Childhood Misconceptions

[Panda]

Growing up many of us had misconceptions about the world around us. I was wondering what childhood misconceptions you had. Did you think a word meant one thing but in reality means something else? Perhaps you thought being a certain age meant that person was an adult. Maybe even where exactly babies came from! Let's share some of the childhood misconceptions we had. I hope I'm not the only one!

Wheelbarrow = Wheeled Barrel. When I was younger I thought a wheelbarrow was called a wheeled barrel. I think it's because growing up my parents, having strong Japanese accents, made it difficult to tell if they were saying "wheelbarrow" or "wheeled barrel". Add to that I knew what a barrel was and the thing looked like a half a barrel with a wheel - thus - it must be a wheeled barrel!

High School Student = Adult. This is a misconception I had when I was in Kindergarden. I remember looking out of the school bus window as we drove through the high school parking lot. There I could see, what looked like, grown ups. They drove cars, had boyfriends/girlfriends and jobs! I thought after you graduated high school you were done with school. You got married, had kids and went to your jobs. I knew if you wanted a really important job like a doctor you needed to go for some more school. Otherwise high schoolers were just a step away from being 100% grown up.

Looking back at this I can't believe I thought that! More than likely I was looking at 16 year olds thinking they were adults! I guess I'll just chalk this up to when you are 5 years old anyone who is a decade older than you [i]IS[/i] a grown up.

So, what were your childhood misconceptions?

[The13thMan]

[FONT=Century Gothic] [COLOR=DarkOrange]I used to think cats would marry dogs and have cat and dog babies. Like a man and woman. Of course the cat was the woman and the dog was the man. When i first learned the truth i was shocked. o_0

SHOCKED! O____O

That's all i can think of, later. ^J^

[/COLOR] [/FONT]

[visualkei]

Well, when I was a kid (probably up to age 12) I thought eggs, the kind you buy in the grocery store, could hatch if you kept it warm. Which I think many of you thought so, too, right?

I thought babies came from pooping. When I realized you don't poop out babies, I thought they came from the urethra, so I thought I never want to have babies. Then come age 15 or so I find out women have three openings down there, and where babies really came from. So I will consider having babies, now. But it seems like it'll be easier if we were to poop them out.

And another misconception as a kid, adults are super-humans. It's not until I become one that I realize they're so flawed.

=P. :cool:

[Retribution]

[size=1]I used to think that babies grew in a mother's stomach. When I asked my mother if this was the case, she immediately crushed that belief and told me that babies developed in the uterus. I wanted to hold onto the easy definition, but she's a stickler for accuracy, what can I say.

I also believed that (Caution: the following text is especially shocking.) [spoiler]Santa Claus came to my house on Christmas Eve, and that he ate the cookies children left him. When I thought about it more, I realized if all the kids left him a cookie, he'd have eaten a huge amount of cookies. So that Christmas Eve I left him a banana and a note saying something along the lines of "eat healthier, Santa." Haha.

Speaking of Santa Claus, I also thought that he, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and God all lived together in outer-space.[/spoiler]

I was also a fervent believer in the "Crime doesn't pay!" slogan. How mistaken I was.[/size]

[DeathKnight]

[color=crimson]I have a really good friend who is eight or so years my senior. I've known him since I was a pretty young kid.

I'm not sure how young I was at the time but he was into his teenage years. He had a pretty bad acne problem- it covered the majority of his face. I had absolutely no clue about acne or puberty or any of that jazz yet so, to his face, I asked "Did you fall in an ant pile or something?" [i]Oh snap[/i].

I think that's pretty funny now but, man, that must have really made him feel like ****.[/color]

[r2vq]

[color=#007520]I have a friend who thought the phrase used before commercials "Brought to you by..." was one word.

I grew up in a Catholic School surrounded by a Catholic community and a Catholic family. From this I divised that the whole world was divided in two groups. The majority of the population, I thought to be Christian, or Catholic. The minority of the population I considered "Publics" due to the names of the schools near mine.

[color=#ff9920][quote name='visualkei']I thought babies came from pooping.[/quote][/color]I thought babies were made when a male and a female [i]kissed[/i]. I remember seeing something on TV one day (probably about test tube babies) where they showed a couple enjoying themselves on a date at a fair. I remember telling my friends at school the next day, "You don't have to kiss to make babies anymore! I think you only have to hold hands now!"

-r2[/color]

[Pumpkin]

[quote name='Panda']Wheelbarrow = Wheeled Barrel. When I was younger I thought a wheelbarrow was called a wheeled barrel. I think it's because growing up my parents, having strong Japanese accents, made it difficult to tell if they were saying "wheelbarrow" or "wheeled barrel". Add to that I knew what a barrel was and the thing looked like a half a barrel with a wheel - thus - it must be a wheeled barrel![/quote][SIZE=1][COLOR=#333333]Aha, thats actually pretty cute! I also use to look up to highscoolers as adults as well, I suppose its because they looked so mature and older back then. Those were the days, if only I knew. Heh, being a young teenager was not fun. I love this thread.

