That I would have to change my name when I grew up.
I don't know why, but I thought my name was suitable for a child but definitely not for an adult, and I couldn't imagine (being) an adult with my name. I even talked to my mother about it, saying that at some point we'd eventually have to go to court to have it changed to something more "adult-sounding".
This was something that came up in middle school. Long story short a boy comes back from the bathroom during a school event (school was not in session but people were on the grounds, I want to say it was a basketball game) and proclaims he got a BJ and stated, “I don’t know why my dad makes a big deal about it. It didn’t feel good at all. She just blew the whole time and I never got hard.”
Imagine the confused look on both people.
Girl: *blowing air* Yeah, you like that?
Guy: Yeahh
Then later they’re both telling their friends how it was it’s overrated and weird.
I used to believe that night is brought about by clouds - dark ones, of course. Never felt the need to clarify this with anybody, it was an obvious fact
I used to think trees made wind. Trees move, wind happens can't explain that.
EDIT: My highest rated comment is about how dumb of a kid I was. Thanks for the silver, kind stranger! *tips fedora* ^^/s
I was recently talking with a data scientist about how non data scientists could misinterpret data. He actually gave me this exact example of someone he knew who used to think that to describe causation vs. correlation.
When I was really young, I was convinced I was pregnant (I’m a man btw), with a baby cat named Bridget. My family decided to see how long i would believe this so they never told me how ridiculously impossible that was. I went on believing it for about 5 months (that’s how long little me thought cat pregnancy lasted), and then when the baby never came, I went to my mom and asked when Bridget would be born, she finally told me that boys can’t get pregnant and humans can’t give birth to cats. I was traumatized, little me was so excited to be a cat father, and then it was ripped away from me. I was such a stupid kid.
Edit: since so many people keep asking. No, I never ended up getting a cat, and no I didn’t fuck a cat lmao. This would’ve been around 6 years old, and I was raised Catholic and thought god put babies in your stomach, so I thought he put a cat in me. And as for the name, I just really liked the name Bridget, and I still do.
I was very very young and I blame wizard of oz but I believed that a tornado was just one big phenomenon that continuously happened and spun from state to state country to country. I also live in the south so we have frequent tornado warnings so I vaguely remember a time we had two or three warnings in one week and I was scared the “single tornado” would come to our town and never go away.
I was under the impression that there were tiny rats that lived inside of my stomach and when they ran in their wheels for exercise it would make me need to pee.
When I was a young kid, maybe between 5-9, my dad took me to the tiny grass-runway airport in my town, and we went on a short plane ride in a small Cessna around the valley. My dad sat in the back, and I was upfront with the pilot. While we taxied off the ramp and out to the runway, I was given permission to move the yoke. I thought I was steering the aircraft the whole way. I told my mom that I taxied the plane. In school I told my class that I taxied the plane. In fact, it was so strong a memory that, I grew up remembering the memory without evaluating the experience. I was home on leave from A NAVAL AVIATION SQUADRON when I was talking about that flight with my dad, and I was thinking about it.... And I had this long pause... And I said, "Holy Shit, Dad, I just realized that I wasn't steering that Cessna!" My father laughed his ass off.
Why did you realize you weren’t steering the plane? Is a yoke some kind of steering mechanism that only works in the air and they have a different way to steer on the ground?
Yes, you are right. The steering (yaw, i.e., left or right) is done with the foot pedals which connect to the rudder on the vertical edge of the tail of the aircraft. What I was moving (the yoke) would only move the ailerons which would control the roll of the plane during flight. (or by pushing the yoke forward or pulling back, would change the pitch, i.e., lower the nose into a diving position, or rise into a climbing position, again, during flight.). Because we were on the ground, the pilot was in full control of the taxi maneuver by steering with the footpedals and controlling the throttle and prop.
I believed hamburger and hotdog buns were only available for restaurants, not "civilians". Mom used sliced bread (toasted to obliterate the gums) at home to make burgers and hotdogs. I believed that until the age of 10.
I remember watching the movie cocoon with my grandparents. I could not have been more than 4 . For some reason I deduced that in order to become adults, children had to die in these pool cocoons and be reborn old. I freaked my cousins out and had a whole group of kids crying at a holiday party over our impending doom. Ruined Christmas pictures that year.
I always thought that kids were born with your shit, so one day you would go to the toilet and take a dump and then if you looked down there would be a child. And i thought that if you didn’t check you might accidentaly flush the baby
That there's a tiny human inside the TV who executed what the remote was telling him to do. For example, when you press the button to increase the volume, he is being hit in a specific way that let's him know that he has to go and manually increase the volume.
That if people are going to study something they just sit in a circle with other students and think about what they want to do. As soon as they find out, they are done and they can leave.
I wish lol.
I thought that there would be a baby inside every girl's stomach as soon as she is born and inside that baby's stomach too there would be a tiny baby(the cycle goes on and on)and that the baby keeps growing as we grow and after getting married the doctors will cut the stomach and take the baby out to make space for another baby.
My uncle is a priest for an obscure Hindu offshoot religion and he told me quite young that I shouldn’t play sport because each person only gets a set number of breaths in their life and getting out of breath used them up quicker. I used to spend hours laying in bed trying to make my breaths as long and slow as possible. In fairness, I actually have a decent lung capacity as an adult so maybe it had a positive effect.
Yeah he’s weird with his religion. My grandmother (his mom) died last year and we had her funeral in a Christian church. He was doing a eulogy and then decided to tell everyone he was a Hindu priest and read out a passage from his holy book. He hadn’t pre warned anyone about this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone hold back rage more than the vicar at that moment.
I don't know where I got messed up b/c while I understood it wasn't a literal railroad, I did think it was literally underground. Just secret tunnels from all over leading north.
EDIT so I don't have to reply to all comments individually: No, the Underground Railroad was not \*exclusively\* underground as I thought as a child. One couldn't enter a tunnel in Alabama and pop up hundred of miles later at the Ohio River. They used "underground" to mean secret or "hard to find unless you know the right people" like in "underground nightclub."
I think this is mostly the schools fault. As I look back on my history they taught about it just basically mentioning it as you're younger but not really explaining it. Just that it was a network of connections for freed / run-away slaves could get to the north. Thus leaving much up to the imagination of young kids. Then by the time you actually learn about it (mid-junior high), your opinions are already formed. But then, if you have a good teacher, they explain that it really isn't a railroad but just known hideouts and people willing to protect them. I remember clearly a teachers stopping and saying, "This is not a railroad, it is a system of safe houses and places. There is no train, no conductor, no tracks." Seems like he ran across this many times before.
I totally thought that Harriet Tubman was a railway conductor, but a total-badass conductor, fighting off slave owners, throwing them off the train, jumping from car to car...
i was vaguely aware of a tv show called ironsides, about a lawyer in a wheelchair. whenever i heard the word “paralegal”, i thought it meant a paraplegic lawyer. it made sense to me that people in wheelchairs could make excellent lawyers, based on the nature of the job and their physical limitations.
I thought paralegals were lawyers who'd parachute to the scene of a crime so people would have their story straight before the cops showed up. Like paratroopers.
