Peters & Lee
When I asked why Peters (or was it Lee) was blind, my mum told me it was because he didn't wash his hands after playing out and had rubbed his eyes. Only a mum could co-opt a blind man into their never-ending quest for child hygiene.
(kitfisto, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:29, Reply)

My Parents told me
that lamb came from lamb plants and not the woolly things in the fields......
(MrsA, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:25, Reply)

Remember
those clear plastic 'space guns' you used to get with a thing inside that sparked when you pulled the trigger? My mum told me that real astronauts used them on the moon as some sort of bizarre propulsion system.

She also used to insist that eating sugar cubes would give you worms.
(Wong Fei-Hung - now with added flickr.com (see profile), Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:23, Reply)

Father Christmas. Enough said.
( Laughing Boy, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:20, Reply)

My parents didn't tell me this,
it was inflicted upon someone else, but is still true... this is the horrifying story of the ice cream van:

George had just woken up in his humble cottage in a quaint little english village. He went downstars to have breakfast and after much deliberation, went with weetabix as his choice above cheerios.

Was this choice going to come back to haunt him?

No, weetabix IS the better cereal and it was therefor the correct decision. Smart boy George was!

Anyway, back to the story. George was eating his weetabix with a ladel (he liked ladels) when he heard a bizarre tune ring out.

It reminded him of children being happy. He was puzzled. Was this sound about to change his life? Is weetabix really better than cheerios? Where was this sound coming from?

His Mum walked in.

'Mum, is that sound about to change my life?' to which his mother replied,
'No.'.
'Mum, is weetabix really better than cheerios?' to which his mother replied,
'That's a matter of opinion'.
'Where was that sound coming from?' to which his mother replied...................................................................................................................................

'Oh, that's just the vegetable van'


:)
(ChimneySweep IS TWO PEOPLES!, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:15, Reply)

2 quite similar ones
Firstly that if I looked out of the window at midnight I would see the devil and die.

Secondly if I dialed 666 on the phone I would speak to the devil and die.

ie go to bed when you are told and don't mess with the phone.

Oh and they told me if I touched a shrew the germs would always be on my hands and would never come off. They told me this because I had just found one in the garden, I spent an hour scrubbing my hands. I think my dad was trying to get me back for putting dog shit on his jumper a few days before.
(mr pete, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:12, Reply)

Licence to print money
My dad used to come home from work and give my mum her housekeeping in cash and say that he'd just printed it!

I was about 8 and he was some sort of engineer so I had no reason to think he was lying.
(Dickmungus, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:10, Reply)

huuuge lie
"It's naughty to kick your sister."
(Fantastic Mr Porter is bored, and wishes it was, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:10, Reply)

Biscuits
My parents hated shelling out on extravagances, so for years, starting from when I was about 2, they conned me into believing that crappy cheap digestive biscuits were, in fact, chocolate chip cookies.

The scrooges.
( the_manhattan_project, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:06, Reply)

Going back to this whole making faces, wind changing thing
There was a really weird looking kid in my class at infant school and my mum told me that he'd got like that because he'd made a face and the wind had changed. This kid was freaky - bug eyes, sloping forehead etc. No symmetry whatsoever.

Some years later I found out that this kid had actually fallen out of a moving vehicle and now had steel plates in his head.

Thanks mum.
(JamScones, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:06, Reply)

SEE HOW THEY LIE TO US
.
(unkle77 Click sig for totally ambient tunes!, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:05, Reply)

tarmac
not so much a lie as the gulibility of my childhood self.

when about 5, walking to school with my mum we passed a drive that had been recently retarmacced, i asked my mum what all the warning signs and tape meant and she told me that if i stood on the drive i would stick there forever. never to be free again

i don't think i could stand on the piece of tarmac for about 2 years, so convinced was i that i would stick there forever.
( monstrinho do biscoito teeeshurts = www.nogunarmy.com, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:04, Reply)

Not strictly a lie . . .
but it was always good value when parents would say to children playing on stairs "If you fall down and break your legs, don't come running to us".
(DoctorJ last upset some twat who doesn't like swearing on, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:03, Reply)

/Lurk
My parents told me...
That there was a man who came round and checked the bins to see if I'd eaten all my vegetables and if he found too many they'd get arrested and taken away.

another one (but not my parents this time) A friend of mine from college liked ice-cream so much as a child that his parents told him that if an ice cream van had music playing it meant that'd run out of ice cream. A money saver I suppose...

