What stupid things did you believe as a child?

[JustSomeAce]

So, here's something I believed as a child for example:

 

When I was really young (say first to third grade or so) I always believed that teachers weren't actual human beings but some kind of robot instead.

At the time I thought that my teachers would after school go to the teachers room, inside a big closet they had there and just shut themselves down (and probably recharge for the next day too).

Then on the following day, they would turn themselves back on once again before school starts and work like usual, before once again, on the end of the day going back to the closet and shutting down again.

 

It sounds extremely silly and stupid, but that's what I thought as a child. 😁

 

Do you have any silly or stupid things you believed/thought as child?

[Guest]

That dreams come true, that you can be whatever you want.

[thanksbutno]

that looking at a used needle by the side of the road, or seeing dry blood spots around, would give me AIDS

[everywhere and nowhere]

Maybe not that stupid, but I thought that telephone actually connected people and so I wondered that if you spit into the receiver, will your saliva fall into your interlocutor's ear?

Maybe not that stupid either, rather naive but moral: I thought that animal languages are fully semantic and grammatical - not simple messages, but full speech, with the only difference being that we humans don't understand it.

And it's not absolutely incorrect. For example, according to just a cartoon I have seen - research confirms that communication between two cats is much more complex than between a cat and a human. In human terms, cats realise that we don't understand their language and deliberately phrase the message as simple as possible. Tigers are known for quite a large range of vocalisations, including roars, moans, a tiger meow which, in my opinion, rather sounds like a moan with such a deep voice, and the famous chuff - a friendly, non-theatening sound used in short-distance communication between tigers (for example, between mother and her cubs, because cubs can chuff too) or between a tiger and a human. And people who have observed tigers say that the chuff, too, is not a uniform "lingustic unit", there are different kinds of chuffs which can be understood in a context if there is a close enough contact between the tiger and the human. Some guy who was experimenting with rewilding tigers was successful, but still the tigers never forgot humans - he was able to closely accompany a tigress, even when she had small cubs. And in this context, it was clear that the tigress was communicating something like "Please get my baby out of the water, I can't pick them all up by myself".

Awwwww, I just love tigers. Since early childhood.

[JustSomeAce]

11 minutes ago, Nowhere Girl said:

Maybe not that stupid, but I thought that telephone actually connected people and so I wondered that if you spit into the receiver, will your saliva fall into your interlocutor's ear?

Maybe not that stupid either, rather naive but moral: I thought that animal languages are fully semantic and grammatical - not simple messages, but full speech, with the only difference being that we humans don't understand it.

And it's not absolutely incorrect. For example, according to just a cartoon I have seen - research confirms that communication between two cats is much more complex than between a cat and a human. In human terms, cats realise that we don't understand their language and deliberately phrase the message as simple as possible. Tigers are known for quite a large range of vocalisations, including roars, moans, a tiger meow which, in my opinion, rather sounds like a moan with such a deep voice, and the famous chuff - a friendly, non-theatening sound used in short-distance communication between tigers (for example, between mother and her cubs, because cubs can chuff too) or between a tiger and a human. And people who have observed tigers say that the chuff, too, is not a uniform "lingustic unit", there are different kinds of chuffs which can be understood in a context if there is a close enough contact between the tiger and the human. Some guy who was experimenting with rewilding tigers was successful, but still the tigers never forgot humans - he was able to closely accompany a tigress, even when she had small cubs. And in this context, it was clear that the tigress was communicating something like "Please get my baby out of the water, I can't pick them all up by myself".

Awwwww, I just love tigers. Since early childhood.

Yeah, cats do actually have a rather complex language. I love them too 🖤

I heard that cats only meow toward humans because they try to mimic them and get that they react the best and give them attention when they vocally communicate with them.

[Beukennootje]

As a kid (like age 7 or 8 ) I thought that all the people in the world think in Dutch (I am Dutch), but that people in other countries (were forced to) speak another language when talking. I learned how to count in other languages or basic words in languages from countries we were going on holiday back then, and I was like: I also think in Dutch when I count in another language, so other people can think in Dutch and speak another language as well.

[JustSomeAce]

12 minutes ago, Beukennootje said:

As a kid (like age 7 or 8 ) I thought that all the people in the world think in Dutch (I am Dutch), but that people in other countries (were forced to) speak another language when talking. I learned how to count in other languages or basic words in languages from countries we were going on holiday back then, and I was like: I also think in Dutch when I count in another language, so other people can think in Dutch and speak another language as well.