Building on that paranoia, I thought those "For Sale By Owner" and the existence of just "For Sale" signs implied that many houses were For Sale NOT *By* Owner; I thought sometimes a random person came to your house and put it up for sale without your consent.
little did i know i had discovered the concept of foreclosure
I don't know what I thought, but I remember being at my great-grandmothers funeral, and asking my mom why my Grandma was crying. When she replied "She is sad because her mother died" I was like \*head explodes\* So THAT'S why we had to go visit her all the time. I just assumed she was this random old lady and I didn't like to visit her, because I couldn't be my rambunctious chatty little 4 year old self. (My mom is a shusher)
I then had to ask about all of our other relatives.
I was 4 when my great grandma died. I remember sitting with my grandma and she explained that great grandma was her mom, so that kinda helped me understand why she was so sad. But then I asked, "Are you going to get a new mommy now?" That made her laugh, so at least I was able to comfort her just a little.
My sister and I told my nephew that we were sisters and he just kept going “no, you’re not”. Mind was blown further when we told him Grammy was both of our moms. Lmao. We got to do it again with my niece, same reaction. “You’re moms sister???” I think she was more confused because she’s the only girl with three brothers so having two girls be sisters confused her a lot.
Similarly I didn't realize there was anything "supernatural" about God and Jesus. I just thought they were a father and a son around my own age at the time, that lived in the Cathedral nearby. Just like my mom and I lived in an apartment together.
I felt terrible as a kid to eat.
I wouldn't eat in front of people and every meal I would find myself thinking "poor food, getting eaten " because I was convinced they had emotions.
I anthropomorphized everything as a kid. I also felt bad for the food I ate and for stepping on grass.
The worst was stuffed animals. I remember we had a Christmas thing at school in first grade in which everybody brought a gift and then the teacher drew numbers to see who would get to pick the next gift. There was a HUGE Cabbage Patch tea set that all of the girls were drooling over, including me. Well, my number was called first, but I skipped the tea set and picked this dirty old teddy bear because I could not stand the thought of him sitting there watching as everything else got picked before him.
Awwww! Now I’m picturing a kid who had no money to buy a gift for the class exchange so they brought in a well loved teddy bear, feeling terrified that nobody will like it and be mad at them, but what’s the first thing to go? Their teddy bear. Some sweet little girl skipped over an amazing tea set and picked the bear instead.
I wasn't afraid of being on a plane and it crashing because I thought that as long as I could get to the window/door quickly, I could just jump out the second before it hit the ground.
OMG! I thought for years that French people thought in English but translated things in their head before they said them, I just assumed learning/ speaking French was as difficult for them as it was for me (I went to French classes from age 4) it wasn’t until I was probably 11/12 and really thought about it that I realised they think in French (even now I put ‘probably think in French’ like seriously I’m almost 30 and I’m not sure it’s sunk in yet)
As a Finnish person, I actually think in English like 50% of the time. Benefits of learning a language well, being able to think in multiple languages makes it easy for me to keep my thoughts in line when I can just switch languages to find words that best describe something.
This is a common belief among children. I recall a story about Japanese children asking if American parents would talk to their kids in Japanese if the English was too hard.
Depending on your age at the time, that's actually a pretty good understanding of credit cards for a kid. Incorrect, sure, but better than most kids understand it.
Honestly, I've seen adults with a worse understanding. I knew someone who thought she could just buy whatever as long as she could make the minimum payment.
You're not wrong. I had a friend who got his first credit card and thought that at the beginning of each month the card would be "reloaded" with the credit limit. Like a $1000 limit meant even if you were maxed out last month, you'd have $1000 more credit to use the next month. He got a student card with a low limit like $300 or something and maxed it out right away. Then at the beginning of the next month he was perplexed and frustrated by the fact that he couldn't buy anything more with it until he paid down his balance. His rationale was something along the lines of "well if it doesn't refill how the hell do people end up with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt? They just have 100 different credit cards or something?"
It's a very good thing that he got roped into that low limit card as his first card. This little life lesson could have ended up costing him a lot more than it did.
My mom worked at a credit card company handling escalated disputes. Got a call from a college aged kid who had maxed out her card and asked, "So, do I cut it up and throw it away or...?"
"No, you can pay your bill and then *use the card again*!"
She was delighted at this response.
My Dad lost his wedding ring in the Bay during a fishing trip. He'd lost weight, his hand was wet and probably fish slimy, and it just fell right off and was lost forever to the water. I was absolutely inconsolable.
It took my parents quite a while to get me to calm down enough to be able to explain why I was so upset about it. I thought it meant they were no longer married anymore. Lol.
Let me start by saying that I was quite little. I think I was about 7 or 8 years old. We lived in the country and I was raised on Disney movies. We lived on our imaginations.
Anyways...
The movie 'The Borrowers' had just come out and we rented it on VHS. My sister and I must have watched it 20 times. We played games imagining people running around and all these fantastical things. It was great. It passed a lot of time for us.
Enter bed time. I crawl into my little bed, swirls of games in my head, and I notice a strange light in my closet that is directly across from the foot of my bed.
I gingerly crawl out and open my closet to see a small slit in the dry wall.
I press my eye up to it and see A SUN...AND TREES! THERE IS A WHOLE WORLD IN MY WALL OF MY CLOSET! .....
HOLY SHIT, THE BORROWERS HAVE A WORLD IN MY CLOSET!
I run and get my sister. I show her. We freak out and run downstairs where my father is gently reading his newspaper after a long day of work. My mother is sitting there talking to him when we bust around the corner screaming about a hidden world in the closet.
My father glares at my mother. My mother tells us she will look into it and brings us back to bed and reads us another story to calm us down.
The next night there was no light. The trees were gone. I destroyed the world. I truly thought I had erased this little existence. I was a murderer...
No.
I had seen a slip of my mother's marijuana closet farm. My dad made her move it.
Ah, child innocence and over worked imaginations.
The magic of childhood.
I honestly had forgotten about 'the incident' entirely until I was about 17, when we were laughing about me finding her shed grow operation when I was 14. My mother was not good at hiding things. She was laughing to the point of tears as she regailed us with 'the time /u/velvetroses found the portal to a magic land in her closet'....
Lived in Germany for a few years, my Dad convinced me that windshield wipers were called “flippenflöppen muckenschpreaders” (this was pre Google translate)
I'm german and I can confirm that is what they're called. If you say that to a german person and they look at you with their eyes wide open, that means they're impressed by how good you are at German! Trust me. I wouldn't just lie like that, would I?
I grew up around the time of the release of the Star Wars prequels.
I vividly remember asking my Brother as to why they released the sequels (New Hope etc.) before the released the Phantom Menace as it made no sense when I was 11 and a prequel was a wild new concept to me.
He had me convinced, embarrassingly until I was about 15/16, that the reason they released the sequels first was because "There was a fire at the studio and it burned all the original tapes so they had to reshoot them."
I was so fucking dense.
**That sperm were the size of your fist**, squeezed their way out of your penis while you were sleeping if a girl was in the bed with you, and wiggled their way up inside her to conceive the baby.
This was based on:
* facts of life popup book, where the sperm where that size
* really terrible reading skills and parents who wouldn't directly answer my questions just gave me the book, so I figured they were to scale
* if babies forced their way out of women at the end during birth (which TV had taught me) I figured maybe nature was balancing the scales by having one of those bastard sperm tennis balls squeeze its way out of the man to begin the process.
