Things your parents didn't believe in

[Aspergallus]

Inspired by the Timotei thread where someone mentioned that their mum didn't believe in hair conditioner, I realised there is actually quite a long list of things my parents didn't believe in that still leave me, at nearly 50 with DC of my own, feeling like I'm being ridiculously extra for doing every day things:

Hair conditioner as above -deemed totally unnecessary, not a real thing, and drain blocking by my parents. I had long, dry curly hair...

Vitamins -I bought my own as a teen as I thought it might help with acne. They behaved like I was shooting up H.

Make up. My mum believed that all make up (but particularly foundation) was the cause of all skin aging and would tell me (when I was wearing it to hide teenage acne) that once I was 40 I would look older than her as a result.

Tampons. Apparently if you used tampons, you'd have to go for a D&C every year or so due to "build up".

Deodorant. Not necessary if you washed apparently. They considered it something dirty people used in lieu of washing.

Sunglasses, especially when driving. Could make you go blind. Like the reading in the dark old wives tale. As a result my mum spend many a summer gardening with no eye protection and got early cataracts. Yet she still looks at me suspiciously, like I might crash, if I put them on to drive on a sunny day.

Contact lenses -seriously dangerous in their view.

Sun block -they were of that generation that used baby oil and encouraged me to do the same because I was so pale and unhealthy.

Changing job -you got one job and stuck with it or your CV would be ruined forever. And they took this literally, expecting me to stick with chambermaiding as a 17 year old. When I was in a professional role and given rotating training -shifting every 6 months, they were horrified. I'd never work again etc.

Hobbies including sport. They simply did not believe in hobbies or interests unless you were going to make it your whole life's devotion, career or it was going to take you to the Olympics. The idea that you might try something out, and not stick with it was outrageous.

I think my parents might have been particularly odd. There are other examples I can't bring myself to say out loud.

Please tell me other people have similar tales of things their parents didn't believe in...

Good for your mother! My mother was very down trodden by my dad and never went to work. I was a very rebellious teenager and I went into pubs and got drunk. When I look back I can see clearly why I rebelled.

Come on... what kind of parents did you have?? Mine weren't anything like this you are making them out to be stupid

@madeleine85 I was told in no uncertain terms that my pads had to be flushed down the toilet...my periods started in 1982 and I had no idea that flushing them was bad until the mid 90s at least. My mother babysat a friend's teenage daughter for a week in the early 2000s and was disgusted when she found the poor girl had been hiding her used pads in her bag...the only bin in the place was in the kitchen and my mother would have seen them if she'd disposed of them in there.

More than 20 years later my mother still mentions how disgusting she was if she comes up in conversation...

So many things:

Showering / bathing - this was a once a week activity. I was shocked to discover when I went to university that people showered daily.

Haircare - again it wasn't until I went to uni that I discovered there were things you could put in your hair to reduce the frizz (I have very curly hair)

Deodorant - again I never had any until I went to uni

Bras - I wasn't allowed one until I was 16 which I found mortifying. Even then I was made to try on ones that were too small to demonstrate to me how uncomfortable they were and thus unnecessary

Saturday jobs - life revolved around school and academic success. This meant I had a very limited social life and no money to spend on things

Periods - these were known dramatically and in hushed tones by my mother as the curse. She thought that if my father so much as saw a packet of sanitary towels he would spontaneously combust.

Eh?
Just because something didn’t happen to you it can’t happen to other people?

Ive never been in a house fire but I believe other people when they say it has happened to them. Fuck me.

Sitting on walls (no idea, sorry!)

I know! It becomes a 'slags' wall', where girls routinely sit to wait for men. Not sex workers, just your average girls, too young for a night out. If you're sitting on a wall you must be making yourself available. Being 'available' was a very bad thing, likely to bring shame to yourself and to your entire family.

I didn't make the rules!

Many of these posts are heartbreaking. I'm so sorry for all of you who experienced such neglect and abuse. Not one of you deserved any of that

One thing I found interesting in some of the more lighthearted posts, is how thinking has come full circle with some of these examples.

Like the belief that tampons and deodrant would cause cancer. We now know there's a link between cancer & aluminium deodorants and non organic tampons.