Reminds me of something different I also thought when I was a kid:

I'm German and I thought (as stupid as it sounds) that Sweden was some place in Germany. 😂

[Beukennootje]

8 minutes ago, JustSomeAce said:

Reminds me of something different I also thought when I was a kid:

I'm German and I thought (as stupid as it sounds) that Sweden was some place in Germany. 😂

It is not me, but someone I know went as a kid for the first time to Germany and he thought "Ausfahrt" was a HUGE city, because it was quite long on the roadside signs...😂

[Guest]

Nothing here.

[Ldlelee]

I didn't understand the concept of "sleep." I would lie in bed with my eyes open and figure that was it.

 

Also, traffic lights. My mom had a green car, and my dad had a red car. I was very confused when I began to notice other-colored cars and asked my mom why they never waited for their color at the stoplight. 😂

[JustSomeAce]

11 minutes ago, Beukennootje said:

It is not me, but someone I know went as a kid for the first time to Germany and he thought "Ausfahrt" was a HUGE city, because it was quite long on the roadside signs...😂

 That's funny, but I get it, because these signs are everywhere after all. 😅

 

2 minutes ago, Leedle-Lee said:

I didn't understand the concept of "sleep." I would lie in bed with my eyes open and figure that was it.

 

Also, traffic lights. My mom had a green car, and my dad had a red car. I was very confused when I began to notice other-colored cars and asked my mom why they never waited for their color at the stoplight. 😂

 That is almost as weird as the teacher-thing I thought 😂

[JustSomeAce]

10 minutes ago, 123383 said:

That my parents cared for me; a very grave mistake but one that is hard to convince yourself of its truth.

That is very sad and I'm really sorry for you and hope you've found someone who cares for you.  

[Gloomy]

I thought people  got married every time they had a kid. So I thought my parents got married when they had me (my mom was like two months pregnant with me when she and my dad got married so that is kind of true) and that they got married again when they had my sister. One time there was a commercial for some talk show on our TV that said "This woman had been married 8 times!" so I thought she had 8 kids lol.

 

One time some girl at the daycare I went to told me she was a witch who was really like 100 years old, and I believed her and wanted her to teach me magic.

[Salmiakki]

I thought that living in a different country made you look like the people living in that country. Like for example, if a Swedish person lived in Japan for long enough, they'd start to look Japanese.

 

I thought that everyone who appears on television could see everyone who's watching it. In both live and prerecorded programs.

 

I thought that boys/men didn't have eyelashes.

[Anthracite_Impreza]

There's a quarry near us, massive open-pit thing. I thought it was a fossilised sauropod's footprint :x (slightly overzealous dino-obsessed child with dyscalculia who didn't quite understand the concept of scale)

[Karst]

I thought that New Guinea was part of the United States.

[Zagadka]

I was convinced that the wall between my bedroom and the living room had a secret room filled with dinosaur bones in it.

[SorryNotSorry]

As a kid, I thought people with blue eyes were born inside the US, and people with brown eyes were born outside the US. 
 

I thought all left handed people must be ethnically Italian.

 

I thought if you buried fish for a few weeks, it would turn into crude oil.

 

I thought if you mixed Dawn dish soap and rubbing alcohol, you’d have a kind of super soap that could clean anything.

 

I thought the mikes and speakers at restaurant drive-thrus were connected to each other by wires that ran under the pavement between the inside of the restaurant and the outdoor kiosk (it’s actually a low-powered 2-way radio).

 

I thought you had to be 21 or older to buy house paint that comes in gallon cans.

 

I thought carbonated water was made by somehow dissolving charcoal in water.

I thought tobacco companies put the tar into cigarettes by spraying superheated roofing tar onto shredded tobacco as it passed underneath on a conveyor belt on its way to the cigarette-making machines.

 

Those of us old enough to remember picture-tube TVs before bluescreen remember how the picture would roll whenever the vertical-hold adjustment slipped. I thought this was due to the TV cameras in the studio being mounted on a ferris wheel doohicky, and whenever the studio crew were feeling sadistic, they’d give the wheel of cameras a spin just to irritate those of us watching TV.

 

I thought a man and a woman wouldn’t be allowed to marry each other unless they both already had the same surname. Boy, was I ever wrong on THAT one!

 

These are nothing though, compared to the nutty things my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother tried to get me to believe.