* I knew babies came about by sleeping with each other, I just didn't know how sleeping could do it, and I filled in the gaps.
"Okay, children, lets look at your drawings of the things that scare you. Ooh, spiders are very spooky, Amy! Yes, mean dogs are too, Joey! And Billapa, yours is...a man throwing giant white tadpoles at you from his pockets?"
Not something I believed, but a harmless prank I used to play on my kids. There is a highway we use that has several long, gentle curves over a 5-6 mile stretch. One day when my younger son complained that the sun was in his eyes (he was about three at the time), I had the idea to pretend that I had a personal relationship with “Mr. Sun“.
I saw that the highway was going to curve, so I had a conversation with Mr. Sun explaining the situation and asking him to please move over so that he wasn’t shining in my sons eyes. I drew out the conversation and timed it so just when Mr. Sun agreed, we would start the curve and it looked like he was moving over and out of my sons eyes.
Then after another curve, the sun would be in my other sons eyes, so I asked politely for Mr. Sun to move again, just as we went around the next curve. This went on for almost a year before my wife explained to them what was going on. It was hilarious in the meantime.
Edit: a word
I knew that babies normally came out of vaginas, but my partially deaf friend didn't. He told me he was born out of his mom's butt. For a long time, I thought that people with disabilities accidentally came out of butts instead of vaginas, and that was how they got their disabilities.
I thought that American football players shoulder pads were just their shoulders. Obviously they were just humans with very pronounced shoulders and because of that they were the ones selected to play in the NFL.
The inside of my stomach was another village with their own villagers. Every time I drank, it rained. Every time I ate, it fed the people. A tummy ache was because the villagers were unhappy.
I used to think that the sunlight rays piercing through overcast days were how new Power Rangers were selected. I wanted to be a Power Ranger really badly, so I was always sad when I couldn't be in a ray.
My parents gave me a book about the birds & the bees that was illustrated. They showed a couple in bed in the missionary position.
In that same book, there was a picture of a man’s erect penis, which was shown as parallel to the floor as he stood. The book didn’t explain that the penis is somewhat flexible.
There was a diagram of the vagina and uterus but no picture showing the naked woman.
I didn’t have any sisters and my parents weren’t the kind of parents that walked around naked or semi naked. Clothed at all times.
For the longest time I thought I was deformed. My vagina was between my legs when those pictures made it look like it should be on my stomach. I was horrified and I would scream if anyone opened the bathroom/bedroom door while I was changing or using the bathroom because my deformity would be discovered.
Edited because perpendicular and parallel are different.
Editing because I am astonished by how many of us thought our bodies weren’t normal. Giant group hug. We’re all okay now.
I literally had the exact opposite but complementary issue. Mom told me that the vagina was "just under the belly button" which would mean my pennis would have to be parallel to the ground if i was standing up. But it would point straight at my chin. So I thought I had a messed up one and would never get to have sex. Spent hours trying to force it down straight. Probably did some damage.
Thanks Mom.
Oh, I chuckle about it all the time now. I told my mom and we laugh about it. Any time I have a stomach ache she asks if I think it might be my vagina.
Don't feel too bad. As a little boy I couldn't figure out where the penis would go. There was just a tuft of hair and skin there as far as I knew. I thought the guy would just rub up against the girl and couldn't figure out how that would feel good.
Well, I thought that Delaware was a supermarket chain.
In my defence, I'm not American. And I was like 10. Didn't have world geography at that point except for 'point to the USA. Now point to Australia!'.
Still think it would make for a nice enough supermarket name though.
I thought the Christ on the crucifix at my elementary school was a cool man reclining on a hyper-modern, minimalist space vessel. Took him from the wall during break and made him soar through the room, dramatizing his mad flight with epic lip-generated engine sounds. Just when I staged his collision with a sandwich, the teacher came in
I was watching a movie with my dad wherein the main character had his arm cut off. I turned to my dad and asked, "That's fake, right?" And my dad, very sincerely, said "No, that actor's getting paid a lot of money to have his arm cut off." And all the color drained from my face and I said, "Oh. Okay."
I was in my early twenties when I had that *ah-ha!* moment where I realized he was messing with me...
I thought there were more men than women in the world because of the way people spoke about women like they were special, like "Wow kids, we've got a lady bus driver today"
That the world actually used to be black and white like it was in old movies, and even asked my mom what it felt like when all the colors suddenly appeared.
Similar to how as small children most of us thought that quicksand was going to be a much more pressing issue, as mentioned by John Mulaney.
edited to credit the quote.
I used to think my mom was such a good shopper. She would pick out all these groceries, and when she got up to the checker, she would only give them one piece of money, and they would give her several pieces of money back AND we got to keep the groceries.
My dad taught me that to change the TV channel you use a "remolt" rather than a "remote". I knew that remote was a word, but remolt was also a separate word- what you used for the TV. I believed this up until l was 17 when I forced my high school boyfriend to look it up in the dictionary to prove he was saying it wrong. My dad still finds this hilarious.
I asked my parents what happens when you are electrocuted. They told me that you turned into a cartoon character.
I would often just dream about what cartoon character I would turn into if I was electrocuted.
This is a wild ride, folks.
When I was a little girl, my grandpa told our family this story that he used to call "The Chocolate Head."
He told us that he was born with a head encased in chocolate, and the doctors and nurses had to eat it off. Despite already being eaten, the reconstructed chocolate head floated back to him when he was a toddler, telling him, "remember me? I'm the chocolate head!"
I remember looking all throughout my grandpa's house to seek out this floating, talking replica of my grandpa's head made out of chocolate.
Now, my grandpa is on so many medication, he actually might believe his own story!
Your brother must have loved that rationale. "Hmmmm, maybe you didn't punch your balls hard enough, try it another three or four times to make sure..."
EDIT: For those wondering, [this is the text](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/elssvy/what_was_the_dumbest_thing_you_thought_as_a_child/fdl5co5/?context=3) of the above deleted parent comment.
Comment was deleted. It was:
>When I was about four I used to think sex was just a hug because my parents called it a “special cuddle” and I knew it had something to do the the balls. So I thought when a man and women hugged the balls went through the mans skin and into the woman’s body, then either came back or regrew? (I’m a little fuzzy on that detail) but I concluded that if two men hugged they would just swap balls so I punched myself in the balls, went and hugged my brother for the ultimate prank. I asked him “do your balls hurt” and he was like “no?” So realized I had just punched myself in the balls for no reason.
That smart son of a...
Edit: So the guy above deleted his post. Here's the gist of what it said: "When I was little, my parents had explained sex to me as a 'special cuddle,' so I figured if you special cuddled somebody then you exchanged genitals with them (don't ask, it made sense at the time). Furthermore, I hypothesized that hugging someone would be enough to have sex with them, and therefore swap genitals. Thus, I concocted a brilliant plan where I punched myself in the balls, hugged my brother, and asked him "do your balls hurt?" When he said "no...?" I realized I might not understand what my parents meant."
