family

My mother had many misconceptions about things when she was younger. Her and her friends were imaginative - they would take a large piece of lint, run down the street as fast as tehy could, and think they were flying off to Candyland. She also thought the TV could hear her when she talked.

Stacia

In 3rd grade we started learning about immigrants so naturally I was curious and asked my dad where we came from. He told me that my great-grandparents were royalty and came to America when their small country rebelled so they wouldn't be beheaded. I went around for a year after this telling everyone I was a princess and when I grew up I would go back to this country and claim the throne.

Anon

So my mum has just had my baby sister. Right. Now, have you ever seen the cliché story in like, EVERY kid's TV show with the whole, "Now my parents have a baby they won't care about me any more"? Yeah, I kinda thought you had to do that(you can see where this is going). Cue me crying in Reception (age of 4, about 1st Grade to all you Yanks) at my school.


Thanks alot, Tweenies.

They Might Be Giants

When my mom went to work, I used to go in the backyard and yell for her thinking she could hear me when she was in a whole other town and miles away from me. I told her that and she just laughed and said she would have never heard me.

Anon

My Grandad used to tell me and my brother that he had a donkey living in his shed. He always had a plausible excuse for us not being able to 'visit' it. He used to pretend to take carrots out to it and one day showed my brother a squashed toy car 'that the donkey had stood on!

Paula Nugent

My 26 year old daughter revealed to me about a year ago (while discussing
her own 3 year old) that she had grown up in fear of the threat I used when she
misbehaved... of "sending her back to the Indians". She thought she really had
come to me from Indians and I would return her like returning something you didn't
want to a store. Now I am ashamed I warped my child. (well almost ashamed)

Granny

When my brother and I were little and naughty, my mum would get angry and say that she had "lost her temper", well we thought it was another name for her purse.........so would go looking for it to make her happy with us again.

Julia

I used to believe that you just 'got pregnant' you didnt have to actually do anything for it to happen. I also didn't understand about relatives and thought you had to choose what you wanted to be. Eg: you could only choose to be either an aunt, a mother, a cousin, a grandmother etc.

Anon

I am an only child. I grew up convinced that once a child was born it was against the law for the daddy to stay. If the mommy got pregnat with another child, the daddy was forced to come back and live with her. I didn't ever think about how she got pregnant with the second child.

Anacita

When I was a wee lad, I used to walk around marveling at how tall all the older folks were so much taller than me. When I discovered that my parents were in their twenties, I immediatly got excited to meet my grandfather. I figured his head would be in the clouds.

Christian Green

When I was little, I had two close black friends whose adoptive parents were a white lesbian couple. I also had two black cousins that my white aunt and uncle adopted. So when I was 5 or 6, I didn't know any black kids who lived with their birth parents. One day my parents were watching a movie and I walked in during a scene where a black woman was crying and saying "They're going to take my baby away from me". So, using what was apparently good logic at the time, I assumed that the U.S. government forced black people to give up their babies to white people. I finally got corrected when we were learning about Martin Luther King in 2nd grade and I raised my hand and asked why no one protested the law about blacks not being allowed to have babies. She gave me a pretty strange look for a while, there.

matt

I admit that I have a creative imagination even to this day, but when I was younger and noticed a change in my parents' behavior or temperment, I would assume that my real parents had been abducted by aliens and that these new, strange, people were actually robots or aliens.

olivia

I used to think that fireworks were a natural occurence that happened every Fourth of July, and that's why we always went to watch fireworks on that day. Then my parents explained to me that people were creating the fiireworks, and that only grownups were allowed to do that. So then I believed that the fireworks were kept in a box and you had to be really strong to keep them in because otherwise they'd escape at the wrong moment.

Brittany

When I was little, I thought that criminals ("bad guys") were never kids. I thought that maybe they were put on the earth as criminals in the first place and they didn't have a choice on whether or not they wanted to be one. When I asked my mom this when I was little, she didn't bother in replying.

Aly

I was so sure that the number of children in a family told you exactly how many times their parents had shared an intimate moment!

Lisa

At Christmas, we would always have big family get togethers. I remember when I was about 4 years old, listening to my Mother making plans for 'Boxing Day' and having visions of my Dad and my Uncle John squaring up in the ring...

Steve Creek

i used to believe that if you stepped on a crack, you would break your grandma's back. my kindergarten friend told me that she once stepped on a crack and her grandma borke her back that same day so i freaked out. one day i accidentally stepped on a crack and ran home crying. i called my grandma and apoligized for breaking her back. she just laughed and laughed and i finally realized you could step on cracks without breaking someones back.

Hannah

My mom was my Girl Scout troop leader growing up. At our first meeting (way back in Brownies, when I was 6), she told us that in our Brownie troop we would get sisters. What she meant was that all the members of the troop were like sisters, but I took her literally and thought that the other members of the troop would become my blood relatives somehow. Since I was an only child and I wanted a sister at the time, I was very excited, and I kept waiting for us to magically become "sisters." It took a year and a half for me to realize that this wasn't going to happen.

Me and my 10 "sisters"

when I was a kid and my parents were going out and we had to have a babysitter, I used to want to go with them rather than staying home. So I would ask my parents where they were going and they'd say "crazy, wanna come?" I used to think crazy was this smokey, hellish place and I was arfiad of going, so I'd say, no and suck it up at home.

stacie

I believed that Daddies were always older than Mommies. I was horrified when I found out that my Mom was older than my Dad!

jennifer