I’m dating myself here, but when I was a kid, Pluto was still a planet; cracking my knuckles would result in arthritis, and if I made faces, they might freeze that way. Of course, back then, we only had the internet in the school computer lab, and it wasn’t yet the excellent information repository it currently is for fact-checking.
Growing up, we’ve had misconceptions and outright lies corrected through our education and medical experiences and stumbling across odd bits of information in podcasts, documentaries, books, and even entertainment websites. You can probably name some things you were told as a kid that turned out to be false (whether your parents were lying or just mistaken), along with misconceptions and mistaken beliefs.
Sitting Close To The TV Will Hurt Your Eyes
In one Reddit thread of misinformation perpetuated by parents, many participants said they’d been told they’d lose their eyesight from sitting too close to the TV or sneaking books in bed at night with a flashlight. Indeed, those pleasures may not have been the healthiest things for our vision.
However, there is no epidemic of kids in the ’80s and ’90s who lost their vision because they insisted on watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with their knees almost touching the TV set. Our parents had great intentions, but the concern was exaggerated.
Eat All Your Food For Starving Kids In Other Countries
When our parents told us we should finish our dinners because there are starving children in other countries, they probably just meant that we should be more appreciative of our good fortune, of the great privilege of having enough. For a lot of kids, though, “Finish your potatoes, there are starving kids in Africa” sounded like an exhortation to somehow rescue those kids by eating past the point of being full.
In retrospect, there are so many failings in this particular line. First, there are also starving kids in the U.S. and every other developed nation, so specifying “in Africa” (some adults remember China being mentioned instead) was a little weird. Maybe they thought if they said “There are starving kids right here in our city,” we’d have said, “Fine, give them my potatoes.” Also, these days, we know that forcing a kid to continue eating when their body is sending signals to stop is not a healthy choice.
Gum Will Never Digest If Swallowed
Where did we get this one? Apparently, from our parents, our peers, and the general inexplicable grapevine that passed on bizarre untruths and misunderstandings.
Somehow, we all became convinced that chewing gum was somehow exempt from the rules of digestion that applied to everything else we put in our bodies and would stay in a solid lump for 7 years before magically dissolving or disappearing. (Maybe it came from kids looking up at the underside of desks during those duck-and-cover drills.)
Wherever the idea came from, it’s utterly false. Like other food items, chewing gum is eradicated in a regular period through digestion and excretion.
Growing Watermelons Inside Your Belly? We Actually Believed This!
The notion that swallowing a watermelon seed (or sometimes the seeds of apples or other fruits) would cause a plant to grow in one’s stomach could probably have been quickly disproven by a glance at a strawberry, whose seeds we eat without a second thought. But we weren’t thinking that way as kids.
Instead, we were convinced that our bellies would swell with a massive watermelon inside, and we were terrified of exactly what procedure would be necessary to remove it. We can all be very thankful to have outgrown that belief!
Root Vegetables And The Importance Of Cleaning Behind Your Ears
It’s not only watermelons that kids were terrified of accidentally growing. Many were told potatoes would grow if they didn’t clean well enough behind their ears. Even as a kid, this doesn’t make much sense because no matter how much dirt you stash behind your ears, you still have to start with a potato cutting to grow a potato. That was a common fact we learned when we grew potatoes from cut-off potato eyes as a typical school science project.
Still, when you’re a kid, your adults are the authority on fact and reality, and if they tell you you’re gonna grow potatoes, you think you’ll grow potatoes. The Good news is that in human history, there’s no evidence that anyone ever produced an ear-adjacent potato farm.
A Little Interior Car Light Misinformation
The lights in a car cannot be turned on while the vehicle is in motion. We all knew this as kids. Some of us were told that our parents would be arrested for having the light on inside the vehicle. Others believed that having the light on for over a few seconds would inevitably cause a catastrophic and fatal wreck.
Okay, having the interior light on can distract the driver, and wanting it off for more comfortable driving is entirely legitimate. But our fears about what would happen from a few moments of light to find a dropped toy were overblown.
You’ll Be Stuck That Way If You Make That Face!
Crossing your eyes, sticking out your tongue, or making an angry, snarly face could be dangerous in a child’s world. “Go ahead and cross your eyes, but don’t complain to me when they get stuck that way! or “Your face is going to freeze like that!”