Anyways, I never was a big fan of Santa but I did have a thing for the Easter Bunny. I use to think my mother had a secret deal with the Easter bunny or that we were related to him somehow. I have no idea how I got that, but I never seemed to figure out how my mom knew what areas the eggs were hidden in. I also remember believing when I was really young and couldn't swim well, that if I went to the deepest end of a pool that there would be goldfish on the bottom like under the ocean and that you could go 'snorkling'. Yes, I know pretty wierd. Nope, I didn't give Santa a banana, just cookies and raisins when we were out of them (in which they were chucked in the garbage, thanks Santa), although I suppose giving him slimfast instead wouldn't have hurt. [/SIZE][/COLOR]

[2010DigitalBoy]

at some time or another I thought the easter bunny, santa claus (for a long time), god (for a short time), and good people were real. I was proven wrong on all accounts.

Also, I never understood sex. One of my friends had seen a porn once and said sex involved a dude [spoiler]peeing white and the chick drinking it[/spoiler], so that's how I thought it went for a long while. I learned around 6 grade that it involed a pole going down a shaft to create babies. Becaus eI kept skipping sex ed I never learned what the privates were till 7th grade. As for positions and what went on, I really had no idea till about 6 months ago when I saw some porno... I am now afraid of sex.

[Zen]

[color=navy][size=1]

Heh. I feel kinda strange looking through out this thread, as I had a rather strange childhood. Let's see.

Well, my initial first kiss was at the age of six with a girl about two or three years older than me. She was eating peanuts when we kissed and had put one in my mouth, so for a while, everytime I thought of kissing a girl, I tasted peanuts in my mouth. Haha. I'm pretty sure my next kiss was in the 5th or 6th Grade with a German girl I had gotten close with while living in Germany.

I always had a thing for girls, ever since I was a little kid. Heck, I remember having a 'girlfriend' in first grade.There was this little Egyptian girl who the other kids picked on, so I defended her a bunch and tried to hug her. Haha. Boy I was quite the lady's man. ;)

My belief in Santa was shattered at a young age (I think about 7 or 8) when I was looking in my backyard shed one day and found a role of sticker-labels saying "To: ***** From: Santa". Boy was I shocked. I, did, however, play along with the notion of Santa Claus till about 9, because I knew I would get more outta my parents by playing along. Boy, was I a hustler as a boy. :animesmil

I never really believed in the Easter Bunny, as the entire notion to me as a child was crazy and a tad scary. The idea of a gigantic rabbit hopping around my yard was a bit strange. I did enjoy the egg hunts, though. And the one Easter where they used real eggs instead of the plastic ones sucked.

I learned about sex at a fairly early age, just from over hearing things and being an avid veiwer of the Discovery Channel as a kid. I said something about sharks mating to my parents, and so they decided it would be alright to have the talk with me. My younger brother, however, had little idea for sometime. :rolleyes:

Also, a trip to the loose sexual boundaries of Greece at the age of ten cleared up any and all questions I had of what things looked like and how it happened. Haha.

I was a bit of a smarty pants as a kid, so I didn't fall for many tall tales or white lies.[/color][/size]

[kalon]

My mother was always straight up with me about Santa and such, and I appreciated not being lied to. That's right, if you didn't already know the truth about St. Nick, [SPOILER]Santa is a 5000 year old rabbit who wears all green and screams "Where are my lucky charms?" at turkeys to make them fly away before they are shot for Thanksgiving. He has a super-intelligent team of reindeer executives who earn him a whole lot of money by putting out movies on Labor Day. He makes fireworks and puts them in the pantyhose and stockings of patriotic pyromaniacs so that firemen have tougher, more sparkly work to do.[/SPOILER] Too lazy to include more holidays.

I can think of some thing that strikes as incredibly funny, though. These aren't misconceptions per se, more cases of being naive. Debby, the girl who sat in front of me in geometry this school year (we were both freshmen) is not knowledgeable about Japan, it seems. We were talking, and I told her how the only music I listened to was Japanese rock and some J-pop. She had no idea that Japanese people had their own rock music. The look of surprise on her face ws hilarious.

Another girl in geometry, Laura, ran track. We were all talking about an upcoming track and field meeting. Laura was trying to remember one of the events they were going to compete in, and she said, "Oh yeah! We're also gonna do that thing where they throw the hibiscus!" I didn't really mean to, but I burst out laughing. Most of the class didn't know what was so funny, so Frankdogg (the world's most awesome geometry teacher and smartest incarntion of evil) had to explain that you throw a [I]discus[/I], and that a hibiscus was a flower.

