Unbelievable Childhood Memories you believed were true 😆

Mum always told me to dry under my arms properly after my bath because I would get tuberculosis if I didn't. This terrified me as tuberculosis was the big fear when I was young. To this day I always dry under my arms very thoroughly.

I have a friend who was told as a child that the very bottom tip of an ice cream cone shouldn't be eaten as it would give her TB. She is now in 70s and I was astonished to see her recently have an ice cream and throw the tip of the cone in the bin!

Pretty much all of the above except for the nun story and red curls.

We were all told as children that if we told a lie, we would get blisters on our tongue. If I occasionally got a sore tongue, I kept very quiet about it!

We were told if we sat with our backs to the fire our kidneys would melt! Never happened

Father Christmas!

My Dad told me that all the sheep in Wales had two legs shorter than the other two so they could stand on the hillsides without falling over. I believed this for many years and even told other people too.

Apart from Father Christmas, my parents only told me these old wives’ tales in order to laugh at them and tell me they weren’t true.

They didn’t deny Father Christmas, but I think I could sense he was a legend rather than a fact, except when I was very little when the thought of him scared me to pieces!.

Think I too was told most of these lies.. But why did they do it?

Visgirl. Possibly their parents had said those things, and at least a few of them could not be proved, it was a link with the past to repeat them.

Most of the above, plus eating dandelions would make you wet the bed (probably true as French is 'pisenlit'), going out with wet hair would give me a cold.

I told my children that the world used to be black and white. They believed me for a long time. We had the apple pips causing apple trees in our tummies if we swallowed them and eating crusts makes your hair curl stories. My father swore blind that he could fly and that he knew a multitude of foreign languages.

While playing with my friend, her mother gave each of us a banana , but told us not to eat the last inch as it contained polio germs. There was a bad outbreak of polio at the time. To this day, I don't eat the last bit!

I grew up on a farm in a very rural setting. In school holidays my grandmother used to put salt in the palm of my hand……so that I could shake it on a rabbit’s tail, catch him and bring home as a pet……
I now do this with my grandchildren 🤗 although I never caught a rabbit!!

Poppyjo what a delightful thread 😊

Oh this thread has made me laugh out loud. So many applied to my childhood too. One I look back on with fondness - Dad and us kids would write our Christmas wish list for Santa, then sit round the open fire in the cosy back room and send them 'up the lum' - up the chimney to reach Santa in the North Pole. I remember having a big tug of war with my Dad, because of course he wanted to read the list before it went up. He couldn't explain it of course, but I thought it should just be between me and Santa.

Oh just remember that Haggis were really wild creatures that lived alongside Tatty Bogles on the heather hillsides.

Oh yes so many of these!!! Do parents still say things like this to their children?

When it thunders, God is moving his furniture around.

Smorgasbords are birds with fur that fly over the North Sea. They are shot by cross channel ferry chefs and served in the restaurant on board at great expense.......thus spoke Mr M and believed by all our DC. DD2, a senior teacher was mortified to find out it wasn't true when accompanying a school trip abroad.

Oh, Mamissimo, that reminds me of when I told DD2 that she couldn’t go to Irish dancing classes because she wasn’t Irish (actually it was difficult to get to and we couldn’t afford the dresses and shoes). She was at art school when one of her friends mentioned having done Irish dancing and DD asked how she’d been allowed to join the class, as she wasn’t Irish…..

She forgave me.

I use to sit with my back to the coal fire to dry my long hair when I was a teenager. My mother told me not to do it as it would dry the marrow out of my bones, big mistake because I was studying anatomy and physiology and laughed at her.
Everything mentioned on this thread was told to us as kids, control by scare tactics ?
I left home on the eve of my 18th birthday and never looked back.

"Look me straight in the eye". Mum thought she could always tell when I was lying. No. It didn't work with my children either.

Don’t wash your hair if your period is on.

We laughed at all of these stories, as Daddy was a doctor and exploded all the nonsense about apple trees growing out of you etc.

We were taught not to cross roads at angle, not because it was a sin, but because jay-walking was an offence according to the Road Traffic Act. For years I believed it was illegal to cross a road except at a pedestrian crossing, although no-one actually had said this to me.

Even Daddy's medical knowledge had to give up regarding the prohibition on bathing or washing hair during a period. That tabu was rigourously observed by my mother and taught to my sister and I.