We were training to keep our faces pleasant, happy, or neutral. And yet, as we grew up, we learned that it didn’t actually work that way. Nope, you missed years of letting your emotions show on your face for no reason. On the other hand, if anyone ever accuses you of having RBF, you can always resurrect that old lie as an excuse. “My mom warned me. I didn’t listen, and it froze this way!”
The Hairy Chest
Remember begging to have the crusts removed from your sandwich? Or maybe you pulled them off yourself or just ate around them. The bread crust has a different texture and a distinct flavor from the soft part. Kids have this natural tendency to want to avoid it. Then the adults say, “Eat that crust, it’ll put hair on your chest,” as though that’s an incentive.
Some folks report being told that various other foods — vegetables, beans, onions — would cause chest hair, and others say that they were told slightly different versions, such as that eating their crusts would result in curly hair. Regardless of the details, there’s no evidence to support this, and to this day, nobody seems to know why parents said it.
You’ll Catch A Cold!
This one, too, has a sort of distant element of truth at a stretch. Our parents told us we’d “catch a cold” if we went outside with wet hair, or if we didn’t wear boots, or if we took our coats off when we got overheated playing outside, or if we rode bikes in the cold, or any number of other things. None of those is true, at least directly. The way to catch a cold is to be exposed to a cold virus. You cannot catch a cold by splashing in puddles, swimming when it’s chilly, or going to bed with wet hair.
Here’s the catch: when your body works hard to maintain sufficient warmth, it may struggle to perform other functions, including immune functions. So, if you’re making your body work harder for heat retention, then maybe you’re a little more susceptible to a virus you encounter — but that’s not the same thing as catching a cold by being cold.
Have You Ever Seen A Rabbit With Glasses?
Remember being told to eat your carrots because they’d help your eyesight? There are so many versions of this one. Some kids were told that a certain uncle or grandparent had to wear glasses because he didn’t eat his carrots as a child. Others got the joke about rabbits. Still others were just told that carrots are good for the eyes.
This one has a fantastic story behind it — according to the Smithsonian, it surfaces from WWII propaganda that was perpetuated to help defeat Nazi Germany. Whoa. The British Royal Air Force had new radar technology, and to keep it secret, they told news media that their sudden successes in the dark were the result of overindulgence in carrots, which gave their night fighter aces the ability to see in the dark.
Carrots won’t give you night vision (though their Vitamin A and beta carotene content is a positive for eye health), but they do come with a sweet history lesson.
Swimming After A Bite To Eat? No Problem
If you’ve had a bite to eat, even as much as half a cookie, you can’t go back in the water for an hour, or you’ll get cramps and drown. This was taken to such an extreme in some cases that kids had to sit and wait an hour before stepping back into their 18-inch backyard wading pool!
At the time, there was a belief that the blood in the body would be diverted to the gut to handle digestion and that legs and arms would be deprived of the necessary oxygenation to function. Strange how it never affected us while climbing trees or running after eating, right?
According to the Mayo Clinic, this is almost entirely a misconception. Some swimmers may feel cramping or discomfort when hopping back into the water with a full stomach, but there’s no actual danger. As always, if your body is giving you signals to stop an activity, it’s good to err on the side of caution.
You Won’t Have A Calculator In Your Back Pocket
As a nerdy kid attached to my TI-83, I always thought this was likely a lie. Besides, many calculators were small enough to fit in a purse.
Nonetheless, we were always told we should be skilled at mental math, not because it’s convenient to do it quickly in your head, but because that would be our only option most of the time. Standing in the grocery aisle, figuring out how much wallpaper or tile to order or doubling a recipe, we were told we would not have a calculator to pull out.
These days, almost every adult in a developed nation has a cell phone that includes a calculator — even flip telephones can have a built-in calculator. This wasn’t really a lie, but more of technology catching up to us.
Growing Out Of Acne? I Wish!
According to Arnie Nicola, one common misconception among teenagers was that acne would magically stop when they became adults. So many young adults must have been so disappointed when they woke up on their 18th birthday and took a peek in the mirror.
