Telling kids certain lies has become a cultural staple for parents across the globe. From a few notable holiday figures to tiny lies that’ll keep kids occupied, it’s not really frowned upon, but it can get pretty silly .
Someone asked people to share the “dumbest” lies they believed when they were kids, and people were happy to reveal their childhood gullibility.
Covert operations.

“My parents convinced us that the person knocking on our door on weekend nights when we were asleep was our uncle Shiloh stopping to say hello. We don’t have an uncle Shiloh. It was the pizza guy.”
If only.

“My older brother told me that if you put your Pokémon cards in the microwave then they become real. I started a fire doing this and ruined cards that would now be worth a lot of money.”
A little too far.

“My dad told me that the reason why police officers spend so much time at donut shops is because the shop owners actually need them there to shoot the holes in the pastries to provide them with the classic donut shape. I found out this was a lie when my dad caught me trying to get behind the counter at Dunkin Donuts one time because I ‘wanted to see the shooting’.”
Making yourself feel better.

“I once thought academic scholarships were only given to dumb students so that some of them could still attend college. I even told my older brother that he was so stupid, he had to get scholarships to go to college. He went to the Ivy League.”
Strange transformations.

“You know how Barbie feet are on tippy toes so they are shaped to fit into a high heel shoe? Well when I was a kid, I thought that when girls grew up into women that their feet would be shaped like that. Despite the fact that I lived in a house with 4 grown women, none of whom had Barbie feet.”
Free pets!

“As a kid my whole extended family would go camping and my great grandfather would bring a big ass salt shaker for every kid. When we arrived he would pass them out to each of us and tell us ‘If you get salt on a squirrel’s tail it throws off the squirrels balance and he can’t climb the trees anymore, that’s how you can catch one and keep it for a pet’ cue all of us running around chasing squirrels with salt shakers trying to catch one of the little [expletive] for hours while the adults got to sit around drinking uninterrupted. Never got my pet squirrel.”
Not worth the risk.

“My sister told me that if you count all the stones of Stonehenge you will die. I still don’t know how many stones there are in Stonehenge.”
Lost and found.

“Lost my stuffed animal (a white dog) in the airport in Miami when I was 5. It was my favorite and I was really sad about it. A few weeks later my mom presented me with a brown dog that otherwise looked exactly like the white one I’d lost. She said the workers at the airport had found it and mailed it to us, but he got a tan because he was in Florida.”
Better safe than sorry.

“The button on your armrest on airplanes is the eject button. I found out it reclines your seat embarrassingly late.”
Some pricy music.

“When I was a kid my dad told me it cost 25 cents to change the radio station to keep me from [expletive] with the radio in his car. I believed that until I was 14.”
Two steps back.

“My mom told me while I was helping mix some batter or something, that if I changed from mixing clockwise to counterclockwise the ingredients would unmixed. I believed this for way too long and still only mix clockwise.”
Get rich quick.

“When I was a child, I got upset after a button came off of my shirt. My mother told me not to worry and that if I placed the button under a rock in the yard, the button fairy would replace it with a quarter. I believed it, and to my mother’s dismay, she discovered I had pulled the buttons off of every shirt in my closet. To this day, 40 years later, shirt buttons can still be found under random rocks in my parents’ backyard.”
Tippity tap.

“My older brother pranked me once. I had watched a kids’ TV show […] that featured a guest star who was a tap dancer. My brother convinced me that tap dancers made their tapping sounds — not with their feet — but with their mouths. I spent the next several weeks trying to tap dance with my mouth noises before my mom made me quit.”
Making wishes.

“My older brother told me that if I wrote down a wish on a kite and flew it up high enough – the ink on the kite would disappear and my wish would come true. I spend hours trying to make this happen.”
Everybody gets one.

“That everybody gets a house once they hit 18 or has a kid, whichever happens first. It wasn’t a lie that I was told, just something I believed was true, but nobody tried to correct me.”
A slow blinding.

“That if you sit too close to the TV or computer screen you’ll go blind. I was told that during the summer of 5th grade, then got glasses in 6th grade. All I heard was a ‘told you…’ as I tried on my first pair of glasses and was told that my sister (1 yr younger) won’t need glasses because she listened. She got her glasses less than a year later.”
A very hungry car!

“Sometimes when we asked for McDonald’s my dad would say no but turn in anyway and say the car was doing it by itself. I believed him every time and thought the car was just my homie.”
A bizarre spectator.

“I thought behind the walls of a cinema there was a resting white shark looking at us. I don’t neither know nor remember why I believed that, but always watched the movies a little scared in case the walls would break and the shark eat all of us.”
Permanent mark.

“The teachers in my school told us if you pull the fire alarm, ink shoots out on your hands that doesn’t wash off for a few days so they know who pulled it. I was 26 when I found out it’s all a lie.”
Oops!

“My mom told me my birthmark was a coffee stain from when she accidentally spilled coffee on me as a baby. I believed it until I was like 11.”

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