Those stories might be stretching the term "misconceptions" a little, but I think they fit.

Oh yeah, I remember until about first grade I thought that the alphabet song went "Y, [I]N[/I], Z" instead of "Y [I]and[/I] Z." I had a major argument with my mom and childhood best friend about it. I mishear things all the time, even now. Like when I was watching Hell's Kitchen last night when they said plating, I heard it as bleeding. I though to myself, [I]Bleeding in a kitchen is not so very good[/I]. I act slow, but I promise I'm not, lol.

[AzureWolf]

[COLOR=maroon]Believe it or not (no pun intended), there's actually an entire website dedicated to these cute stories:

[url=http://www.iusedtobelieve.com/]I Used to Believe[/url]

Some stories are creative, some are universally common, some are just down right wtf-ish, heh.[/COLOR]

[SunfallE]

[COLOR=RoyalBlue]For some reason I had it in my mind that the buildings for grade schools were made enormous to keep kids from sneaking out. I excelled at getting into trouble when I was a kid so sneaking out was one of my favorite things to do. Anyway, I thought that all those rooms and doors had adults in them just waiting to catch you if you tried to sneak out the door and go play instead of being in class. I eventually got over it, but it wasn?t until I was much older and for some reason or another entered one of the grade school?s I had attended as a kid that I realized that it?s size was no different than any other building. It was only my small stature as a kid that made the building seem huge.

The other one was that I thought space travel and living on the moon was going to happen by the time I was a teen. I was determined to be one of the first kids to attend High School while living on the moon. That one was a killer to find out as I had been looking forward to living on the moon. [/COLOR]

[conpiracymonki]

[size=1]
Off the top of my head, some of the general-er ones:
- I used to think I could dig to China. Lord knows I tried :( I only used to do it in this one specific spot though, beside the hedge of my old front yard. As if digging anywhere else would take me to the wrong country lol.
- I used to think I could make robots out of kitchen roll, toilet roll and allsorts. I blame that one on all the cheap films we used to watch my cousin's house. His dad owned the local video shop and his house and mine had one road separating them so I'd be at his house near enough everyday after school watching films and stuff until like 1-3am. Man, all those weird films.. we were like test subjects O_O
[spoiler]On a related note: does anyone know the name of some sort of old flick where there's this robot with traffic lights set into his chest or something? >_>[/spoiler]
- Whenever I used to find some sort of random object, I'd always treat it as though it was magical. Like onetime I found this key in my garden shed. One of the heavy grey ones.. and I used to frequently wash it with all sorts of junk, hoping it'd one day turn golden and lead me to something. Never happened =/

Um, I'll add more as I remember lol[/size]

[Panda]

Great story guys. I have another one to add that was a misconception my husband John had as a kid.

One day while he, his brother and mother were standing in their living room in front of their front window a car drove up and some people got out. John's mom tells the boys: "Get down and don't make a sound!!" Since she had such urgency in her voice they did what she said. In a whispered voice John asked her who it was. She answered: Jehovah's Witnesses!

So as they crouched under the window John was thinking they were like the mafia or something and would bust into the house with guns a-blazin'. I'm sure you can all imagine what a little boy's imagination could take a situation like that.

[2010DigitalBoy]

i remember when I was very small learning the alphabet. I thought elemenowpee was one letter.

Also when I was little I always ate uncooked hot dogs. One day i heard my grandma say 'he's gunna get worms!' and I was terrified I'd have worms living in me. (thats not relly a misconception but it was damn funny XD)

I never knew what went on in other countries. I thouhgt they were all like us XD

[Aaryanna]

[COLOR=SeaGreen]When I first started taking books home from the library at school, I didn?t fully understand what the word fiction meant. I was only seven so I suppose that?s to be expected. But for some reason I thought the books that weren?t picture books were in fact stories of things other people had seen. It didn?t take too long for me to realize that like the books that were mostly pictures they weren?t real. But for a short time I really believed it was possible to end up in other worlds by accident. [/COLOR]

[Gavin]

[SIZE=1]Interesting, most interesting.

Oh boy do I have a few misconceptions from childhood I'm not proud of, or rather that is to say I think back on them now and am damn glad I never said them to anyone.

First one up, back when I was about seven or eight, I thought that pads for menstruation were used by women as a preventative from wetting themselves through a lack of bladder control. My little sister had bed-wetting problems at the time, so I kind of assumed this was something all women had, I can't imagine I actually thought that at one stage but it's true.