Recycling being a con - well, it is. We should all be doing it but there very been lots of news stories about how governments ship it all off to less developed countries to landfill or be burned.

Early forms of conditioner must have been quite claggy and greasy at times, especially if applied incorrectly. Older generations used to use things like vinegar rinses which are now back in fashion again.

I can even understand the fear about microwaves causing cancer - there have been lots of fears about WiFi and mobile phones doing the same, some more paranoid than others (looking at you 5g towers)

Same weekly menus would have been down to household economics. I remember my own grandparents doing similar but less rigid....Eating in the street and blue jeans were common (think about where Levis originated).

I remember health scares around aluminium pots, clingfilm or plastics in the microwave and chemicals in deodorant

These are all back again. We know about microplastics now and the dangers of our foods and drinks being packaged, stored and heated in plastic.

The attitudes about mh and children have been very hard read and have seen them in my own family. Fact is, knowledge about child development and psychology has come along in leaps and bounds in the last 70 years - even in the last 20.

And those parents who refuse to believe their own habits and beliefs are harmful - many must struggle to open up to the idea that they may have harmed their own children, especially when they hear it from those children (re their grandchildren).

Can see a lot of generational trauma in these stories and hope that we successfully break the cycle.

Another one who had the weekly bath in about 3 inches of water as this was all that was "needed". To be fair, water had to be heated by the coal fire so it was limited, but mostly this was a hangover from wartime economies. This was the mid-60s.

I still dislike baths.

My mum believes that you must not be able to see your own glasses frame when you are wearing them. So from age 12 to about 17 I wore massive NHS issue Deirdre Barlow style glasses so that I could not see the frame.

Like quite a few things on this thread, this could have a grain of truth in it. I remember the optician advising my mother to pick large frames for us as children as he said otherwise you get into the habit of turning your head rather than moving your eyes to see so you're not using your eye muscles (I think?).

StBrides I agree about generational trauma, I can trace the wounds n my family back through several generations, each individual unaware or unable to heal.

echt a weekly bath was the norm for me growing up too. I was the youngest so was lucky enough to get in first.
My father was last, so must have been pretty grimy, and yes it was very shallow too. My family didn't have the money for daily hot water. No central heating, and water heated by coal, which was a luxury.
We had strip washes with cold water in the sink every day, it was harsh especially in a freezing cold home during a scottish winter.

My mother gave up work when she married, didn't have a bank account not even a joint account with my father, and never learned to drive.

She still doesn't believe in equal pay for women because men are" cleverer and stronger", so deserve to be paid more.

@StopStartStop You realise you rinse the conditioner out? You don't leave it in? So your head isn't 'sticky'. You rinse shampoo out of your hair, too. You don't leave shampoo in, or conditioner in. No one ever has a 'sticky head' from conditioner.

Split ends are real, it is damage to hair. It means the ends fray. Denying that split ends exist is like denying diabetes or heart attacks exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoptilosis

Absolutely. It’s not just ‘abuse’. It’s far more complex. Societal attitudes have cha he’s a lot and sometimes not for the better. Snacking, fast foods, addiction to phones, lack of clear boundaries , not teaching manners. There are a lot of things that are wrong with modern life too. Many parents ignore their kids in favour of sticking them in front of the the telly, allowing them to spend hours on screens and not giving enough quality attention these days. Using material stuff to replace interaction and love. Swings and roundabouts.

Speaking to me ignored me from as young age I can remember days weeks months and as I got older years

eating food she saw as high in fat I was put on a diet aged 3 and have battled all my life with weight and have had every ED going and now going for a gastric sleeve

looking out of windows or touching curtains 🙄

having your bedroom door closed yet she was allowed to

barbecues were only for lower class people 🙄

having fun

buying me clothes sanitary towels tights deodorant

taking me to the gp

she didn’t believe (still doesn’t) that you’re not ill unless you have the flu even when I was blue lighter to hospital after losing several pints of blood I was either making it up or it wasn’t serious enough and no she didn’t even visit me even after having surgery I was 14

she didn’t believe in getting me a bank account when I was growing up either said the bank said I couldn’t have one and couldn’t find me I was 10 which led to absolute paranoia growing up that I would be in trouble

ive Got loads but perhaps they should be on a thread for narcissistic parents 😂

once I was a teenager she didn’t believe in letting me wash my bedding and clothes and if I was allowed it had to be a cold wash and that was only when I was allowed to use the machine

Pp above I have one son he’s 8 I broke that cycle I wouldn’t never treat my son the way I was treated

It is so fascinating reading these.