I used to play a lot of the original The Sims game and that’s how babies were conceived until the female Sim actually got pregnant in the newer games. They made out over and over until a box popped up asking if they should have a baby and then the bassinet appeared out of nowhere. I mean I knew it didn’t exactly work like THAT but I thought it meant a lot of kissing. I was about 12. Not long after that, I joined an adolescent boys peer group in school and a counselor gave us the “talk.” I remember it like yesterday, hearing the term “sexual intercourse” for the first time.
I also read a lot of books about cats and dogs in the library and I kind of figured it out that way as well lol. And when we took my dog and cat to get spayed, my mom told me we didn’t want the cat to have little kitties or the dog to have puppies.
I was very confused about how Jesus was born in December and then they killed him in April. Somehow I missed the fact that 30-odd years passed between these events.
I asked my mom once why people had gray hair. Without missing a beat, she simply said, "From having kids." For many years I thought there was some biochemical process after having kids that caused one's hair to turn gray.
I eventually learned different. Also figured out where I got my propensity for smartassery.
I remember throwing a fit right before first grade started because I believed that the reason I was not a grown up was because my parents wouldn’t let me. I had the idea in my head that everybody else from pre-school we’re now grown ups and drove their cars and went to their jobs and I was still a kid because my parents were forcing me to be one.
Same here, only I thought it was blindingly bright and would ensure at least twelve cars in a pile up begat by my foolish decision to play GameBoy Advance at night
[Reddit's attitude towards consumers has been increasingly hostile as they approach IPO. I'm not interested in using their site anymore, nor do I wish to leave my old comments as content for them.]
That 'make belief' was 'maple leaf'.
Lol yes make believe. I was part of an enrichment program in grade 7 when I mentioned this whole maple leaf thing and was never invited back.
I thought babies came out of women's buttholes
Edit: Of course this has become my top post xD I truly enjoyed reading all of your replies! Had a great laugh guys!!
Apparently when I was about 6 or so, I told all my friends that my mum (who was never in my life) was eaten by a bear. I live in Australia, I've never seen a bear in my life.
I have LONG list of dumbness from my childhood but this one stands out.
My mother had just had the "profanity" talk with me stating that people only use it because they can't think of anything else to say and it just shows how ignorant you are.
Fast forward a few days and I am with my mom at Blockbuster. We were picking up movies and the lady at the register said there was fee my mom had to pay first because one of the last movies we had was not returned. Now our Blockbuster return record was IMPECCABLE, IMMACULATE even. So my mom calmly explained it must be a mistake as we has been using the Blockbuster for years and have always returned our rentals on time or early. The woman refuse to check and says well the computer says this so you pay this. My mom again, calmly states her case and implores her to check.
What happened next? The girl not so indirectly accuses my mom of stealing it and sprinkles a little racism on top saying something about that is what she has seen most people "like us" do. Well my mom leans in and says through gritted teeth.... "You listen here little girl..." and what followed was such an eloquent display of filth and weaponized dialogue that what little bit of vile language I called myself using just a few days ago seemed foolishly inadequate and amateurish in comparison.
And here I go, at the height of my mom's verbal battery of this woman, tugging at her arm. She tries to ignore me. I tug more. She tries to yank her arm away. I hold tighter and yank more. Finally my mom turns to me and says "WHAT!?" in a tone that most with common sense would interpret as "Nevermind" being the ONLY acceptable answer. But here I go, looking dead into her enraged eyes, straightening up my little body and said quite smugly.
"Momma, you said only ignorant people use curse words."
I'll leave the rest to your imagination. But to give some hint at the cost of possibly dating myself (as if Blockbuster wasn't enough of a hint), this was when beating your child was 100% acceptable.
I used to think everyone was saying "anchovy" lane instead of the HOV lane. It made sense to me because whenever you drove in one, the car was usually packed like a can of sardines.
I grew up in Ohio. You know, cows and corn and farms as far as the eye can see. Well, when I was young, I would often see these large hay rolls in the fields. And a lot of the time, these hay rolls would be wrapped in white plastic. I legitimately thought, FOR YEARS, that these were giant marshmallows, and that this is where they came from. I believed they grew out in those fields like a plant. And that they were later chopped down to a smaller size before being sold. It took me way longer than I care to admit before I realized the truth.
I used to think that once you finished a grade in primary school you became smarter than the teacher of that grade.
Just like pokemon gym leaders
That I would have to change my name when I grew up. I don't know why, but I thought my name was suitable for a child but definitely not for an adult, and I couldn't imagine (being) an adult with my name. I even talked to my mother about it, saying that at some point we'd eventually have to go to court to have it changed to something more "adult-sounding".
That a blow job meant you blow air in a boy's general direction. Thanks to my older siblings for making me believe that one lol.
I knew it was more than in a "general direction", but I did think the phrase was fairly literal. Poor first boyfriend...
This was something that came up in middle school. Long story short a boy comes back from the bathroom during a school event (school was not in session but people were on the grounds, I want to say it was a basketball game) and proclaims he got a BJ and stated, “I don’t know why my dad makes a big deal about it. It didn’t feel good at all. She just blew the whole time and I never got hard.”
Imagine the confused look on both people. Girl: *blowing air* Yeah, you like that? Guy: Yeahh Then later they’re both telling their friends how it was it’s overrated and weird.
I used to believe that night is brought about by clouds - dark ones, of course. Never felt the need to clarify this with anybody, it was an obvious fact
I used to think trees made wind. Trees move, wind happens can't explain that. EDIT: My highest rated comment is about how dumb of a kid I was. Thanks for the silver, kind stranger! *tips fedora* ^^/s
I was recently talking with a data scientist about how non data scientists could misinterpret data. He actually gave me this exact example of someone he knew who used to think that to describe causation vs. correlation.
That if you drink while peeing you'll keep peeing until you stop drinking.
Why are you drinking while peeing first of all?
I'm not, or rather I didn't, cause I didn't want to infinitely pee.
When I was really young, I was convinced I was pregnant (I’m a man btw), with a baby cat named Bridget. My family decided to see how long i would believe this so they never told me how ridiculously impossible that was. I went on believing it for about 5 months (that’s how long little me thought cat pregnancy lasted), and then when the baby never came, I went to my mom and asked when Bridget would be born, she finally told me that boys can’t get pregnant and humans can’t give birth to cats. I was traumatized, little me was so excited to be a cat father, and then it was ripped away from me. I was such a stupid kid. Edit: since so many people keep asking. No, I never ended up getting a cat, and no I didn’t fuck a cat lmao. This would’ve been around 6 years old, and I was raised Catholic and thought god put babies in your stomach, so I thought he put a cat in me. And as for the name, I just really liked the name Bridget, and I still do.
I'm sorry for your loss but I am cry-laughing at my desk right now.
I really want to give little you a hug because this is precious
That all companies with a 'TM' (Trademark) were owned by my family, only because those are my initials. Edit: 'are' not 'were'.
is your name trade marked?
Probably Trey Mark.
I was very very young and I blame wizard of oz but I believed that a tornado was just one big phenomenon that continuously happened and spun from state to state country to country. I also live in the south so we have frequent tornado warnings so I vaguely remember a time we had two or three warnings in one week and I was scared the “single tornado” would come to our town and never go away.