Second one, when I watched the second Brady Bunch movie, or was it the first ? Anyway I recall the eldest of the girls mentioning the phrase [I]Menage a Troi[/I], and having started studying French in school, I think I'd have been about twelve at the time, I resolved to translate this unknown phrase. Eventually all I could come up with was Eat at Three which didn't sound right at all, I don't know what prevented me, a small miracle surely, but I was going to ask my French teacher one day and decided not to. Not too long after that I learned what it meant and was eternally grateful for not doing so.

That's it really.[/SIZE]

[Raiyuu]

[quote name='Tical][font=verdana']I thought elemenowpee was one letter.[/font][/quote][font=trebuchet ms]I was even cuter than you. I pronounced those letters "lemon in a pea" when I first learned the alphabet.

I was also convinced for a fair while that I could see through my eyelids, but [i]only at night.[/i] Why? Because at night, I could see the same thing whether my eyes were open or closed. Being a child, it didn't occur to me that [i]darkness[/i] looks the same whatever state your eyes are in...[/font]

[Ikillion]

[COLOR=#af992f][SIZE=1][FONT=Comic Sans MS]Hmm the only real misconception I can really remember is...[spoiler]that when I was young, I though that once a child had grown old enough to stop the need for breast feeding, that the breasts actually fell off and like went away[/spoiler]

I think another one was that I though that Santa was a burgler trying to plant "presents" that really spy on you so one night I hid behind a couch near the christmas tree and when I though I saw him I jumped out an attacked her. Yet I later found out that it was only my mom and I gave her a swollen and bloody lip.

Although I am sure there are many more I just can't remember them right now. I try to delete those memories out of my mind for obvious reasons.[/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR]

[kalon]

I remembered something that evolved into a semi-phobia. When I was about five, my mom hummed the Jaws theme while swimming with me and I freaked out. She had no idea I even knew what Jaws was! From then on (not exactly sure how I transferred this went from pool to tub), if I was in the bath for a long time and the water became that unclear white from when the soap disappates, I thought the Jaws shark was going to come up through my bathtub since I could not see into the water.

Even now I am afraid of deep water that I cannot see into, and until about age eleven I was too afraid to swim any further than where my toes could touch.

[Kanariya]

[size=1][font=georgia]The one that comes right off my head is when I was young (about three to five years old), my babysitter would always sing that 'Jesus loves me yes I know' song. And she said Jesus was always with me, too. I thought she meant Jesus was in me, like, in my body when she said 'with me' for whatever reason. So for a period of time I thought he lived in my bellybutton (since I have an 'innie', the little skin inside proved to me to be Jesus' head).

Also, I always got the impression that a condom was also made of cotton. I didn't know how that would work at the time, so I dismissed it thinking 'it's got special powers of some sort or something'. I learned the truth around eleven years old. Pathetic. -_-[/size][/font]

[Delta]

[COLOR=#35425e]I honestly once thought that, with the exception of midgets, humans never stop growing. I was really afraid that when I turn 30, I'll be fifteen feet tall. I was 8 then, and was 4 feet tall so the working equation I used was height=age/2. yeah, I was a messed-up math kid. I thought I'll be taller than my parents who, after putting much thought into the subject, I realized were perfect counterproofs to my odd theory.[/COLOR]

[nezzyjean]

[quote name='Tical']i remember when I was very small learning the alphabet. I thought elemenowpee was one letter. [/quote]

i definitely thought that too...XD

I always thought that when it was your birthday, you automatically got to advance to the next grade at school. So, the day after my 6th birthday, i was screaming and crying as my mom dragged me to the same classroom as i had been in for the last couple of months. I was also under the misconseption that if i didn't like somebody's name, i could just change it myself, so people named fred became thread and so on.

ohp, and there was a crocodile that lived under my bed so i refused to climb into it without using a long wooden board as a ramp to avoid getting eaten.

[AomiArmster]

I am looking back now.. really really trying to find something and.. I'm not catching anything..
then again.. it probably had to do with where i lived.. ( we were more concerned about getting home without stepping on a landmine)

i mean.. my brother had always told me things [B]as they were [/B] so and i wasn't lead to believe something for the sake that i was just a kid

i was taught [B]how[/B] to think not what to think.

well now that i really think of it.. i just had misconceptions of trust... backstabbing friends, things like that
this is an interesting topic... its makin me think about something i haven't really thought of
*bangs head against desk*

[Dhampir]

First, I thought that I was schizophrenic because I could talk to myself in my head

Also, I thought that I had special powers because... well... you know how if you are looking at something and one eye is blocked somehow, you can see through it because your other eye sees past it, so it seems like you are seeing through it? Yeah, I thought I had x-ray vision.

Yeah, thats all I got, lol...