Stupid things you thought as a kid - we were all dumbasses when we were kids

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I thought my dad was full of shit as a kid. I knew he was smart, thinking that he was full of shit was mostly because he sometimes made up absurd lies mixed with facts, with quick thinking and a straight face he could answer any questions about the shit he just made up to fool many adults into believing what he said was true. Not in a "just kidding" kind of way, some people would return weeks or months later saying that they told someone what he had told them and got laughed at. His reason for doing this was that you shouldn't believe everything people say especially if it seems outlandish, at least think it through first or seek a second opinion through reading or asking someone else before accepting it as fact.
But mostly for his own amusement.

The lies had the format of someone asking something, like why do cows do that, and he would happily tell them about cow physiology, dairy psychology and their unique biology("not only do they have four stomachs"), it was all just bullshit and hilarious to listen to. I don't remember the details but his breakdown of how bread actually works was really funny and the part I really remember was that one woman stayed off bread for a year out of fear. If you are an adult and don't know about bread then god help you.

He told us kids(including friends) a lot of things and I was always vary about it unless it involved a physical task or how to do/build something. It turns out he never lied to kids, his reason for not doing that was that kids have an excuse and can't be faulted for having large gaps in their knowledge or being gullible.

tl;dr thought dad was full of shit, was actually just trolling idiots

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

My dumbass didn't like reading so I pronounced word like plague and hyperbole like "plagoo and hyperbowl"

When I'd read the condiment bottles that restaurants leave at each table as a kid, I could never pronounce "Worcestershire sauce" correctly, so I'd instead call it "woodpecker sauce."
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Somewhat similar to the story shared by @Smaug's Smokey Hole , I had a classmate through grade 8 who, in our middle school years, often got asked what professional sports team won the championship in a given year -- usually one that was before we were born. (Example: Who won the World Series in 1961?) He'd give an answer that everyone accepted and it furthered their belief he was a sports trivia nut.

Fast forward to 8th grade and he finally confided to me one day that he always made up an answer simply because he had no clue who won those various championships and everyone always believed him. Because the internet didn't exist yet, there was no easy way for our classmates to verify his answers without trying to find an encyclopedia, almanac, or other book of facts to look up the answer. It was easier for them to ask him and believe whatever he said -- blissfully unaware that any correct answer he gave was totally by chance.

 

[Lurkette]

I kept mixing up "diarrhea" and "diary".
This led to telling my mother I couldn't find my diarrhea, and later whispering to my confused father I had diary.

 

[JambledUpWords]

I tried making homemade peanut butter as a kid by mashing peanuts with a small fork in a cup with a tiny bit of water. I then thought if I waited over night, it would change into peanut butter. It did not work and 9 year old me was disappointed.

 

[UntimelyDhelmise]

When I was little I saw an episode of Arthur where they somehow meet the president in person, and with how the show treated him like a deity I got the idea that the American president was an infallible being who could do no wrong and always did what was best for the country.

...I actually kind of want to punch my kid self for thinking that now.

 

[Midlife Sperglord]

The thought that Nine Inch Nails lyrics were really fucking deep did occur to me when I was a child.

 

[Spastic Colon]

I thought Richard Nixon was cute. (Should have been institutionalized for that, tbh). My parents were hippy wannabes, so I bet they were horrified. I also felt sorry for Ford because he kept tripping all the time. I used to worry about him whenever I saw him on TV.

I have dumb stories that aren't me (I swear -- if I admitted to the Nixon thing, there is no reason to pretend these aren't me).

• One friend thought that you could use saran wrap as a condom. And she and her boyfriend actually did use it. Fortunately, no pregnancy resulted.
• Another friend thought that when boys used magazines for masturbation -- that it wasn't looking at the pictures in them, but instead she thought they rolled it up and used it that way. Imagine the papercuts ...

I'm ready for my horrifying ratings now.

 

[Jason Wynn]

This used to be my pride and joy when I was a kid, never realizing I probably looked like a complete sped riding it instead of a normal bicycle.

 

[chickenbutt]

For some reason, I was deeply afraid of the possibility that gravity would cease to function or be reversed somehow when I was little. I would get really freaked out lying on my back outside staring up into a cloudless sky, like, "if the world turned upside down right now, what would I grab onto?"

I used to mistake getting away with shit because I was cute with having the power of hypnosis. I once tried to convince the local shopkeeper to give me penny sweets in exchange for "invisible money" when I was about 4. Crafty bastard gave me invisible sweets - and I realised that adults were just humoring me, and I did not in fact have jedi-like powers of telepathic persuasion. This remains a huge source of disappointment to me.