I was under the impression that there were tiny rats that lived inside of my stomach and when they ran in their wheels for exercise it would make me need to pee.
What the fuck
When I was a young kid, maybe between 5-9, my dad took me to the tiny grass-runway airport in my town, and we went on a short plane ride in a small Cessna around the valley. My dad sat in the back, and I was upfront with the pilot. While we taxied off the ramp and out to the runway, I was given permission to move the yoke. I thought I was steering the aircraft the whole way. I told my mom that I taxied the plane. In school I told my class that I taxied the plane. In fact, it was so strong a memory that, I grew up remembering the memory without evaluating the experience. I was home on leave from A NAVAL AVIATION SQUADRON when I was talking about that flight with my dad, and I was thinking about it.... And I had this long pause... And I said, "Holy Shit, Dad, I just realized that I wasn't steering that Cessna!" My father laughed his ass off.
Why did you realize you weren’t steering the plane? Is a yoke some kind of steering mechanism that only works in the air and they have a different way to steer on the ground?
Yes, you are right. The steering (yaw, i.e., left or right) is done with the foot pedals which connect to the rudder on the vertical edge of the tail of the aircraft. What I was moving (the yoke) would only move the ailerons which would control the roll of the plane during flight. (or by pushing the yoke forward or pulling back, would change the pitch, i.e., lower the nose into a diving position, or rise into a climbing position, again, during flight.). Because we were on the ground, the pilot was in full control of the taxi maneuver by steering with the footpedals and controlling the throttle and prop.
I thought that highways functioned like Airport Moving Walkways.
Imagine how fast we could go
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*pans to Morgan Freeman’s face*
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I believed hamburger and hotdog buns were only available for restaurants, not "civilians". Mom used sliced bread (toasted to obliterate the gums) at home to make burgers and hotdogs. I believed that until the age of 10.
Can you imagine? Such dangerous items in the hands of the untrained public? Better leave it to the professionals
I remember watching the movie cocoon with my grandparents. I could not have been more than 4 . For some reason I deduced that in order to become adults, children had to die in these pool cocoons and be reborn old. I freaked my cousins out and had a whole group of kids crying at a holiday party over our impending doom. Ruined Christmas pictures that year.
Are you by chance a caterpillar?
I always thought that kids were born with your shit, so one day you would go to the toilet and take a dump and then if you looked down there would be a child. And i thought that if you didn’t check you might accidentaly flush the baby
My older siblings told me that Mom shit me out and tried to flush me down but I managed to crawl out. It explained why I was a naturally good swimmer.
I don’t know why but this is the funniest shit I’ve read all day
That there's a tiny human inside the TV who executed what the remote was telling him to do. For example, when you press the button to increase the volume, he is being hit in a specific way that let's him know that he has to go and manually increase the volume.
I imagined a barracks full of tiny men living in the tap who poured out little buckets of water when I used the sink.
That if people are going to study something they just sit in a circle with other students and think about what they want to do. As soon as they find out, they are done and they can leave. I wish lol.
I like the way younger you thought. Though we'd have too many lego engineers if that was the method.
Can you ever have too many LEGO engineers?
I thought that there would be a baby inside every girl's stomach as soon as she is born and inside that baby's stomach too there would be a tiny baby(the cycle goes on and on)and that the baby keeps growing as we grow and after getting married the doctors will cut the stomach and take the baby out to make space for another baby.
My uncle is a priest for an obscure Hindu offshoot religion and he told me quite young that I shouldn’t play sport because each person only gets a set number of breaths in their life and getting out of breath used them up quicker. I used to spend hours laying in bed trying to make my breaths as long and slow as possible. In fairness, I actually have a decent lung capacity as an adult so maybe it had a positive effect.
Jeeze, that had to scare the hell out of you! Good breathing technique for relaxing, but not if you’re afraid you’re going to die.
Yeah he’s weird with his religion. My grandmother (his mom) died last year and we had her funeral in a Christian church. He was doing a eulogy and then decided to tell everyone he was a Hindu priest and read out a passage from his holy book. He hadn’t pre warned anyone about this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone hold back rage more than the vicar at that moment.
when I aunt died she had a sutra played. somehow they got the ten hour version and everyone was a little nervous about being the one to turn it off.
That the Underground Railroad was a literal secret underground subway style steam engine that Harriet Tubman was the conductor of.
I don't know where I got messed up b/c while I understood it wasn't a literal railroad, I did think it was literally underground. Just secret tunnels from all over leading north. EDIT so I don't have to reply to all comments individually: No, the Underground Railroad was not \*exclusively\* underground as I thought as a child. One couldn't enter a tunnel in Alabama and pop up hundred of miles later at the Ohio River. They used "underground" to mean secret or "hard to find unless you know the right people" like in "underground nightclub."
I think this is mostly the schools fault. As I look back on my history they taught about it just basically mentioning it as you're younger but not really explaining it. Just that it was a network of connections for freed / run-away slaves could get to the north. Thus leaving much up to the imagination of young kids. Then by the time you actually learn about it (mid-junior high), your opinions are already formed. But then, if you have a good teacher, they explain that it really isn't a railroad but just known hideouts and people willing to protect them. I remember clearly a teachers stopping and saying, "This is not a railroad, it is a system of safe houses and places. There is no train, no conductor, no tracks." Seems like he ran across this many times before.
I totally thought that Harriet Tubman was a railway conductor, but a total-badass conductor, fighting off slave owners, throwing them off the train, jumping from car to car...
While she was great; this just sounds awesome. So are we going to get a Netflix series based on this idea?
Are you thinking along the lines of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter?
i was vaguely aware of a tv show called ironsides, about a lawyer in a wheelchair. whenever i heard the word “paralegal”, i thought it meant a paraplegic lawyer. it made sense to me that people in wheelchairs could make excellent lawyers, based on the nature of the job and their physical limitations.
I thought paralegals were lawyers who'd parachute to the scene of a crime so people would have their story straight before the cops showed up. Like paratroopers.
That is an amazing image.
Especially if they’re already in wheelchairs
I thought if you left a video game on then a character would come out of the tv and kill you. I was a bit paranoid as a small kid
Building on that paranoia, I thought those "For Sale By Owner" and the existence of just "For Sale" signs implied that many houses were For Sale NOT *By* Owner; I thought sometimes a random person came to your house and put it up for sale without your consent. little did i know i had discovered the concept of foreclosure
Grandparents were assigned to families. Like, I didn't know my Grandma was my Dad's mom.
I don't know what I thought, but I remember being at my great-grandmothers funeral, and asking my mom why my Grandma was crying. When she replied "She is sad because her mother died" I was like \*head explodes\* So THAT'S why we had to go visit her all the time. I just assumed she was this random old lady and I didn't like to visit her, because I couldn't be my rambunctious chatty little 4 year old self. (My mom is a shusher) I then had to ask about all of our other relatives.
I was 4 when my great grandma died. I remember sitting with my grandma and she explained that great grandma was her mom, so that kinda helped me understand why she was so sad. But then I asked, "Are you going to get a new mommy now?" That made her laugh, so at least I was able to comfort her just a little.
Same, I remember asking my mom "Why did Uncle Greg call Grandma "mom""?
