When I was a kid I believed....

I thought a "round of applause" was called a "round of the claws," which sort of makes sense. You clap your hands together so your claws would touch if you had them.

Despite not being raised in a religious household, I believed that when a man and a woman got married that God made the woman pregnant, so you can understand my confusion when an unmarried neighbor girl got pregnant. That is when I discovered the concept of the fallibility of God.

Of course I eventually learned how women got pregnant, but my belief in the fallibility of any God has remained.

When I realized my attract to my own sex, I thought I must be attracted to both sexes since I had always been told I would fall in love with a girl someday, get married and have children. While I liked girls, I eventually realized that they didn't give me boners the way guys did. I hadn't heard of homosexuals, it was the late1950's, so I thought I might be the only person who had these type of feelings. I thought about telling my parents about it, but I didn't figure they would believe me, so I just kept quiet about it.

From watching movies on TV, I thought drowning in quicksand was as common as a fender bender.

Hahahah R3, me too!!! I was convinced I would meet my demise by mistakenly walking into a patch of quicksand (in suburban Ohio).

In WWI, they would shell a field heavily before sending men marching across it. If there had been rain, the shelling would create deep layers of mud, and sometimes the men would drown In the mud when marching across it.

There was an early-morning PSA that ran daily on WGN when I was up at 6 am watching cartoons as a young child. It terrified me as they would menacingly intone that "Aliens must register yearly at the Customs and Immigration Office."

I sincerly thought that extra-terrestrials existed and had to register with the government.

That they made milk from ice cream... or that it would be a good idea if they did.

...that the area outside the school with the swings and monkey bars was called the play-go-round.

I too was worried about quicksand.

I also believed that you could carve a hole in the floor if you paced back and forth enough, (I think that idea came from the Flintstones).

Back to my thoughts on crime as a child, I thought that the bad guys dressed in all black with Zorro type masks over their eyes, said, "stick 'em up" and carried burlap sacs with dollar signs on them (too much Bugs Bunny).

When you were a kid you believed you were middle class 😂

No, R10, I knew I was middle class since my mom drained pasta.

I thought there was a good chance that heterosexual sex was a myth and it never actually happened. I am serious.

R11, don't you love the meltdown by the low rent narcissists who didn't realize they come from trish trash?

Front row seats are dangerous though

I thought the "Fine for littering" sign meant that specific area was "fine" for littering.

I also thought a serial killer was a "cereal killer" and someone was making the rounds poisoning cereals subsequently killing people.

R14 WW

I thought the guerrilla warfare I heard being talked about on the news was actual gorillas with guns traipsing through the jungle.

When I was five we got a kitten and I loved that kitten so much. I was outside holding it and a bitch neighbor got me and the kitten wet with the garden hose. We took it inside and dried it off. The next day it was GONE and my cunt oldest sister told me it had died. To this day I don't know what my family did with that cat. Since I knew cats were afraid of water I thought the water had killed it. I remember like it was yesterday seeing a commercial around that time of kids giving a cat a bath and I fucking lost it because I just knew that the kitten on TV was going to die.

I seemed to have been taught that all snakes were venomous and dangerous. I later learned that there are no venomous snakes in my part of the state. I'm very deeply ashamed, that I killed so many snakes when I was a young guy. I'm an animal lover, and animal deaths are horrible to me.

[quote]I also thought a serial killer was a "cereal killer" and someone was making the rounds poisoning cereals subsequently killing people.

OMG me too!

Also believed in the ubiquity of quicksand.

Thought dogs were as smart as humans and could talk if they wanted but chose not to. I imagined that they knew the answers to a lot of things, but didn't share them because their wisdom was to make you figure things out on your own.

I swear, my boyfriend's aunt once knew someone whose son had drowned in quicksand in South America. I know no further details.

It happens.

I thought when a girl's breasts grew her nipples fell off so her breasts looked like a Barbie doll. The first time I saw a picture of a naked woman, with full breasts and intact nipples, I felt lightheaded and nauseated. Definitely not turned on.

President Gerald Ford built by parents' car. The Great Lakes were ice on the top of the map of the United States.

That someday everyone I had ever known would gather to give me a huge party.

