What were you told growing up that were just pure lies!

[Magik01]

Talking about this today with a friend, apart from the obvious Santa/Easter bunny/tooth fairy.

I was that chewing gum (as in the long flat ones back in the 90s) were made of cob webs. And if you ever swallowed gum it would stay inside for 7 years. 😂

That bread crusts would make your hair curly.

Has anyone else heard these or have any random things they were told as a child?!

"You need to train your hair by brushing it" when trying to get my greasy straight hair out of my eyes as a child. We were laughing only last week about training hair.

If you put red and white flowers together in a vase, someone would die.

😮 At some of these fibs! Your parents told some corkers 😄.

My mum used to say the crusts one but only in a jokey way, like if I left the crusts off my sandwich (rarely TBF) she'd say "ooh, you'll not get curly hair!"

If I spent too long looking in the mirror she would say "you'll see t'devil if you keep looking in that mirror!"

This is genius!

Sitting on a cold wall gives you piles.

Haha my mum used to say this to me too!

I was told that eating bread crusts would make your hair curly too. Such a disappointment.

Don't think I was told this when I was growing up but I certainly tell my dd it... don't chase/scare the birds, they'll come back and poo on your head.
She has the utmost respect for a flock of birds now, and will give me a knowing look of we see someone else do it.

I just hate the things flapping around me. Let's hope no one tells her it's apparently good luck if they do poo on you or I'm screwed!

I was told most of the above and believed them. Also that there was a giant under the stairs..

This is actually true but outdated. In the old days before everyone used commercial shampoo and conditioner brushing was essentially how you cleaned your hair by moving the oils down from the root to the tip. Now we strip them out with shampoo and replace them with conditioner which makes you hair greasy faster as you start overproducing oil.

The brush has to be made of natural bristles or wood though.

If there was a crack in the curtain during a storm, the lightning would 'get' you

Ha! My parents couldn't have done this to me as the Ice Cream man round our way used to hang out of the ice cream van window ringing a bell like a town cryer! I used to chat to him all the time so knew full well that the bell meant that he was on his way, stocked full of lovely ice cream!

How the hell he drove and rang the bell hanging out the window without crashing is beyond me!

A boy I knew told me that the queen lived in a house near us, it was terrace..

ahem I think not 😂

but I really believed that

There’s this omnipotent old geezer in the sky who created the whole entire world in just seven days….

Money was tight growing up and my mum and dad used to say we have to keep really still while the car was being filled with petrol because it would make us pay for more fuel - I was obviously very gullible as I never questioned it and even in my 20's when friends filled up I'd be as still as a statue!! Ahh so bloody gullible!!

That if you pluck your eyebrows they don't grow back. Also that plucking them could damage your eyesight. My.mum must've really hated plucked eyebrows!

Yes to the bread crusts making your hair curly.

That it was illegal to drive with the lights on in the car.

That chewing gum would block your insides and you'd die.

That if you held a sneeze you'd die.

That cutting your toe nails on a Sunday was bad luck.

If you wash your hair or get a bath during your period it'll go away and come back the week after.

That if you use the phone during a thunderstorm you'll die.

If you put shoes on the table someone/you will die.

Basically my entire childhood consisted of being told I'd die at every turn!

That if you sit too close to the telly you will go blind. That sexual intercourse meant writing letters (I asked what it meant and evidently my mother could not bring herself to explain it).

If you swallow an apple seed then a tree grows in your stomach.

The LSD-impregnated temporary tattoos scare story 🤣

If you bit your fingernails there would be nothing to stop the ends of the bones coming through the skin... Scared me witless as I secretly bit my nails till they bled! (only thing that stopped me was realising where my fingers had been when I started my nurse training.. I still enjoy the occasional chew now)

We told the kids that when the little red sensor lights came on the motion sensors for the burglar alarm, then Santa was watching. Evil really but they were well behaved in those rooms.

Hahaha 🤣 we had a few of those as sayings, like the crusts one, but I don’t think we ever actually believed them.

I recently had to disabuse my MIL of her conviction that if you are so much as a biscuit within two hours before swimming you would die horribly. She was particularly worried because DP, a large healthy man in his mid-30s, had eaten two hobnobs an hour before taking DD to the children’s pool, in which he can stand up throughout.

MIL: digesting it will mean his so ACB takes all the blood from his limbs and this will give him cramp and he’ll die horribly in the water.

Me: The water only reaches to his waist! Plus when did you last hear of someone dying of cramp due to swimming? <googles> Never. Apparently no one has ever died from eating before swimming. It’s an early twentieth century medical myth made up by scouting troops in the 1920s apparently, and has literally zero basis in fact. Plus, it takes more than eight hours for food items to traverse the gut. So even if it were true, two hours wouldn’t be nearly enough. You haven’t even started digesting the biscuits then. You’d have to wait a day before swimming if that really happened.

MIL: He must wait another hour because my father was a GP in the 1950s and nothing he said was ever wrong. The biscuits might kill him.

MIL is not a woman of science.

*his stomach takes all the blood from his limbs