Do you ever remember something your parents did when you were growing up and feel annoyed?

[RosieLemonade]

My mum would never ever pick me up on a night out, from a train station, from university etc. Every other parent I have known has done pick ups and drop offs. Me and my sister would have to walk an hour every Friday and Saturday night after working 9 hour shifts. I would never make DD get a bus after a 4 hour train journey (with a walk between station and stop). My mum was a good mum in lots of ways but this still annoys me years later!

Went out at night and left me home alone. Every week end. OK apparently because she knew the woman in the upstairs flat...
From 12 /13...

Always late 🙄

Smoking in the car and wouldn't let us open the windows, called us precious for moaning about the smoke. Genuinely great parents for the most part but totally oblivious to how awful their smoking was for us.

My brother broke a antique glass fish and blamed me. He was 7 and I was 5. I said it wasn't me but my dad believed the golden child.
I got a smacked bum, sent to my room and only allowed out for meals and toilet for the whole weekend so didn't get to go swimming but he did.

Still bummed about that.

That's totally shit, not picking you up OP.

Have you ever asked them about it?

Bloody everything my parents hated me. They often didn't even let me get the medication I needed

Insist we went out every single weekend. Appreciate they were trying to keep us entertained but sometimes it would have been nice to just have a day on the sofa or in the garden instead of bundled out of the door at 9am!

Have a very messy house. It took a long time to train myself to be fairly tidy person.

I had the flip side to that lemon

Bowls whisked away while half your breakfast was still in it, never have a drink, wander off and return as it would be gone. Never read a book, go to the toilet, and return, as the book will have vanished. Anything we owned was thrown out as soon as it was deemed we didn’t need it any more, even if it had some sentimental value. My dad abhorred what he viewed as ‘clutter.’ I remember being lectured at length about earrings because the studs fall off and they get caught in the hoover. I was 28 at the time

@DeltaFlyer

My brother broke a antique glass fish and blamed me. He was 7 and I was 5. I said it wasn't me but my dad believed the golden child. I got a smacked bum, sent to my room and only allowed out for meals and toilet for the whole weekend so didn't get to go swimming but he did.

Still bummed about that.

I have a load of stories like that! Except I was the little sister and my ‘sensible older (golden child) big sister would never: try to bathe the cat, try to teach the cat to swim in the pool, dig up the rose patch, break the front gate by swinging on it, push next doors (horrible) child into the nettles, pull a branch off the apple tree, cut a hole in a school uniform, block the kitchen sink with toffee, burn a hole in the front room armchair (playing with matches), pull the towel rail off the wall (swinging off it), drop grandmas hearing aid into a glass of water, singe the bedside cabinet (ditto)... oh my god I could go on...

I was always getting a row for something...

@30degreesandmeltinghere

Went out at night and left me home alone. Every week end. OK apparently because she knew the woman in the upstairs flat... From 12 /13...

Mine too but from 6.

So many things.
From the age of 11 I was asked to order or buy my own birthday/Christmas presents, with the pretence that my parents would transfer the money for the gifts, that never happened.

As a younger child I was asked to clean the cars and do a large amount of house work for pocket money that I was never given.

Parents would never attend parents evenings or let me go on school trips, other parents thought there was something odd about the family and I often felt left out by other kids. Wouldn’t pick me up from school, the teachers created a rota to wait with me every evening

I'll never forget my mum when I was 11 or 12 and a brochure came through about stagecoach acting club and I really wanted to join so asked her and her response was "well that sounds great but how are you going to get there?".

We lived in a village with no transport links and they had no problem taking my younger brother and sister to various clubs and activities. I was painfully shy as a teenager and always wonder if I'd have been a more confident teen if I'd been able to do this club.

She said the same when I broached applying for a scholarship at a private school one town over for sixth form. They'd applied for my brother to go to the same school just a couple of years before (he failed the entrance exam). No questions about how he was going to get there!

Not the biggest deal but they still really annoy me years later. My life's turned out pretty peachy so no regrets here but still..

I had fantastic parents but they very set in their ways and abhorred anything ‘immature’ or ‘rude’ or ‘noisy’.

I couldn’t eat toast in front of my dad because it would end in a screaming match for chomping when in actuality it was crunchy toast.

We couldn’t play on holiday or laugh at a meal because it was ‘loud’ and ‘common’.

My mum sulked when I made the school football team again as it was seen as common. Never did anything remotely childlike either so no soft play or days out etc, infrequent park trips.