I was also raised Catholic, and had real trouble with the idea of transubstantiation. If the bread and wine is literally the body of christ, and we're still eating him 2,000 years later... does that mean Jesus was a huge fatass??

Edit, just remembered: I believed in ghosts, and when I was 7 I taped a lil note to my upper level window facing outward. Can't recall the exact wording but it was basically that I was open to visits from friendly ghosts, but please don't sneak up on me.

I'm realizing I may have been an odd child

 

[bigoogabaloogas]

I thought I could make a dynamite stick by packing dirt in a cardboard tube, covering the holes, and then lighting up a random piece of string I found on the house. Suffice to say 8 year old me was quite disappointed back then.

 

[ES 195]

I thought Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Pokemon, Digimon etc were all drawn by the same guy and that anime was just his style.

Also thanks to the horror boom of the Ps1 era I would get an unshakable feeling that monsters or dinosaurs would randomly burst out of people's houses when walking by or into my house at night and kill me and my family. I think there's a specific monster in Parasite Eve that has a one-hit kill move where it eats the main character and it was my first encounter with humans being eaten as a concept.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I was also raised Catholic, and had real trouble with the idea of transubstantiation. If the bread and wine is literally the body of christ, and we're still eating him 2,000 years later... does that mean Jesus was a huge fatass??

I had significant trouble with the holy trinity, it's still gathering dust on a shelf in my brain, marked unsolved.
I knew the father - God, the son - Jesus, the hierarchy/lineage between them is very clear, but who the fuck is the ghost? Is he God's boss or a middle manager type of diety? Is he lower than Jesus? Is he the ghost of Jesus? The problem was that no one, including the teachers, were religious and the town was very secular so not only was there a lack of knowledge, no one really cared but it was a mandatory subject.
In a latter class on religion we deduced that we were probably jews because we weren't baptized among other things and the teacher couldn't come up with a single jew-fact ("do you eat pork?" "are you circumcised?") to debunk our newfound heritage.

So, yeah, we believed we were jews for a while because our teacher was bad.

 

[Soap Sniffer]

My Dad had tried to explain to me what insurance was, but I, uh, later discovered I didn't get it right. I ended up with the understanding it literally made a car invincible, like a forcefield. I thought this for 3 or 4 years. It seemed like the correct assessment of the concept to me and I never had reason to question it. Not like little kids think about insurance all that much.

Eventually, years later, we drove by a wreck and I said something to the effect of "He should have had better insurance." Dad's face contorted into an expression I had never seen before. This time I understood it when he was done.

Later, I became an autist.

 

[Elysian]

When I was 5 years old mom asked me to make a Christmas list for the first time, but since I was fresh outta the womb and unironically believed in Santa Claus I thought that meant I could put whatever I wanted on the list and would automatically get it. I went through the whole toy section of the Argos catalogue writing down toys that I wanted and the end result was 1.5 pages long and came to about £1,500. Needless to say, I did not get that many toys for Christmas.

 

[The Sauce Boss]

I used to think that the government actually cared about the common citizen.

On a less serious note, when I was about seven I thought that girls peed out of their butt. Standard kid fare, you say, but it was pretty fucking stupid in hindsight.

 

[Neil]

This used to be my pride and joy when I was a kid, never realizing I probably looked like a complete sped riding it instead of a normal bicycle.

View attachment 956756

What the fuck? No, where I come from, you'd be the cool one.
Every other kid looks like a fucking idiot riding their dumbass dora the explorer fuckin' barney the dinosaur ass garbage bikes, this shit is the real shit.

 

[Inflatable Julay]

I read in a Rand McNally or something of book like that about different countries that black people live in Africa, I also knew that Africa was where all the bad diseases were. So every time I saw a black person I would hold my breath until they were out of sight so I didn't get AIDS

 

[thatpirateboi]

I thought, I had magical powers.

 

[afternoon_tea]

Until I had a proper sex ed class I had no idea women had a vagina (like the actual vaginal canal). I thought you just had a vulva and pee hole. My mom had kind of explained how babies were made, but I didn't quite grok how they got out of there.

I remember hearing kids on the playground start whispering about sex stuff in 5th and 6th grade and I thought intercourse was just putting a dick between pussy lips like a hot dog.

I also thought semen was completely clear and the same texture as water and actually didn't find out this was not the case until I saw it for myself for the first time and was like "wow, I didn't expect that at all"

 

[Bluey]

I once asked my mom when I was 4 how cats go to the bathroom. She said they dig a hole. So I thought they got a shovel dug a huge hole.

When I was the same age, I use to think the world was one timezone, as in everyone shared the same time as everyone else.