Randomly odd things you believed as a child and possibly beyond...

[Elmo230885]

I live this type of thread...

(I'm not talking about believing in Santa or the tooth fairy)

I'll start. I had a cousin named Stephen and he had the middle name Dean. For some reason he used to switch and go by either name. So as a child I believed that Dean was short for Stephen in the same way Bill is used for William.

I thought that somebody had to die to make room for a new baby to be born, every time I knew someone was pregnant I would freak out waiting to see who died to make way for the baby.

@Awwlookatmybabyspider

Creepy kid alert. I used to think people were buried in actual grave stones. I was very confused as to how they got the person into them. I figured in the end that they must cut and squash the person up.

When my mum used take me on the bus to my nan’s I was always baffled that the destination on the front didn’t say ‘BabySpider’s nans.

Nurses were women. Doctors were men.

That when a women was pregnant they had to keep on having sex for the baby to keep growing

The 'needng to keep having sex during pregnancy' rings a bell.

In about 1980/81 (when I was having babies) I read a letter on an advice page in a women's magazine from a pregnant woman who was afraid for her baby's development.

Her husband had told her that each time they had sex it added a bit to the baby, no doubt to keep having his fun throughout.
As he sometimes had to work away from home she thought their unborn child was at risk.

The advice given was that this is NOT the case and that she should talk over her concerns with her midwife or GP.

I sometimes wonder what became of that family.

The crusts thing comes from an era when ‘nice’ girls went to bed with rollers and pins in to get the curly hair that was fashionable then
So the parents lied to them to say if they ate their crusts their hair would go curly and then not need the rollers - apparently ( according to my nan) the pins and rollers were very uncomfortable

This is my most embarrassing one that is frequently mentioned That Zebras were Horses in Pjs ready for bed. Both parents had always said this and I was quite surprised to discover they were in fact a different animal 😂

I believed cauliflower cured whooping cough until I was 17.

I thought my dad’s tetanus jab scar was a snake bite that he got in the Army (he did his National Service in Norfolk).

I was a credulous child.

And that babies were born through your belly button

I thought this too!

And that if you sucked on your hair it would fall out and get wrapped around your heart and you’d die

I also thought that tv presenters had hundreds of little screens in to the viewers houses, so they could see the viewer in the way we can see them. I remember being really annoyed the Andi Peters wasn’t waving back at me

Lelophants.....omg just realised what that meant ...LMAO after 44 years xx xx

Wait, a Swan can't break your arm with their super strong wings? Mind blown! My phobia of swans has now been cured 😂

I lived in Clevedon - on the Bristol Channel opposite Wales. I was convinced that when the tide went out from us it was so that Barry Island could have it, then it went out for them we had it. I was about 9.

Eating your crusts gave you white teeth and curly hair. Or, as we used to say white hair and curly teeth. Eat an apple pip and it'll grow into a tree in your stomach.

@CurtainWitcher I love your Jewell Carriages and Custardy Sweet! What a wonderful world you lived in.

We used to drive along the M4 each weekend to visit relations, and would return quite late at night. I would lie on the bench seat in the back of the car and try to sleep (pre-seatbelts). When we drove past Swindon it would look really big and sparkly with all the streetlights, and my dad would tell me it was fairyland.

I've been there. It really isn't.

I believed the world used to be black and white

My mum had showed me a photo of her as a child and it was black and white. For years I remember believing the world was black and white when my mum was a child and I was very curious as to how and when colour came Into the world

Yes me too I also believed the world used to be in black and white.

Which is odd because we still had a black and white tv and took black and white photos (1970s) so I really should have twigged!

It was what people said to get children to eat crusts when having curly hair was particularly desirable 'You won't get curly hair unless you eat your crusts'

Absolutely, though it didn't work on me, as I already had curly hair. I'm assuming it's now died out as a saying, given that curly hair is no longer seen as particularly desirable by many?

I believed that when the couple went into the sacristy at a church wedding to sign the register that they were signing the licence that allowed them to have babies, and that somehow switched on the baby-making parts of their biology -- this was my poor, rational little mind trying to make sense of the injunction of my childhood that you had to be married to have a baby.