I was undiagnosed ND too so had terrible coordination and they simply didn’t have the patience to teach me so I never learnt to swim/ride a bike. Could never ask for help with school work as it always got very fraught.

Living on a knife edge was the best way to put it and the atmosphere was always fraught but God we were loved. I think it was just a different time.

From an adult perspective we realise now my Dad had OCD hence the hatred of noise or mess or anything not done just so and my Mum’s mum was an awful narcissist and she was dealing with the aftermath of that. I think realising your mum and dad are human is a lesson every child eventually learns.

It doesn’t make them bad parents though, just a bit faulty on occasion.

Their tendency to mischedule things / forget things. I found it quite stressful.

When I was growing up they lived in a different country from me, and I would go and stay with them in the summer holidays. One summer in my mid-teens, I arrived at the airport after an 8 hour flight and wondered why they weren't there to collect me. They had forgotten I was coming and had gone on a road trip. Luckily I was able to stay with a friend until they returned a week later.

Silver lining: It made me into a well-organised adult who double-checks things.

@KittenKong you and I would have been excellent friends. So would our boring older sisters ;)

I got third degree burns from trying to iron those coloured bead men but didn’t realise I needed wax paper and in my eagerness to avoid getting in trouble tried clawing the melted wax off the iron.

Another summer, also mid-teens:

While I was staying with them, they decided to take me on a road trip up the coast to the adjoining country (lovely idea; it's a beautiful part of the world).

Three days of driving later, we reached the border. They had forgotten their passports (I had mine with me). So we had to turn around and drive back.
Not the end of the world, but frustrating.

Got really told off for displaying vocal and motor tics. Plug chopped off tele, grounded , yelled at. Told it was a habit I needed to work harder at to stop. I'm in my 30s now and pretty 100% I have tourettes syndrome. My mum has a hand tic (and others) and so does her cousin and uncle. Clearly runs in the family. I've never broached it with them but I definitely feel traumatised by it all. My daughter has started showing signs now too (I was 7 when mine started)

My dad beat me with a belt for not emptying the waste paper basket in my bedroom. When we had swimming at school the next day, I told my friends my cat scratched my back to explain the whip marks on my shoulders..... I still think about his physical abuse from time to time....

That’s shocking...

The boring things we had to do at weekends. It amazes me when I see the effort parents now go to to entertain their kids - things the kids will actually enjoy: soft play, swimming and petting zoos and stuff. I remember being resentful that after a week at school, our weekends consisted of tedious things like church, antique fairs, going to visit dreary relatives, or clothes shopping for my mum. It's made me extremely protective of my free time. I really resent having to do dutiful things I won't enjoy.

Sending me to a child minder I hated for years. They were still using her for babysitting when I was 9 and my mum keeps in touch with her now. She was such a bully and I used to complain about her all the time, and my mum just thought I was being over sensitive .

My mum, again, was always promising me things and then going back on it. Or offering to pay for things and then changing her mind. I don't trust her now as an adult.

Being late for everything.

I live 3000 miles away now, and when I come home my mum charges me for my and DH's food. She made me memorably presented me with a bill for our stay one time, including a line item for a £3.00 jar of olives from Sainsbury's. They're not poor. They also insist on picking a restaurant and making a fuss about going to dinner, then hand us a bill at the end. I'm fine to pay and often treat them to things, but I'd like a say in the restaurant if I'm forking out for it.

@Collidascope

The boring things we had to do at weekends. It amazes me when I see the effort parents now go to to entertain their kids - things the kids will actually enjoy: soft play, swimming and petting zoos and stuff. I remember being resentful that after a week at school, our weekends consisted of tedious things like church, antique fairs, going to visit dreary relatives, or clothes shopping for my mum. It's made me extremely protective of my free time. I really resent having to do dutiful things I won't enjoy.

God we had the same childhood. I can still smell the old antique halls with the endless coronation plates. We weren’t even allowed to look at the fun stuff like the guns.

Smacking or punishing when his ego was challenged. Not by cheek but by being right about things he didn't know and calling it cheek. I remember saying the correct answer when watching university challenge and I was sent to my room. I was about 16 and I wasn't smart, it was just by coincidence my current higher French novel they asked about.

In the days before awareness of how damaging the sun could be for your skin my father always used to go on at me and my siblings about how pale we were. (We were red-headed thanks to his family's genes although he wasn't - and we used to burn badly). He was out in his shorts with no shirt from April to October. Guess who had to have a cancerous lesion removed from his back?