Those of you whose parents didn’t believe in painkillers, body-hair removal, hair products, sunscreen, deodorant, microwaves… are you all children born in the mid to late 70s like me? And if so, WHERE do you think these weird ideas started?!

Were there magazine or newspaper pieces saying these things were dangerous in the 1960s/70s, when our parents were growing up and starting their families?

the body hair and painkiller ones are the weirdest to me (my parents, well my mum really, still don’t believe in either of these things). If you take painkillers your body will ‘not know if the pain is getting worse which might mean you need a doctor but you don’t know’ 🙄 and I’m talking literally a couple of paracetamol for a one-off headache here. And/or they ‘make the pain worse in the long run’ 😳 apparently, because you will become addicted (after two paracetamol) and get a cycle of rebound headaches for the rest of your life.

Removing any body or facial hair by ANY METHOD will ‘make it grow back thicker’ or, contradictorily in my mums case and pertaining to eyebrows, mean they ‘never grow back again’. I was in my early 30s before I dared to tweeze a single eyebrow hair because she swore tweezing had made her eyebrows almost bald. I now tweeze almost daily to keep my still-massive caterpillar eyebrows even vaguely tidy. 15 years of tweezing and NO BALDNESS YET. I look at my wedding photos with such sadness because I still hadn’t started tidying my eyebrows then and all I can are two massive caterpillars on my face!!

Hair conditioner wtf??? Apparently it ‘gets your hair used to not producing its own oils’ and will also at the same time ‘make it greasy’. My curly hair is dry as a bone and not conditioning it (liberally) makes me look like Captain Caveman… which is how I looked throughout my teenage years.

Like a pp said most of my mum’s not-believing in stuff came from something she had dimly ‘heard’… I wasn’t allowed to use swimming goggles because they apparently gave you a detached retina (wtf??) so I can’t really swim properly as I never put my face in the water. I think she ‘heard’ this from her hairdresser one day in the early 80s. She still believes it today.

Changing jobs is another big one, check. That seems a very 80s parenting one.

tampons 1000000%. They ‘damage you inside’

sunscreen (ESPECIALLY using in the UK) is just giving you cancer indirectly by stopping you from getting Vitamin D and ‘everyone’ who has cancer definitely got it from vitamin D deficiency… 🙄

I would just love to know where they were getting all this stuff AND more importantly (because I understand science and knowledge was less good back then, so maybe the sunscreen thing etc is sort of an understandable mistake) WHY they continue to believe this stuff in the face of overwhelming evidence that contradicts them!!

@StopStartStop I never went to the hair dresser as a kid. Discovered my split ends before I’d heard about them. Just fiddling with my hair like kids do. Then I heard the name for them afterwards.

That is truly weird.

I was born in the mid 50s and I've never heard most of this nonsense so I don't know where your parents got it from.

My parents didn't buy conditioner because they had never had it not because they thought it was harmful. I hadn't even heard of it until I left home. The things I had to do without were due to economy not ignorance.

Someone way back in the thread said people in the past were more worried about what other people thought. Have you ever read Mumsnet? There are loads of posts about subjects such as 'can I wear this over 40'. People are more concerned than ever due to social media.

No it goes on your head because the hair is on the scalp. But you rinse it out thoroughly just as you do shampoo.

I haven’t read all 21 pages but I can relate to a lot of the things listed here and I grew up in the 70s. I guarantee there will be threads in 20-30 years’ time that ridicule things parents are doing/not doing right now.

Very rarely allowed to watch ITV, my parents thought it was too common so mostly BBC in our house.
Missed out on so many great adverts that were talked about in school.

Completely agree with this re university

I also only put conditioner through the ends of my hair, not the top of my head. I have oily skin and get greasy hair quickly, I know you have to wash conditioner out but still feel like it makes my hair get greasier more quickly if it touches my scalp.