... when I was a kid I thought cum was greenish in color. I don't know why, I hadn't started cumming myself.

I'm English - I thought this was a picture of God:-

I worried that if I chewed on the holy communion wafer (“the body of Christ”), I’d get in trouble with the nuns and/or God, so I sat in the pew for what felt like eternity, waiting for it to very slowly dissolve in my mouth.

For the complete sensation of that rich, chocolaty flavour!

If a woman got pregnant that proved she had had sex. I had no idea most married couples have sex regularly. Then again, I was in college before I realized what was in an X-rated movie. My older sister thought French kissing was spreading germs.

I did not understand the concept of gay or lesbian sex either. Those were forbidden words in my ultra-Conservative household. TV and movies were also severely restricted.

I thought oral sex meant you would talked about sex.

Whenever I saw the Watch for Pedestrians signs, I did not think it was fair that my religion (Catholic) didn't have a sign for safety too. When I was 8, I heard my sister tell her friend she should have known she would get pregnant since she slept with a boy. I was terrified for years that if my brother and I even fell asleep in the same room I could get pregnant. I learned I would have to kiss a boy in front of everyone when I got married at that same time. I decided I would only marry my brother because I wouldn't be embarrassed to kiss him on the cheek since I knew him.

I thought women got pregnant from kissing. I thought all women on soap operas had to be on the pill so they didnt get pregnant. I thought they had to be very careful because how could they be sure their husband was really the father of any child born while they were on the show

Very confused by reports of gorillas / guerrillas fghting in Central America throughout the '70's.

When I was in bed late at night and heard a strange noise that I thought might be the sound of someone breaking in, I would hold my breath and lay very still, thinking that the intruder wouldn't kill me if he thought I was already dead.

[quote]and lay very still

Oh, dear.

R34 again, really confused. Should I "oh, dear" my first post (would lay) or my attempted correction (would lie)? Please help, Grammar Trolls!

I thought the stars were a window shade with holes in it. My brother and I thought holidays were hollerdays so we went outside and hollered.

I thought that whenever you went to the bank they [italic]had[/italic] to give you money. And there was no limit on how much you could ask for.

After watching a World War One documentary which had been projected at the wrong speed, I asked my dad when it was that people began to walk more slowly.

... I didn't know if nuns were boys or girls. Also I thought they were bald and had no hair.

I thought the world existed in black and white until around the 60s. That's when TV shows and photographs started to show color. I think I was around 10 when I asked my dad what the world was like without color. I remember the look of shock on his face that I thought that for so long.

[quote]That robbers all dressed like old school cat burglars.

I bet you were the kind of kid that got a medal even if their time lost. Was it fun riding the little school bus?

You were all adorable children! Thanks for the posts!

I thought that as long as my parents had checks left in their checkbook, that meant that they had plenty of money. "But mom, you can just write a check!"

I grew up watching masterpiece theatre on PBS. Poirot especially.

When I was 8/9 I truly was afraid that a 1920s heiress was going to sneak out of my closet and murder me by some extravagant means in my sleep. A single silk thread lowered from above onto my lip, along which the murderess would slowly pour a few drops of poison. Getting stabbed by an art deco letter opener. Being shot (most likely). Having my nighttime glass of water poisoned.

I was a really popular kid.

I thought that they turned off Niagara Falls at night.

My sister thought euthanasia was the Peace Corps.

Where there was water; there were sharks! Lakes, large puddles, pools & bathtubs. I just knew they were always lurking below the surface.

That, or piranha, R48.

i thought the people at "the bank" -- not realizing that the bank my parents went to was one of millions -- were the ones who printed the money. I also thought the bank gave money to everyone who asked for it.

When this “No Littering” sign was introduced along interstate highways I thought that the emblem meant “No Embryos”.

All babies were born with a penis. If a baby had long hair, the doctors knew it was a girl and would remove the penis.

A human embryo:

I thought females had the same equipment down there as males do. I also thought that balls were for storing urine.

I thought it was "public hair" which made sense to me because it helped hide your junk if you happened to be out and about naked.

At the end of "The FBI," they would show a mugshot of one of the FBI's real Most Wanted criminals, and I would spend the week scanning the faces of every adult man I saw, convinced he might be hiding out in our boring suburban neighborhood.