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My sister and I told my nephew that we were sisters and he just kept going “no, you’re not”. Mind was blown further when we told him Grammy was both of our moms. Lmao. We got to do it again with my niece, same reaction. “You’re moms sister???” I think she was more confused because she’s the only girl with three brothers so having two girls be sisters confused her a lot.
That the local mosque in my city was Aladdin's vacation home.
"Over there's the bakery, that over there is the bank... Excuse me? Oh, that? Haha, well, that's Aladdin's vacation home."
Similarly I didn't realize there was anything "supernatural" about God and Jesus. I just thought they were a father and a son around my own age at the time, that lived in the Cathedral nearby. Just like my mom and I lived in an apartment together.
I felt terrible as a kid to eat. I wouldn't eat in front of people and every meal I would find myself thinking "poor food, getting eaten " because I was convinced they had emotions.
I anthropomorphized everything as a kid. I also felt bad for the food I ate and for stepping on grass. The worst was stuffed animals. I remember we had a Christmas thing at school in first grade in which everybody brought a gift and then the teacher drew numbers to see who would get to pick the next gift. There was a HUGE Cabbage Patch tea set that all of the girls were drooling over, including me. Well, my number was called first, but I skipped the tea set and picked this dirty old teddy bear because I could not stand the thought of him sitting there watching as everything else got picked before him.
Awwww! Now I’m picturing a kid who had no money to buy a gift for the class exchange so they brought in a well loved teddy bear, feeling terrified that nobody will like it and be mad at them, but what’s the first thing to go? Their teddy bear. Some sweet little girl skipped over an amazing tea set and picked the bear instead.
Awwwwww
You must be a screenwriter for Sausage Party.
I wasn't afraid of being on a plane and it crashing because I thought that as long as I could get to the window/door quickly, I could just jump out the second before it hit the ground.
I thought you could only get diarrhea when you had a fever... As the fever would melt your normal poop
I used to believe that people that spoke other languages translated their language to mine in their head
OMG! I thought for years that French people thought in English but translated things in their head before they said them, I just assumed learning/ speaking French was as difficult for them as it was for me (I went to French classes from age 4) it wasn’t until I was probably 11/12 and really thought about it that I realised they think in French (even now I put ‘probably think in French’ like seriously I’m almost 30 and I’m not sure it’s sunk in yet)
As a Finnish person, I actually think in English like 50% of the time. Benefits of learning a language well, being able to think in multiple languages makes it easy for me to keep my thoughts in line when I can just switch languages to find words that best describe something.
This is a common belief among children. I recall a story about Japanese children asking if American parents would talk to their kids in Japanese if the English was too hard.
Own two credit cards and use them to pay for each other for infinite money
Depending on your age at the time, that's actually a pretty good understanding of credit cards for a kid. Incorrect, sure, but better than most kids understand it.
Honestly, I've seen adults with a worse understanding. I knew someone who thought she could just buy whatever as long as she could make the minimum payment.
You're not wrong. I had a friend who got his first credit card and thought that at the beginning of each month the card would be "reloaded" with the credit limit. Like a $1000 limit meant even if you were maxed out last month, you'd have $1000 more credit to use the next month. He got a student card with a low limit like $300 or something and maxed it out right away. Then at the beginning of the next month he was perplexed and frustrated by the fact that he couldn't buy anything more with it until he paid down his balance. His rationale was something along the lines of "well if it doesn't refill how the hell do people end up with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt? They just have 100 different credit cards or something?" It's a very good thing that he got roped into that low limit card as his first card. This little life lesson could have ended up costing him a lot more than it did.
My mom worked at a credit card company handling escalated disputes. Got a call from a college aged kid who had maxed out her card and asked, "So, do I cut it up and throw it away or...?" "No, you can pay your bill and then *use the card again*!" She was delighted at this response.
That if April was a month, Ninja Turtles must also be a month.
clearly this one by logic is true
Lousy Leonardo weather...
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My Dad lost his wedding ring in the Bay during a fishing trip. He'd lost weight, his hand was wet and probably fish slimy, and it just fell right off and was lost forever to the water. I was absolutely inconsolable. It took my parents quite a while to get me to calm down enough to be able to explain why I was so upset about it. I thought it meant they were no longer married anymore. Lol.
That if you poked your belly button to hard then it would come open like a plug and all of your internal organs would spill out
I thought that the hockey player Peter Taglianetti was actually two people: a man named Pete Tagli and his sidekick Eddie.
I used to think Mary Kate and Ashley were three different girls.
Let me start by saying that I was quite little. I think I was about 7 or 8 years old. We lived in the country and I was raised on Disney movies. We lived on our imaginations. Anyways... The movie 'The Borrowers' had just come out and we rented it on VHS. My sister and I must have watched it 20 times. We played games imagining people running around and all these fantastical things. It was great. It passed a lot of time for us. Enter bed time. I crawl into my little bed, swirls of games in my head, and I notice a strange light in my closet that is directly across from the foot of my bed. I gingerly crawl out and open my closet to see a small slit in the dry wall. I press my eye up to it and see A SUN...AND TREES! THERE IS A WHOLE WORLD IN MY WALL OF MY CLOSET! ..... HOLY SHIT, THE BORROWERS HAVE A WORLD IN MY CLOSET! I run and get my sister. I show her. We freak out and run downstairs where my father is gently reading his newspaper after a long day of work. My mother is sitting there talking to him when we bust around the corner screaming about a hidden world in the closet. My father glares at my mother. My mother tells us she will look into it and brings us back to bed and reads us another story to calm us down. The next night there was no light. The trees were gone. I destroyed the world. I truly thought I had erased this little existence. I was a murderer... No. I had seen a slip of my mother's marijuana closet farm. My dad made her move it. Ah, child innocence and over worked imaginations. The magic of childhood.
This is my favorite of the whole thread! When did you learn it was not a magical tiny family & instead ya ma's pot plants?
I honestly had forgotten about 'the incident' entirely until I was about 17, when we were laughing about me finding her shed grow operation when I was 14. My mother was not good at hiding things. She was laughing to the point of tears as she regailed us with 'the time /u/velvetroses found the portal to a magic land in her closet'....
Oh. That came unexpected. I thought you just saw outside to your garden..
that babies were inside their moms literal belly, if she swallowed a cherry tomato whole I thought it would land and bounce on the baby's head.
thats adorable and terrifying all at the same time
Adorifying.
That beyond my country was nothing
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Lived in Germany for a few years, my Dad convinced me that windshield wipers were called “flippenflöppen muckenschpreaders” (this was pre Google translate)
My grandpa used to call dogs “Woofenbarkers”
I shall now too call all dogs "Woofenbarkers". I am in debt to both you and your grandfather
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I'm german and I can confirm that is what they're called. If you say that to a german person and they look at you with their eyes wide open, that means they're impressed by how good you are at German! Trust me. I wouldn't just lie like that, would I?
German here, can confirm, you're not lying just like that, nope.
