Why adults choose to lie or hide things from children is something I'll never understand.
Though explicit details and facts aren't always necessary, the basics are reasonable.
There are fun lies, like Santa and the Easter Bunny, but then there are lies that are just ridiculous.
And it's all for the sole purpose of manipulation.
I was fed a few doozies back in my day.
I suppose it all helped to grow my wild, boundless imagination!
Redditor SluttySmooty wanted to hear about the lies our parents told us, so they asked:
"What's the biggest lie an adult made you believe when you were a kid?"
Come Home
"My various pets ran away 🤣. They definitely died."
- gothprincessrae
"After my pet parrot got sick, my mom told me she took it back to the store, cause they knew how to take better care of it.'
"After a month, she told me it got better, but had made a nest in the meantime, and had laid eggs. So of course we couldn't take it away from its family. And she bought me a new one."
"We went to visit 'it' a few times! (I mean all parrots looked the same...)"
- DarthTomatoo
High Five See Ya GIF by Dr. K's Exotic Animal ERGiphy
De Ja Vue
"My mom knew I was telling my dad everything she was saying (I was like 11 and lived with my dad) and she told me she got a new job at a local strip club called De Ja Vue. She didn't tell me it was a strip club, but said she was working at De Ja Vue. I went home and told him and he got soooo pissed."
"She just told me that to piss him off for being nosey lol."
- Azakhitt
To the Left
"My grandma used to drive me out to a lake and let me dig for rocks. I often found beautiful polished stones of every different color. Amethyst, turquoise, obsidian, etc."
"At my cousin’s wedding, when I was about 28 years old, he mentioned, 'All those times grandma would buy rocks from the hobby store and bury them for us… 'I instantly remembered grandma making comments like, 'Try digging a little more to the left.'"
- TopicHefty593
Lie Marks
"When you lie, a big black 'L' would appear on your forehead. I believed it so much that if I knew I had to lie to get out of a situation, I’d put on a hat. Nothing like a dead giveaway."
- Cats-And-Brews
"My stepmother told me that the little white dots you get in the middle of your fingernails meant you had told a lie. She was cutting my nails at the time and saw one so she figured out a way to get me to tell her some dirt."
- keinmaurer
"For me and my sister, it was that hooks would appear in our eyes. We eventually tested it and figured out it was a lie told to us, so we learned to lie by avoiding eye contact for smaller things, but if there was a lie we really really wanted to hide, we knew to look at them straight in the face. Eventually our parents caught on that we knew it wasn't true."
- themagicfroggie
BOOM
"I was scared of thunderstorms, and in the Tampa Bay Area of Florida, they happen A LOT. So when I was little, my dad told me that the thunder was angels in heaven playing bowling and the really big thunders were them getting a strike. It actually helped a lot. I’d start to get excited and clap for the angels, and when a big loud boom came we’d yell strike together and laugh. My dad was brilliant. I still think of that when storms come."
- Bird_Watcher1234
In the Eyes
"My mother once said that pets can read minds, so I shouldn’t even think about swear words. My cat looked at me with his big charming eyes and I believed."
- TerryOutsider
"That's funny because of all the animals, I expect that cats would be one of the worst for incessant swearing."
- vivec7
Bored Cat GIFGiphy
Close to the Sun
"My mom has a giant red, scattered birthmark on and around her elbow area. When I was 5 or so, I asked her about it and she said, and I specifically remember her saying this, no matter how hard she denies it, that she got it while in a hot air balloon and went too close to the sun."
"And 5 year old me believed her for the longest time. Other than that, my parents have always been straight up with us kids."
- mdubelite
It's Magic!!
"We had a '62 Chevy station wagon with an automatic rear window. They were new to us. So we asked Dad how it worked."
"Instead of saying 'There's a button' or 'It's magic' he told us elves lived in the window well and rolled it up and down."
"We were quite concerned about their welfare, so we poured milk and jam down the window slot to feed them. It was high summer. After 3 days, the car stank to high heaven. Dad was furious with us and there were lots of tears and yelling."