I also believed all dogs were male and all cats were female (a common childhood misconception, I found out later).

And I believed there was an age where everyone started to smoke, that it was a part of adult development.

[quote] I also thought the bank gave money to everyone who asked for it.

And so they should in a perfect world.

I also thought that during the Clinton AG hearings that whomever it was who hired the illegal for a nanny (Baird or Wood), actually hired an alien.

I thought when someone holds up the peace sign (2 fingers) like ol Nixon did, it meant "Playboy".

I thought “no drinking and driving” meant NO drinking while you were driving of any kind! I remember one time pleading with my father to leave his cup of water at home. What if someone saw him drinking and we got pulled over?!

The Salvation Army was were everyone had to take their old clothes to be salvaged. When somebody said "ends meet", I thought they were making "endsmeat" ... and it must be similar to a meat pie. World War II started because of Pearl Harbor, and the entire world like the USA so well, that it went to war for us. There we two states called Washington. Washington D.C. didn't became to the capital until after the Civil War, to show the Southerns that we Northerners weren't upset about them rebelling. That I was going to die in a nuclear war.

This topic was trending on Twitter recently.

I believed there was only copy of the Bible in the world. I got taught something about the Bible being a very important book, and I took it extremely literally. I remember being taken to church when I was five years old or so and being surprised to find copies in the pews.

That the sun turned into the moon at night

I used to believe that singers on the radio were singing live down at the radio station.

I also thought that stores with "Open 24 Hours" signs meant they were only going to stay open for 24 hours and then they had to shut down.

I grew up in a very isolated farm in the middle of Saskatchewan, and when I heard the term, 'elevator music', I could not figure out why they would play music in a grain elevator. I had never been exposed to what the British call a 'lift'

When I was six and my cousin was eight, he told me a blow job was when "a lady blows on your penis" (like blowing out a birthday candle).

I was amazed. "And that feels good?" He told me it was great.

That "fl ounces" meant floyd ounces, not bothering to find out what "floyd" was or meant.

My dad had a workshop in the basement full of tools, etc. I loved to go down there and mess around playing with hammers and saws. Eventually he put a sticker on the door saying “No Minors”. I kept on playing in the workshop after I saw that sticker because I didn’t think it applied to me. I thought he was only talking about people that Mined coal or gemstones.

I thought when you held up two fingers in the air it meant "Playboy". Instead it means "peace".

I thought Hail Mary was full of grapes.

I thought that if a woman went to a hospital for any reason she would come home with a new baby.

gosh, r71, you were stupid.

That a private school was a school all to oneself

Commercial breaks when the actors to use the bathroom.

As a child it was drilled into my head that you could not go into the water immediately after eating. So I was real confused the time my mother told me I had to take a bath right after dinner. I thought I would drown.

I somehow got the saying ‘naked as jay bird’ confusesd and associated with jaywalking. So, for awhile anyway, whenever I heard about someone jaywalking, I assumed they were naked in public.

[quote]gosh, [R71], you were stupid.

R72 it must be a great comfort to find other individuals with similar mental abilities to yours.

To have a baby , you had to screw once-a-month for nine months.

I asked a school friend's Mum why we weren't allowed in the "other part" of the house. I wasn't aware that some people lived in 'semi-detached' houses. I also thought blocks of flats were hotels.

I thought the same thing R69!

I thought all Americans were black people with big afros

When I was small I watched a movie - I think it was National Velvet - when there was a reference made to minors not being allowed to participate in some equine event. I wondered why they were so prejudiced against miners.

I thought that cumulus clouds were the floor of heaven and that the dead sat on top of them and looked down on us mortals. Many years later I saw a painting by Nicholas Poussin and the Roman gods and goddesses were perched on top of the clouds just as I had imagined as a child.

I thought when a woman was raped it meant the man just ripped her clothes off.

R75 I asked my mother if fish waited a half-hour after eating to swim again. She said "no, they're fish."

I thought that you could reach the moon if you found s string that was long enough to reach it.!Then you just climbed up the string

My parents confirmed that eggs were chicken babies so I believed my brother when he told me sliced pickles were frog babies.

