What were your assumptions about the world as a child?

[OneUmberJoker]

I thought being rested as in sport star rested meant arrested

I thought that the usa was a shopping centre. When there was a death in a film i thought that the actor was dead in real life. I thought that a general anesthetic wouldn't work when i had an operation. When it thundered i thought that my neighbours were moving their furniture about.

I would have a nice house, holidays each year and be married in my 20s and true love was easy find. All jobs paid well and everyone lived where they grew up.

mid 40s. Met DP 5 years ago, no kids as didn’t want them. Just bought a nice house and I need save for everything. Adulting sucks. My parents made it look easy

Yes definitely this.

Quick sand was a real danger! I have Never ending story to thank for that, it scarred me for life. And I still think about quicksand every time I go to the beach.

I don’t think there’s any quicksand in Blyton! I now desperately want to know where so many people got their childhood fear of quicksand….

Ah, that would make a lot more sense!

I thought I'd live in a BIG house, beautifully decorated and furnished (even knew what colours i'd have) and would have some land and stables. I would have loads of clothes (that bit is true!) including riding outfits and would spend my time as a well dressed lady of leisure and riding in my spare time.
What my husband would be like didn't figure much in my plans. just aswell as my real life one jumped ship after we decided we weren't suited.
So never got the manor or the horses but life isn't so bad!

Travelling in the car one day I must have asked too many questions by the time I asked Mum why she drove around dicarded bags in the road rather than over them. Her irritated reply "you don't know what's in them, it could be a brick or anything." Whenever I later saw a discarded bag in the road I wondered why people threw bags containing bricks into the road, 50 years later I still drive around bags, just in case.

Good things happened to good people. Bad things happened to bad people. The police always caught the baddies and they went to prison, justice always prevailed.

doctors could always make you better and save your lives.

if you worked hard you’d have a fairly comfortable life

When I was a very small child I thought all adults were really good people. I truly believed they all were honest and lovely and trustworthy. I don’t know why I thought that because I was definitely taught stranger danger both at home and at school.

That people who got married planned it all out logically and stuck to it (I was a very sheltered child and rocked to the core when my parents split when I was 24).

I actually used to lie in bed when I was about 5/6 thinking to myself who will I get married to? And worrying that I didn't want to marry any of the boys I knew!

Joke's on me anyway. 35 and still unmarried (ltr though).

Honestly, maybe having emotionally-neglectful, immature parents who thought the world was hostile and stacked against them, and whose main ambition for their children was to never stand out from the crowd may have been a boon. I expected my adult life to be awful, and it’s been way better than I expected.

I thought when I was ten or eleven I had to leave school at 15, get a job in a shop, marry one of the boys on the estate and be a SAHM while hoping he didn’t drink, beat me or end up in prison.

Discovering that in fact university wasn’t ’just for rich people’ (my parents, who lived two miles from a famously pretty campus, thought that peoole like them weren’t allowed inside the gates and tried to persuade me not to apply because I looked like I had ideas above my station) and that I was clever enough to beat the private school boys to a scholarship was better than anything I ever dreamed of for myself. (Because my dreams were so cramped, rather thsn because my adult life has been one long glory, I mean…)

The TV one really made me smile.

I assumed for years that my dad worked in a mug factory, because he once brought home a Charles and Di mug “from work”.
I also assumed all the proper grown ups I had met (teachers, doctors, mums boss etc) all knew each other and had meetings.
I think also there was a strong assumption in the 80s that nuclear war was just inevitable. You don’t hear that so much now, even though it’s actually more likely to be true!

I was in primary school in the early 90s. We used to get shown safety videos in school and I'm pretty sure how to survive quicksand was one of them. Another was a boy who lost his football in one of those electricity transformer hut things and got frazzled to a crisp.

If it wasn't those, it was Michael Burke on 999 🤣

To be fair, I grew up on the Bristol channel. Quicksand was a viable threat!

When I was seven my friend died. My family told me that she was watching down on me from heaven. On enquiring further about other people who died, apparently they were all watching down on us from heaven. This made me absolutely paranoid, imagining an entire crowd of dead friends, neighbours, relatives, previous generation relatives, more distant relatives, to ancestors across generations, all being assigned duties of watchfulness over the living, resting on a space of sky immediately above our heads, invisible to us but able to see and judge everything we did. Some days I could barely bring myself to perform any act or speak any word in case it failed the standards of the assembled watchers.

A lot of tourists get cut off by the tide where I live, it's happened to a good few locals too. There is a particular spot where the tide surrounds a little island of sand.

That all men were lovely, gentle and kind because my dad was...I learnt the hard way that this wasn't true.

That everyone got to be queen. I remember a dinner lady at school bursting that bubble for me 😭

That if you worked hard at school, were kind to people and always did the right thing in the face of adversity that like some 1980s movie, things would always work out and you'd get a happy ending. Preferably with a plucky underdog 80s soundtrack and a power ballad song to finish on.

Sadly, that just isn't the case.

If you eat apple seeds, an apple tree grows in your stomach

If someone is sacked it meant they were put in a sack and shook around

Thunder was god getting angry (later believed it was simply god farting)

The swastika was the national flag of Germany (mortified! I watched war stuff with my dad and stuff just wasn’t explained to me)

we were all in real danger of death by quick sand

Rice Krispies really did contain 3 little cartoon men in the box. I was gutted when my mum bought a box and there were no little men in it.

That the grown ups knew what they were doing. 🙄🤦‍♀️. Also quicksand 🤣

I thought news readers remembered their lines.
That I would grow up to be rich and successful.
That my parents knew everything (my own children don’t seem to be struggling with this misapprehension)

That Id live in a house similar to what I grew up in 🤣🤣

I thought we'd have jet packs to get about and flying cars by the year 2000.
I was an avid watcher of Tomorrow's world and avid reader of the comic 2000AD and an active imagination.

That pancake day was the only day of the year you were allowed to eat pancakes.

Also took me a long time to figure out that grandparents were my parents' parents..