In fact, large amounts of the strange things I believed were as a result of trying to rationalise the standard nonsense of a conservative religious society.

Oh, and where I grew up the standard way for older people to describe someone being widowed was 'X buried his/her husband/wife last year'. I thought this meant that when your husband or wife died you had to dig the grave yourself, and that people like my uncle, who was among other things a gravedigger, were only used in emergency situations where the surviving spouse was unable to dig the grave themselves because of age or infirmity.

I thought Piccadilly Circus was an actual circus, with a ringmaster and horses.

I thought Chesterfield was a county until I was in my twenties.

And I thought if you picked up a guinea pig by the tail its eyes fell out, until my then-infant school age child corrected me.

Oh, and until about a month ago, I thought if a dog’s front legs were pulled apart, its heart would split. My dad taught me that. God knows why. My brother couldn’t believe I still believed it.

When I was a small child, we often went to a caravan park in Wales, close to a large hill. I used ask my Dad what was behind the hill... he always said it was a place called “Timbuktu”
I had been an adult for many years before I found out where Timbuktu really was... even now there’s a very small part of me that still think it’s behind a hill in Aberystwyth 😳

That crocodiles made a "kkkkrrrrrrrrr" sound.
I had needed a speech therapy as a small child and one of the exercises I was given was "Mr Crocodile says kkkkrrrrrr" which was clearly to get me to practice the sound. Confused me for years

I thought the bin men worked one day a week, coming to our little tiny hamlet just to collect our rubbish...if only hey

When my daughter first saw photos of me and DH as children, I actually said as a joke "Oh that's when we were all in black and white". I never thought she'd think it was true, but she did until she was about 10!

For me, it was looking at copies of my mum's Woman's Weekly magazine. I couldn't understand why there was so many adverts for "towels"? Why did ladies buy towels in packs of 10? All I had in my mind were bath towels. Sanitary towels were a mystery to me.

@LunaNorth

I still believe the one about the dogs heart being damaged if you pull it’s legs apart!! I always been very careful with all my great heavy German Shepherds!!

I believed that the belly button got its shape when the doctor or midwife tied a knot in it. I thought that the type of knot resulted in the shape, and outies were because they’d messed up the knot. I confessed this to my mum recently and she fell around laughing and asked when I’d realised. I had to confess it was when they didn’t knot my daughter’s cord (I was 40 when she was born).

I also believed that when you had a cold you had to wash your hands before you touched your nether regions or your fanjo would catch a cold. I didn’t think much about it, but always washed my hands before going to the loo if I had a cold. About five years ago I had the revelation that I must have mixed up cold and cold sore...

The little piggies -but in my illustrated book of nursery rhymes the little female (cos she was wearing a skirt) was going to the food market to buy stuff with a little basket on her little arm-thing.And anyway, how was I to know pigs don't walk upright?, I was a city kid..Bloody hell!
And a girl in the playground at Juniors told us how a man impregnates a woman.She had brothers so she knew about these things...so the daddy has a special retractable thin tube that comes out of his willy which goes into the mummy's foof cos obviously a willy couldn't fit in there, could it? And I can remember we all nodded in agreement. Made perfect sense. At 11-12 I went to a girls Grammar School and in Biology we were taught how sticklebacks reproduced - all at a respectful distance where the mummy lays her eggs then the daddy stickleback comes along and drops 'stuff' on top of them, so my belief in a boy/man's Incredible Retractable Tube stayed intact.

My Dad used to tell my ds that drinking Coca Cola rotted your socks... Ds came crying to me one day, with a hole in his sock, saying “Grandad was right, Mummy, look!!”
He still mentions it when he gets new socks...he’s almost 35 now😀

That parents had a cuddle to fall pregnant lol.

That if not dad punched the tv we could all go inside the TV to the GMTV studios and whatever else was on hahaha

Hahaha great thread!
House moving really confused me, I thought if you wanted to move house you had to swap, and you just had to be really lucky to find someone with a nice house who wanted to swap with you.
My uncle also told me that water cooler towers made clouds, and for years I thought that's where clouds came from.