I thought there was a pedal for forward and a separate pedal for backward in the car. I thought a cross dresser was someone who decorated crucifix

a friend in third grade told me babies came out a woman's bum and had shit all over them

When I was around 5 or 6, I left a glass of water out in my bedroom. I had just heard about evaporation and the water cycle from somewhere. I accidentally left it there over night and was horrified that some of it might have evaporated into my room. I thought evaporated water would somehow turn the air to poison. But I survived.

I believed homosexuality was a choice because the Christians told me it was

I thought elvis and Marilyn Monroe were married

I remember being in church and assumed that the priest speaking over the speaker system must be God. After all, we were in church and I couldn't actually see who was speaking, so it must have been him. He sounded so loud and authoritarian.

I thought teachers lived at school and was surprised that they had a life away from their job. my neighbour was a bank manager, I thought he took all the money from the bank home with him and that he owned it

I thought that people who worked at ToysRUs lived there and were there overnight after the store closed. I though it would be so great to be able to work there because I would be able to play with any toy in the entire store anytime I wanted.

When I was a very small child I thought that when we went into the elevator at a department store, someone quickly re-arranged the whole store while the doors were closed (like a set change at the theater) and when the doors opened we were still on the same floor but all the stuff had been replaced and things were redecorated.

At night, with a streetlight shining through it, the window shade in my room (the old pull down kind on rollers with a tassel) would always crinkle into the shape of Dick Tracy's profile. I was only 5 but I distinctly remember feeling protected and safe because of it. Now I realize it probably wasn't real but I could always find his hat, forehead, nose, and chin.

I thought cars drove up and down the cables on suspension bridges. Even though I had crossed such bridges normally.

Same for me R3 and R4 and I grew up in Brooklyn.

When I was a child I was convinced that it you were not in bed and asleep when Santa visited you would not get presents. One Christmas Eve my parents and I got stuck behind a snow plow after visiting my older brother in the country and arrived home after midnight. I was convinced that I'd wake up to no presents and was pleasantly surprised to find that my fears were unfounded. Christmas Eve was always magical to me - the very atmosphere seemed to be charged with excitement. It helped that we lived in a place that was snowy, frosty and a real winter wonderland - we even had the aurora borealis.

I believed in vampires and I wanted to be one. I even wrote a letter (which was on my bedside table) to Count Dracula asking him to turn me instead of killing me if he happened to visit my bedroom while I was sleeping.

I believed that my favorite stuffed animal, which I wrapped over my exposed neck when I went to bed, would protect me from vampires. Nothing more to it. No questioning, hey, what if the vampire lifted it up off my neck?

I wouldn't eat rye bread because I thought the caraway seeds were little bugs.

I als wouldn't eat Muenster cheese because I thought it was made by The Munsters.

I thought the Pope could see me masturbating.

Sometimes I wonder if dead loved ones, like my dad, can see me having nasty sex down here on earth. If so, I'd be so embarrassed.

That babies came out of stomachs until I happened to flip to our local PBS station and saw an uncensored delivery--and almost threw up.

I believed babies came out of women's assholes. i couldn't believe a woman's pussy could stretch that far until i was 12.

I thought when you got married, God gave you a baby. But then I found out I was a bastard child and I had to go back to square one with my theorizing.

[quote]Eventually he put a sticker on the door saying “No Minors”. I kept on playing in the workshop after I saw that sticker because I didn’t think it applied to me. I thought he was only talking about people that Mined coal or gemstones.

On our big family vacation out West when we hit Nevada I started seeing signs that said "No Minors" and after thinking about it the sign made perfect sense, since no one would want those dirty miners coming in to their nice casinos and getting everything dirty. Imagine my shock when I figured out they were talking about ME!

I thought that TV news anchors had to have other jobs in the morning, because how could you live on working for only 30 minutes a day?

That to make babies, Daddy put his seed in Mommy's dinner.

When my mother tried to explain the birds and the bees she saw that I was grossed out by the fact that a man would put his thing in the woman's pee-hole. "There are two holes," she said which really threw me.

I was terrified of the Bermuda Triangle and was convinced that I would vanish mysteriously without a trace if I ever flew across the Atlantic.

I thought pay-per-view was called "paperview" I thought this until I was in my 40's.

[quote]I thought the Pope could see me masturbating.

