What were your assumptions about the world as a child?

[OneUmberJoker]

I thought being rested as in sport star rested meant arrested

I don't understand the point you are making @OneUmberJoker

However, as a tiny child I remember believing that the little birds had little bird weddings with veils and trains, etc, before building their nests. After a sex education class when I was about 9 and it was explained about sperms and eggs and that the penis went inside the woman, I thought that my mum must have had sex once as I was an only child, but they Queen had it four times because she had four children.

I remember watching the news and it felt very removed from me, until Aberfan which I related to because it involved children.

That quick sand would 'get' me .

That I would help the police solve a baffling murder ( I read lots of famous 5 and secret 7 books )

That all singers / actors wrote their own songs / lines

That I would own a family home by 25 on a middle class kind of job salary. That my children would not have SEND. That I would never have to worry about money being a well educated, bright, hardworking person. Oh how naïve I was!

That every crime that ever happened made the news.

I thought I’d be married with kids at 18 because 18 is an adult.

I thought all blocks of flats were council estates (to be fair this is true where I grew up).

That if you had a bigger TV, the main picture would still be the same size as on a smaller screen, but you’d be able to see what was going on behind the scenes. I was most disappointed when I went to an electronics store aged about 5, and saw some massive TVs for the first time, and found that that was not the case. What was the point in having a bigger TV?!

That grown ups never told lies. It shook my world when, aged 8, an elderly neighbour went to my parents' door and told my mum that I'd been going up to her living room window and pulling faces at her, which I hadn't done.

It also meant that when I asked my mum what would happen if you had an itch and didn't scratch it, and she replied, presumably fed up with me asking silly questions, "Your leg will fall off," I believed her and was terrified.

This would be SO COOL if it was true

That if you were a good person good things would come your way
that if you played by the rules things would be fair
that if I worked hard studied got a good job I’d be able to afford a home and holidays

That if it was written in a book it must be factually correct

That male chickens weed on eggs and that’s what made the eggs have chicks inside 😂

That questioning any sort of authority was inherently bad!

I thought I'd no longer be shy and would have loads of confidence. Still shy in my 40s.

I thought we were watching people going about their lives in TV and that something bigger (dinosaurs?) were watching us on their tvs.

In my teens I thought I'd have an amazing job as a grown up, my kids would have a FT nanny, I'd drive a Jaguar, live in a period property and I'd have a holiday home somewhere. I have a good job but can afford none of that!

1 - Death from Quicksand was terrifying, highly likely and a certain thing we would encounter in our lifetimes.

2 - That cats and dogs were males and females of the same species (cats the females and dogs the males).

3 - The harder I worked at school and the higher I performed, the more successful I would be in life. I mean, there’s still a strong correlation here but nowhere near as strong or as absolute as I first believed.

Quick sand would be a major issue 😅

I also was terrified of dying in quicksand (in rural Hampshire). Also thought getting cut off by the tide was highly likely. Think I read too much Enid Blyton.

I thought that the only countries were the UK, France ,Germany and USA. I knew of the Bermuda Triangle and worried about it for about 75% of each day in case it expanded 😂

That wars were only stories.

I took everything at face value. I thought (though was puzzled by) it that actors who were killed in films really died. I also believed that newspapers printed truth - my wake-up call was when Greville Wynn, a businessman who travelled to Russia and arrested as a spy, turned out to be really a spy. Our newspapers had protested vociferously and indignantly that he wasn't.

I also thought that I was collecting foil to cure dogs of blindness and wondered how on Earth the foil helped fix their eyes 😂

Oh yes, I remember Quick Sand, often appearing as a threat on TV. I think it was The Land of The Giants.

Funnily enough, my ambition was to have a nice four bedroomed house on the sea front, a husband who was something like a bank manager or GP, to be a SAHM and have my own little run around car. Looking back that would have bored me rigid.

I had no ambition whatsoever but all my friends who were going to be actresses or artists or have creative jobs in London, and who were academicially clever and did all their homework, stayed at home or went back home and had lives not unlike the one I described above but with possibly a bit less money

I thought that everyone who died would be on the news. Not like, national news top headline. But local news “and finally, 90 year old Jane Smith died today of natural causes.”

Oh gosh, yes I had forgotten all about the Bermuda Triangle! Spent many a night awake as a child in the 90s thinking incessantly (and clearly unnecessarily) about this! Don’t think I’ve heard anyone mention the Bermuda Triangle for a good two decades now!

That all wars would stop by the time I was an adult because people would realise they were obviously a bad idea.

As a disabled child I genuinely believed I would have the same opportunities as everyone else and be seen for who I am and what I can do. It has not been the case

From the age of nine until maybe eleven, I thought gay men had sex by somehow pushing one man’s penis into the opening of his partner’s penis, and I thought lesbians had sex by somehow pushing one woman’s vulva into the other’s vagina.

That nuns were fictional or extinct or something. My flabber was truly gasted when one sat next to me on the bus (I was late teens too 😳)