I heard something the other day that made me think of when I was a kid — boy was I gullible. I guess I wasn’t that much different than other kids…. when we were young, we all believed a lot of crazy things — that’s what kids do, and it’s part of growing up.
Now that I’m an adult (in years, at least) it’s hard not to laugh at some of the things I actually believed when I was young.
My mom told me lots of times that if I crossed my eyes long enough, they’d stay that way forever. I suppose that was my mom’s attempt to make me stop crossing my eyes. Whenever I was upset, or crying, or just making a funny face, I’d usually get the same warning from her.
When I was a little kid, I think I believed that stepping on a crack could literally break my mother’s back. I’m not sure what this rhyme was based on, but I remember consciously avoiding cracks in the sidewalk.
I remember when we went somewhere at night, looking out the back window of the car seeing the moon, and it seemed to be following us — I always wondered how the moon knew when we were going someplace and it never occurred to me that the moon was “following” anyone else. I thought it was just following out car….
When our son David was very small, a clip of an old TV show — American Bandstand, or something like that came on TV and of course it was in black & white, not color. Claire made some remark like, “well that was us.” David’s eyes got really big and he said “you guys were black and white?” It was really funny at the time, but when you think about it, all the old pictures we have of older people like grandparents or great-grandparents, are black and white photos. I guess the only logical assumption for a kid is that these people lived in a world that was completely black and white.
Television didn’t come into being until I was about 8 or 9 years old, but as I’ve mentioned before, we had the first television in Maysville and almost immediately after we got it, my mother started telling me that if I sat too close to the screen, it would ruin my eyes. Even though I was maybe old enough to know better, I believed it. I suspect that parents probably still tell their kids the same thing today.
When I was little, the street in front of our house wasn’t paved and when it rained it had a lot of “mud holes” with standing water that attracted toads/frogs. Of course, being a little kid, I used to catch them — I’m not sure what I did with them but it’s one of the things little kids do. Anyhow, my grandmother was adamant that if you touched a toad, you’d get warts. I don’t know of anyone that ever developed warts from an exposure to toads. Once again, I at least partially bought into this.
When I was a kid I was told to never swallow chewing gum. I think my mom told me that if I swallowed gum, it would stay in my body for seven years — or at least for a long time. Another fallacy I bought into — I never swallowed my gum. Actually I don’t swallow gum even today.
Something that was drilled into me when I was young and I still hear today is that reading in dim light will damage your eyes. I even catch myself asking Claire sometime if she need more light. Of course this isn’t true, but it’s another bit of mis-information I grew up believing for some amount of time.
I was never a big fan of carrots, but my mother swore that if I ate them, my eyesight would improve. When I was little I was convinced that I’d go blind or at least have to wear “coke-bottle” glasses because I didn’t like carrots.
Actually, there’s a story behind how the rumor of carrots improving eyesight got started, and it;s pretty interesting:
It all began during World War II…. Royal Air Force fighter ace John Cunningham became the first person to shoot down an enemy plane (using automatic targeting) in the dead of night. British officials credited the pilot’s success to eating carrots in order to fool the Germans.
Well since I’ve already gotten off the subject a bit, this seems like a good place to stop. I think the bottom line is that kids are suckers — I mean that in a good way. At least most of them grow out of it….
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