Oh, he CAN, R103. He can. And he's masturbating while he's watching you.

Because of the road signs for "caution deaf child" or "handicapped child", that the road sign that says "soft shoulder" I thought meant that a child with no shoulder bones lived in the area, and drivers should slow down. I also thought, from watching The Wizard Of Oz, that Kansas was actually in black and white.

The strangest one, was as a very young child, I was convinced that any helicopter I saw was out to kill me. I would go into an immediate panic, and hide under whatever I could to avoid being killed. My new aged parents could fall into this too, because they believed I was reliving past life trauma, and would ask me if I remember details from said past life.

The Monkees were actual musicians.

Another quicksand devotee. We always included falling into quicksand in all our games, someone always yelled ‘I’ll go find some rope!’ Phew. Quite a few close calls.

I was also afraid of vampires including The Count from Sesame st and I believed that if I slept in a turtleneck they wouldn’t be able to bite me.

[quote] I also thought, from watching The Wizard Of Oz, that Kansas was actually in black and white.

It is. I've been there.

When my Dad was drunk he either pushed or hit my Mom, and she said, "That's Assault and Battery!" I heard this as "That's a Salt and Battery!" I assumed a Salt and Battery was some kind of boxing move.

We shopped at the commissary on the military base. This was a huge grocery store with low prices. The milk cartons were somewhat plain and jad large lettering saying "Homo Milk." Whe I later learned at school what a "homo" is, I wondered if there was some connection, but I didn't say a word.

I thought I had a benevolent skeleton that lived under my bed and would protect me from the actual monsters.

R70, I laughed so hard I cried

I believed eating a pit would cause a watermelon to grow in my stomach. I had eaten way too many and was planning to explode any day from all the watermelons. But I figured it out when I saw a lot of other people who swallowed pits and didn't have watermelons sticking out of their bodies.

I was 13 when I first came to NYC. When I saw the "No Standing" signs, I though it meant that pedestrians had to keep walking and not stand around on the sidewalks.

[quote]The milk cartons were somewhat plain and jad large lettering saying "Homo Milk." Whe I later learned at school what a "homo" is, I wondered if there was some connection, but I didn't say a word.

Drink homo milk at night and feel yourself in the morning.

My mother kept a bottle of ammonia under the sink in the kitchen and I wondered why she would do that when so many people were catching "ammonia" all the time.

The very first time I went to a drive-in movie ( was about 4, i think), I thought that the people on this huge screen must be operated and controlled by a huge crowd of people behind the screen pulling ropes and moving levers.

I thought candidates literally ran for president.

I was very impressed when I learned that grandpa Bush Sr beat a young Michael Dukakis.

I thought the people on the television were behind the TV

r128, god you were stupid!

I thought women took dumps and peed out of the same hole.

I thought the handicap bars in restroom stalls were actually for constipated people who needed leverage.

r130 you didn't know about pussy?

when i was in 4th grade, this nasty girl in my class told me that once a month women piss blood.

That I was born at McDonald's Hospital until my mother corrected me "No, the Cleveland Clinic, silly"!

R75 me too! Jaywalking meant basically streaking! Hahahaha I thought any piece of dirt in our yard that wasn't covered by grass could be the source of a "hidden treasure." I'd spend hours digging for treasure when I was a kid. A neighbor had dumped a bunch of rocks out that had been in her fish tank one time and when I found it, I thought I had found a cache of unpolished turquoise!

I believed people had babies from kissing

[quote]The Salvation Army was were everyone had to take their old clothes to be salvaged. When somebody said "ends meet", I thought they were making "endsmeat" ... and it must be similar to a meat pie. World War II started because of Pearl Harbor, and the entire world like the USA so well, that it went to war for us. There we two states called Washington. Washington D.C. didn't became to the capital until after the Civil War, to show the Southerns that we Northerners weren't upset about them rebelling. That I was going to die in a nuclear war.

Oh, dear!!

I thought all deaths were by way of gunshot.

I thought Matt Groening wrote every episode of The Simpsons himself.

When I was a kid, my friend Colleen and I were wondering how the baby came out of the mother. We decided it came out the asshole because everyone has one.

i thought babies were all c-sectioned.