- Liv-Julia
Uncle Ralph
"During a rare south Georgia Christmas snow, my uncle dressed as Santa, borrowed or temporarily stole someone's horse, hitched the horse to a tobacco sled, and visited all of us country children in the neighborhood. I believed it. He was a mess. And awesome.
"Due to some true horse-trading (something about a loan Uncle Ralph made to a friend who later couldn't repay,) he wound up with the collateral sitting out in the cleared area around the barns: literally the Saturn V launch structure. I had an awful lot of fun climbing around on bolts the size of a small bedroom and whatever. And then we'd watch the $1.98 Beauty Pageant after supper, because we both enjoyed the ridiculous, I guess."
'Life on the farm could absolutely be tedious, but it didn't have to be boring."
- Flashy_Watercress398
Propaganda
"I was a very picky eater as a kid with very thick glasses, so my Dad told me eating all my carrots would help improve my night vision which sucked. I didn't realize it was just WWII propaganda and legit thought the vitamins in carrots would somehow improve my vision and ate them all the time."
"I've often wondered if my history buff Dad knew it was propaganda and repeated it just to get me to eat my veggies, or if he'd been told the same by his parents, never questioned it, and was repeating it thinking it was fact."
- Scribe625
When she was 10...
"If you ask my now adult daughter, it was something I said to her when she was around 10 years old..."
"As we were driving along one day, we passed a local Lutheran complex that had a church, a school, and a graveyard. I casually said to her (as a dad joke), 'Do you see all those tombstones over there next to that school? Those are the graves of all the children who flunked their tests,' and just kept driving. I thought it was funny and never thought another thing about it again."
"Years later we passed by and that comment came up again, and my now adult daughter exclaimed, 'I believed you!'"
"Had I known then what I know now, I'd have kept my mouth shut."
- Sensitive_Hat_9871
Meow...
"That my sweet uncle was unmarried and single because he was allergic to cats, and all the women he dated had cats. He is gay, figured it out as a teen."
- Spookymama12
Fab 5 Netflix GIF by Queer EyeGiphy
The Middle
"That they loved me."
"I wasn’t abused, or neglected, or anything like that. I am the middle of three boys, and it was incredibly obvious that my older brother was my mother’s favorite, and my younger brother was my father’s. I was just there. Thirty-something years later, and it still hurts. I have never had a normal relationship with another person, and don’t think I ever will be able. I have no idea what healthy relationship dynamics are, and every time I’m involved with someone, I always manage to destroy the relationship."
- insomniaczombiex
A Piece of Paper
"Getting a degree was important, but the type didn't really matter. Just get your piece of paper, and you'll be guaranteed a good job. I'm lucky to have a degree, but man I wish I'd picked a different major and worked harder at it. Very lucky to have the life and job I do, but the degree wasn't really all that necessary to get the things I have now."
- ausyliam
Tiny Foreign Objects
"I'm not sure if my mom intended for me to believe this, but I truly thought that if I got a splinter, and I didn't let an adult pick it out of me (which hurt), it would always become infected 100% of the time and I'd have to get the limb amputated (she knew a lady who lost a finger this way, and told me about it when I was little)."
"I was a full-grown adult when I learned that in some cases, the body just absorbs and/or calcifies tiny foreign objects sometimes and they just hang around inside forever causing no harm."
- RoseyDove323
Rough Neck
"That my neck was always dirty. In my country, children wear uniforms from kindergarten to high school. All those years I'd wear a collar blouse, and being exposed to the sun daily, I got a permanent tan from my face to my neck at the collar and the V where the button stops. "
"For years she told me to scrub my neck because I wasn't showering properly and my neck was always dirty. It was just a permanent tan from the same style clothes exposed to the sun for 15+ years."
- iriefantasies
Getting Ready Daffy Duck GIF by Looney TunesGiphy
Well, that is a whole lot of nonsense.
Why can't adults just lead with the truth?
Kids can handle the truth!!
If someone had told me that my pets just ran away, I'd never stop looking for them.
That's cruel.
I will admit that a few of these are creative, though.
What lies have adults told you?
@madeley.bsky.social
@sirDukeDevin/X