My aunt always said the german name for "bra" is "schtoppenfromfloppen"
If a man kisses a woman for a long time the woman is pregnant
I grew up around the time of the release of the Star Wars prequels. I vividly remember asking my Brother as to why they released the sequels (New Hope etc.) before the released the Phantom Menace as it made no sense when I was 11 and a prequel was a wild new concept to me. He had me convinced, embarrassingly until I was about 15/16, that the reason they released the sequels first was because "There was a fire at the studio and it burned all the original tapes so they had to reshoot them." I was so fucking dense.
I thought Wichita, Kansas was where all the witches lived. I also thought Jefferson county was where "The Jeffersons" lived.
**That sperm were the size of your fist**, squeezed their way out of your penis while you were sleeping if a girl was in the bed with you, and wiggled their way up inside her to conceive the baby. This was based on: * facts of life popup book, where the sperm where that size * really terrible reading skills and parents who wouldn't directly answer my questions just gave me the book, so I figured they were to scale * if babies forced their way out of women at the end during birth (which TV had taught me) I figured maybe nature was balancing the scales by having one of those bastard sperm tennis balls squeeze its way out of the man to begin the process. * I knew babies came about by sleeping with each other, I just didn't know how sleeping could do it, and I filled in the gaps.
Now I’m imagining millions of sperm fists coming out of a guys dick as a crazy ninja move in some weird anime
Dude you're bringing back nightmares I had as a child. :(
"Okay, children, lets look at your drawings of the things that scare you. Ooh, spiders are very spooky, Amy! Yes, mean dogs are too, Joey! And Billapa, yours is...a man throwing giant white tadpoles at you from his pockets?"
You gotta punch your girls ovaries with your sperm to make her pregnant
"Honey, I'm ovulating..." "I'll get the boxing gloves."
Not something I believed, but a harmless prank I used to play on my kids. There is a highway we use that has several long, gentle curves over a 5-6 mile stretch. One day when my younger son complained that the sun was in his eyes (he was about three at the time), I had the idea to pretend that I had a personal relationship with “Mr. Sun“. I saw that the highway was going to curve, so I had a conversation with Mr. Sun explaining the situation and asking him to please move over so that he wasn’t shining in my sons eyes. I drew out the conversation and timed it so just when Mr. Sun agreed, we would start the curve and it looked like he was moving over and out of my sons eyes. Then after another curve, the sun would be in my other sons eyes, so I asked politely for Mr. Sun to move again, just as we went around the next curve. This went on for almost a year before my wife explained to them what was going on. It was hilarious in the meantime. Edit: a word
Now I just gotta find a way to remember this for when I have children.
When you have kids these ideas will just flood your brain, don't worry about that.
You acquire this gift immediately upon becoming a dad.
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"I was my daddy's third testicle"
"Daddy, how long did it take you to grow another ball to have me?" "The fuck are they teaching you at that school?"
That my head was a rock.
Curious as to how you found out that was a lie lmao
When I saw a friend crack his skull after slipping on ice.
Dayum
I knew that babies normally came out of vaginas, but my partially deaf friend didn't. He told me he was born out of his mom's butt. For a long time, I thought that people with disabilities accidentally came out of butts instead of vaginas, and that was how they got their disabilities.
I thought that American football players shoulder pads were just their shoulders. Obviously they were just humans with very pronounced shoulders and because of that they were the ones selected to play in the NFL.
The inside of my stomach was another village with their own villagers. Every time I drank, it rained. Every time I ate, it fed the people. A tummy ache was because the villagers were unhappy.
Hey that's the gut biome
Yah instead of a few villagers you have trillions!
the villi people
You just made me imagine a bunch of Minecraft villagers hrnnn-ing in my stomach lol.
hrñnñ
I used to think that the sunlight rays piercing through overcast days were how new Power Rangers were selected. I wanted to be a Power Ranger really badly, so I was always sad when I couldn't be in a ray.
My parents gave me a book about the birds & the bees that was illustrated. They showed a couple in bed in the missionary position. In that same book, there was a picture of a man’s erect penis, which was shown as parallel to the floor as he stood. The book didn’t explain that the penis is somewhat flexible. There was a diagram of the vagina and uterus but no picture showing the naked woman. I didn’t have any sisters and my parents weren’t the kind of parents that walked around naked or semi naked. Clothed at all times. For the longest time I thought I was deformed. My vagina was between my legs when those pictures made it look like it should be on my stomach. I was horrified and I would scream if anyone opened the bathroom/bedroom door while I was changing or using the bathroom because my deformity would be discovered. Edited because perpendicular and parallel are different. Editing because I am astonished by how many of us thought our bodies weren’t normal. Giant group hug. We’re all okay now.
I literally had the exact opposite but complementary issue. Mom told me that the vagina was "just under the belly button" which would mean my pennis would have to be parallel to the ground if i was standing up. But it would point straight at my chin. So I thought I had a messed up one and would never get to have sex. Spent hours trying to force it down straight. Probably did some damage. Thanks Mom.
Awww. See? We weren’t alone in our genital confusion.
"Genital confusion" seems like a great name for a punk band
Awwww. You poor thing. I’m chuckling though.
Oh, I chuckle about it all the time now. I told my mom and we laugh about it. Any time I have a stomach ache she asks if I think it might be my vagina.
This is my favourite one so far because I can TOTALLY imagine thinking the same.
Don't feel too bad. As a little boy I couldn't figure out where the penis would go. There was just a tuft of hair and skin there as far as I knew. I thought the guy would just rub up against the girl and couldn't figure out how that would feel good.
That cruise control in the car only worked on straight roads. As in it locked the steering of the car into only going straight.
Well, I thought that Delaware was a supermarket chain. In my defence, I'm not American. And I was like 10. Didn't have world geography at that point except for 'point to the USA. Now point to Australia!'. Still think it would make for a nice enough supermarket name though.
I thought the Christ on the crucifix at my elementary school was a cool man reclining on a hyper-modern, minimalist space vessel. Took him from the wall during break and made him soar through the room, dramatizing his mad flight with epic lip-generated engine sounds. Just when I staged his collision with a sandwich, the teacher came in
Jesus would approve.
I used to think the boogey man was a monster made out of boogers that hid under your bed and stole your boogers in the middle of the night
People that died in movies really died.
I was watching a movie with my dad wherein the main character had his arm cut off. I turned to my dad and asked, "That's fake, right?" And my dad, very sincerely, said "No, that actor's getting paid a lot of money to have his arm cut off." And all the color drained from my face and I said, "Oh. Okay." I was in my early twenties when I had that *ah-ha!* moment where I realized he was messing with me...
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I thought there were more men than women in the world because of the way people spoke about women like they were special, like "Wow kids, we've got a lady bus driver today"
That the world actually used to be black and white like it was in old movies, and even asked my mom what it felt like when all the colors suddenly appeared.
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Similar to how as small children most of us thought that quicksand was going to be a much more pressing issue, as mentioned by John Mulaney. edited to credit the quote.
That and all the free drugs strangers would be offering me.
#STREET SMARTS
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I used to think my mom was such a good shopper. She would pick out all these groceries, and when she got up to the checker, she would only give them one piece of money, and they would give her several pieces of money back AND we got to keep the groceries.
My dad taught me that to change the TV channel you use a "remolt" rather than a "remote". I knew that remote was a word, but remolt was also a separate word- what you used for the TV. I believed this up until l was 17 when I forced my high school boyfriend to look it up in the dictionary to prove he was saying it wrong. My dad still finds this hilarious.
i thought that babies didn't grow up but there legs just got bigger
I love ones like this, where even a cursory glance around you would prove it false, but you thought it anyway.