In reality, acne is caused by a combination of factors, including hormones, which do not look at calendars and don’t instantly stop because you had a birthday, diet, and genetics around skin type. Many sufferers will grow out of their worst symptoms as hormone production decreases, and some people may be able to reduce acne through dietary changes. Medications can also help some sufferers. However, there’s no instant aging out. It just doesn’t work that way. Sorry, teens.
The Lie Detector Lie
For generations, parents have told their kids that they have a built-in lie detector of one sort or another. Several Reddit users shared their own or parents’ versions of this lie. “I tell the kids their face turns green when they lie” or “I tell them that their eyes get red when they lie.” One user wrote, “I told my kids their tongue turns blue when they lie, and only moms can see it.”
In reality, parents can often tell when their kids are lying. They use some tactics around body language, like watching for fidgeting or avoiding eye contact, which can backfire if the kid is just anxious or nervous or if they have an undiagnosed neurodivergence that affects eye contact comfort. That info is often combined with previous information or context, for example, the teacher called or there’s chocolate visible around the mouth, but the kid insists he didn’t fail the math test or sneak a cookie.)
However, most of these tactics are fallible, and a skilled parent only uses them when they have hard proof and want to reinforce the lesson, not to lie.
Battery Shortage Or Annoying Toy?
So many kids have been told the batteries in their noisiest toys couldn’t be replaced and that the toy was just used up when the batteries died. Some parents also say they tell the kids that the TV’s battery is dead at night and has to be recharged so it will function again in the morning.
However, this one only works for a short time because kids soon find the battery cover and combine that with knowledge obtained from seeing their parents replace batteries in other objects. They also quickly realize that the TV still functions when Mom and Dad want to use it!
On the other hand, as some of their toys, such as tablets, transition to rechargeable batteries, the “has to charge first” excuse is becoming less of a lie and more of a genuine reason for a break.
Superstitions We Believed As Children
Even adults tend to carry around some superstitions. Knock on wood. Don’t walk under ladders. Watch out for black cats crossing your path. Finding a penny is good luck. Broken mirrors bring years of bad luck. Flowers can be used for wish-making (dandelions) or predicting love (daisies). Crossing fingers makes wishes come true.
Maybe we don’t believe these in the most literal sense, but they can become ingrained as habits. Who wants to tempt fate? Then, some of them do have practical origins – while walking under a ladder doesn’t invite bad luck; it can be dangerous. For kids, though, they can often be literal and terrifying. Many adults say that they didn’t realize that these various “unlucky” events weren’t to be taken too seriously until after they’d spent most of their lives in deep anxiety over them.
Ice Cream Music
It’s incredible how many adults say that they were told, as kids, that if an ice cream truck played music, they were sold out.
Looking back as an adult, it makes no sense — why would they want to use music to attract attention when they don’t have anything to sell, as opposed to when they want to call the neighborhood kids to come running? Still, as kids, we tend to believe our adults since they have more information about the world than we do, and this is a good example.
Stoplight Powers We Thought Were Real As Children
It’s always stunning when your parents can predict when the stop light will change color or claim they can cause it to change. Well, at least until you’re old enough to notice that the light going the other way turns yellow, then red, and then your light turns green. One Redditor described passing on the tradition:
“My dad used to tell me he had powers and could change the stop light from red to green when we were stopped at an intersection. Recently I started this with my kid too because he wouldn’t stop yelling to go when they light was red! It stopped him from yelling and now it’s a game to try and gather our magic powers to change the light.”
The Tooth Hurts, But We Grew Out Of These “Facts” On Our Own
If you want to start an argument, ask a group of adults whether Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are “lies.” Some adults will tell you they are lies, which affected their ability to trust, and others will argue that fantasy isn’t a lie; it’s just creating magic for their kids.
When it comes to the Tooth Fairy, though, more adults are saying that she’s a lie, even if they consider her to be justified. In some cases, they cite their own parents adding to the story—the Tooth Fairy didn’t just bring quarters to exchange for old teeth; she also did nightly inspections for brushing diligence or otherwise made regular check-ins.
Many adults, though, consider her a transitional phase that made the Santa revelation easier. For example, they describe learning that the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real when Dad said she couldn’t come until payday, which led them to make a gradual connection.