[kenny.]

i thought that Australians hung upside down off the world like bats

[Ortac]

I used to believe that if I messed around with the phone, there would be angry operators at the phone exchange who would be able to detect what I was doing, and that they would shout at me down the phone and threaten to send the police around if I didn't stop fiddling with it. I believed that because I had cousins of a similar age who claimed that it had happened to them. 

 

Because of the way that some food products were advertised on TV, I believed that eating those particular food products would give the person eating it the ability to carry out amazing feats of super human strength. For example, there was a commercial for a brand of tinned meat balls which showed a kid eating them and then immediately picking up a chair with an adult sitting in it and placing it on the table. I was gutted that my parents refused to buy me that product because I genuinely believed that it would enable me to do that.

 

As a young kid I heard shop keepers calling women "madame", and I used to think whenever I heard it that the shop keeper and the customer knew each other, and that the woman's name actually was "madame". It was only when I remarked to my parents one day that madame was such a ridiculously common woman's name and it must get confusing that I was set straight. 

[Tree snake]

I thought that copy machines had a person inside them who's job it was to make all the copies and feed them out through the hole to you. I wanted that job so desperately I started practicing copying things.

[SorryNotSorry]

2 hours ago, kenny. said:

i thought that Australians hung upside down off the world like bats

I knew kids in elementary school who thought the same of Argentinians.

 

Incidentally, so many people had this crazy idea that the north and south geographic poles are marked with actual red and white spiral barber poles, that the research station personnel eventually had some shipped in, erected them there, and distributed photos of them to shut everybody up. You can look them up, they're on Google images.

[kenny.]

@Woodworker1968 that’s actually pretty funny! i didn’t realize that idea was so prevalent 

[AceAnimeFan]

I thought religion was something like a collection of fun fairy tales like the Brother's Grimm stories and didn't know people actually believed it was real; I thought people were pretty stupid for a while after I found out they thought it was real. I don't think I fully comprehended what religion or the concept of a god was until I was in high school, and I still don't really understand it (not for lack of trying). 

 

In elementary school I understood what reproduction was as a vague concept but didn't know how it worked so I thought that I would get pregnant by just touching a boy. This caused a lot of anxiety and I'm not sure when that misunderstanding cleared up. 

13 hours ago, Gloomy said:

One time some girl at the daycare I went to told me she was a witch who was really like 100 years old, and I believed her and wanted her to teach me magic.

^ something similar to this also happened to me, don't quite remember details though

[SorryNotSorry]

34 minutes ago, AceAnimeFan said:

I thought religion was something like a collection of fun fairy tales like the Brother's Grimm stories and didn't know people actually believed it was real; I thought people were pretty stupid for a while after I found out they thought it was real. I don't think I fully comprehended what religion or the concept of a god was until I was in high school, and I still don't really understand it (not for lack of trying). 

Oh, that's nothing. I didn't even know what a Jew was until I was around 16.

 

34 minutes ago, AceAnimeFan said:

 

In elementary school I understood what reproduction was as a vague concept but didn't know how it worked so I thought that I would get pregnant by just touching a boy.

A lot of kids probably believed girls and women urinate through their vaginas. I wasn't even sure how we guys are supposed to have sex without peeing... until a high school biology teacher explained there's a tiny sphincter muscle at some point along the male urethra that prevents unwanted golden showers.

[SorryNotSorry]

2 hours ago, kenny. said:

@Woodworker1968 that’s actually pretty funny! i didn’t realize that idea was so prevalent 

Oh yes.

 

I have no idea though why the Antarctic crew stuck a glass gazing ball atop theirs...

[AceAnimeFan]

45 minutes ago, Woodworker1968 said:

Oh, that's nothing. I didn't even know what a Jew was until I was around 16.

I didn't know there were different religions until I learned about older religions (the Greek and Roman gods, specifically) and didn't know they all had names and believed different things. I learned this a little after I learned that people actually believe in gods, before that I just thought of it as "Religion" as a singular thing that people either did or didn't think was real, like a yes or no question rather than a multiple choice question

[Gloomy]

I was one of those kids who thought the world used to be black and white since pictures and movies used to be in black and white. Sometimes I wonder if there are kids today who think life before HD TV was more blurry.

[Guest]

I used to believe almost everything people told me.

[SorryNotSorry]

I used to think turbans were made of rubber, like bicycle tire inner tubes. Bet that ought to make your head uncomfortable!