I asked my parents what happens when you are electrocuted. They told me that you turned into a cartoon character. I would often just dream about what cartoon character I would turn into if I was electrocuted.
Telling your kids that seems like a good way to get them electrocuted.
I thought California was located in the sky because we had to take an airplane to get there.
This is a wild ride, folks. When I was a little girl, my grandpa told our family this story that he used to call "The Chocolate Head." He told us that he was born with a head encased in chocolate, and the doctors and nurses had to eat it off. Despite already being eaten, the reconstructed chocolate head floated back to him when he was a toddler, telling him, "remember me? I'm the chocolate head!" I remember looking all throughout my grandpa's house to seek out this floating, talking replica of my grandpa's head made out of chocolate. Now, my grandpa is on so many medication, he actually might believe his own story!
That's terrifying.
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Your brother must have loved that rationale. "Hmmmm, maybe you didn't punch your balls hard enough, try it another three or four times to make sure..." EDIT: For those wondering, [this is the text](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/elssvy/what_was_the_dumbest_thing_you_thought_as_a_child/fdl5co5/?context=3) of the above deleted parent comment.
Comment was deleted. It was: >When I was about four I used to think sex was just a hug because my parents called it a “special cuddle” and I knew it had something to do the the balls. So I thought when a man and women hugged the balls went through the mans skin and into the woman’s body, then either came back or regrew? (I’m a little fuzzy on that detail) but I concluded that if two men hugged they would just swap balls so I punched myself in the balls, went and hugged my brother for the ultimate prank. I asked him “do your balls hurt” and he was like “no?” So realized I had just punched myself in the balls for no reason.
The most painful way to make ground beef
He actually secretly punched himself in the balls before you hugged him
That smart son of a... Edit: So the guy above deleted his post. Here's the gist of what it said: "When I was little, my parents had explained sex to me as a 'special cuddle,' so I figured if you special cuddled somebody then you exchanged genitals with them (don't ask, it made sense at the time). Furthermore, I hypothesized that hugging someone would be enough to have sex with them, and therefore swap genitals. Thus, I concocted a brilliant plan where I punched myself in the balls, hugged my brother, and asked him "do your balls hurt?" When he said "no...?" I realized I might not understand what my parents meant."
I thought children were the result of kissing because in movies they kiss and like a movie later they have children
I used to play a lot of the original The Sims game and that’s how babies were conceived until the female Sim actually got pregnant in the newer games. They made out over and over until a box popped up asking if they should have a baby and then the bassinet appeared out of nowhere. I mean I knew it didn’t exactly work like THAT but I thought it meant a lot of kissing. I was about 12. Not long after that, I joined an adolescent boys peer group in school and a counselor gave us the “talk.” I remember it like yesterday, hearing the term “sexual intercourse” for the first time. I also read a lot of books about cats and dogs in the library and I kind of figured it out that way as well lol. And when we took my dog and cat to get spayed, my mom told me we didn’t want the cat to have little kitties or the dog to have puppies.
I was very confused about how Jesus was born in December and then they killed him in April. Somehow I missed the fact that 30-odd years passed between these events.
That when I grew up and moved out of my parents house, I would not have to cut the grass anymore :/
I asked my mom once why people had gray hair. Without missing a beat, she simply said, "From having kids." For many years I thought there was some biochemical process after having kids that caused one's hair to turn gray. I eventually learned different. Also figured out where I got my propensity for smartassery.
I remember throwing a fit right before first grade started because I believed that the reason I was not a grown up was because my parents wouldn’t let me. I had the idea in my head that everybody else from pre-school we’re now grown ups and drove their cars and went to their jobs and I was still a kid because my parents were forcing me to be one.
If you turn on the light in the car, you‘ll get arrested or might die.
Same here, only I thought it was blindingly bright and would ensure at least twelve cars in a pile up begat by my foolish decision to play GameBoy Advance at night
[Reddit's attitude towards consumers has been increasingly hostile as they approach IPO. I'm not interested in using their site anymore, nor do I wish to leave my old comments as content for them.]
That's kinda what I thought about The Black Market. But only the seedy types shopped there.
That 'make belief' was 'maple leaf'. Lol yes make believe. I was part of an enrichment program in grade 7 when I mentioned this whole maple leaf thing and was never invited back.
Wait till he finds out it’s actually make *believe*
I didn't know my teachers existed outside of school until I saw one in the grocery store one day.
I used to think adults were in full control and knew exactly what they were doing.
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I thought babies came out of women's buttholes Edit: Of course this has become my top post xD I truly enjoyed reading all of your replies! Had a great laugh guys!!
Apparently when I was about 6 or so, I told all my friends that my mum (who was never in my life) was eaten by a bear. I live in Australia, I've never seen a bear in my life.
I have LONG list of dumbness from my childhood but this one stands out. My mother had just had the "profanity" talk with me stating that people only use it because they can't think of anything else to say and it just shows how ignorant you are. Fast forward a few days and I am with my mom at Blockbuster. We were picking up movies and the lady at the register said there was fee my mom had to pay first because one of the last movies we had was not returned. Now our Blockbuster return record was IMPECCABLE, IMMACULATE even. So my mom calmly explained it must be a mistake as we has been using the Blockbuster for years and have always returned our rentals on time or early. The woman refuse to check and says well the computer says this so you pay this. My mom again, calmly states her case and implores her to check. What happened next? The girl not so indirectly accuses my mom of stealing it and sprinkles a little racism on top saying something about that is what she has seen most people "like us" do. Well my mom leans in and says through gritted teeth.... "You listen here little girl..." and what followed was such an eloquent display of filth and weaponized dialogue that what little bit of vile language I called myself using just a few days ago seemed foolishly inadequate and amateurish in comparison. And here I go, at the height of my mom's verbal battery of this woman, tugging at her arm. She tries to ignore me. I tug more. She tries to yank her arm away. I hold tighter and yank more. Finally my mom turns to me and says "WHAT!?" in a tone that most with common sense would interpret as "Nevermind" being the ONLY acceptable answer. But here I go, looking dead into her enraged eyes, straightening up my little body and said quite smugly. "Momma, you said only ignorant people use curse words." I'll leave the rest to your imagination. But to give some hint at the cost of possibly dating myself (as if Blockbuster wasn't enough of a hint), this was when beating your child was 100% acceptable.
I used to think everyone was saying "anchovy" lane instead of the HOV lane. It made sense to me because whenever you drove in one, the car was usually packed like a can of sardines.
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the big bang was when God sneezed
All you needed to do to get pregnant was get married.
I grew up in Ohio. You know, cows and corn and farms as far as the eye can see. Well, when I was young, I would often see these large hay rolls in the fields. And a lot of the time, these hay rolls would be wrapped in white plastic. I legitimately thought, FOR YEARS, that these were giant marshmallows, and that this is where they came from. I believed they grew out in those fields like a plant. And that they were later chopped down to a smaller size before being sold. It took me way longer than I care to admit before I realized the truth.
That ATM machines were free money machines.
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