'pologies for the length.
(Icarus, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 16:02, Reply)

when i was younger
i used to wear a crimplene nike jacket/trakky bottoms combo (the HEIGHT of 7 year old fashion.) Well, i say used to wear, i stopped wearing it when my parents told me it was made up of thousands of baby crimplenes. Not only that, but i would cry when i saw it too.

also, my mum had "gone for a snooze" when she was lying rat-arsed in front of the hoopla stall at the fair. oh how we laughed!
(iwantacone, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:59, Reply)

Me mates parents
When i was a kid, me mate told me that his dad was a pilot in the RAF and if i pissed him off he'd bomb the fuck out of my house. His dad worked in a factory making paint.
(unkle77 Click sig for totally ambient tunes!, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:57, Reply)

when my older sister was around 6ish
she asked how sheep could stand sideway on the side of hills without falling over, and my parents explained that one side of legs (i.e. the front and back left legs) were shorter than the other side, so it matched up with the hill slope. She didn't notice the problem with this.

She believed it till the age of 18, whereupon attempting to explain this to a friend of hers in the car my mother said:
"Err...that's not true dear, we were joking..."
( jme, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:55, Reply)

my teacher lied, does that count?
my fourth grade teacher told us that the atom was the smallest form of anything.

i was a dork in fourth grade (er, and still am), so i piped up, "what about protons and neutrons and electrons? they're smaller. and what about quarks? they're smaller still."

i got yelled at. no idea why, as i was quite correct.

this teacher also once tried to get us to do a project that involved imagining you had travelled through the center of the earth. she yelled at me when i objected and said you'd burn up long before you got there.

teachers shouldn't give out such heinous misinformation. i bear a grudge to this very day.
( TheFelineAnarchist, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:53, Reply)

Dead Rabbits
My rabbit Fred (God rest his vicious little soul) died on the day we were going on holiday. I was well upset, my dad said he was going to give him an honorable rabbit funeral. I believed him and promptly forgot about it. I later found out that the bugger had wrapped Fred in a placky bag and chucked him in the bin.
(unkle77 Click sig for totally ambient tunes!, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:50, Reply)

Parental lies
At the height of the Edwina's Eggs scares, I was about eight years old and totally uninterested in any news programmes when there was an episode of Thundercats to be watched elsewhere.
One evening, after a weekend family dinner consisting mainly of an omelette, my father casually remarked that we could probably expect a visit from Sam and Ella later that evening.
Not knowing what the fuck he was on about, I eagerly sat around waiting to meet whoever these mystery friends of my parents were for a good three hours, glancing out of the front windows every now and again to see if they had arrived - and thus missing Noel Edmond's Saturday Roadshow (in retrospect, probably not such a bad thing).
It was several years later that I discovered they were making a clever-clever play on words with "salmonella". Bastages.
( Neth, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:43, Reply)

Lies Your Parents Told You
My folks, (bless em) told me that if you swallowed your fingernails after chewing them that they would turn into worms...

Oh and Santa!
(computerdisco, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:42, Reply)

Moving
First my parents promised we would never move.
Then when I was six I was told we were going to move to a wonderful new city. With lots of new things and new friends and things to do.
For the next ten years we lived in MILTON BLOODY KEYNES!!!!
(Finn_coyote, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:40, Reply)

Santa?
Another one...

One Christmas Eve when I was quite young, my dad was drunk and therefore stumbling about when putting presents in my room, and woke me up. I was very worried about the existence of Santa, and questioned my mum about this in the morning. She told me that Santa was really busy that year, so he left the presents at the bottom of the chimney and asked my dad to put them in my room...

Bless her.
(Hippychick, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:38, Reply)

Whenever we drove though the country
and the farmers had manured the fields, my Mum would tell me to "Sniff it up...it's good for you". I can't remember the age I was when I finally worked out that choking down lung fulls of shit-fumes had no immediate health benefits.

There's a load of these here by the way.
(son of crazymum, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:33, Reply)

My budgie flew away
and then next day when I got home from school there was an identical one in his old cage, to which my parents told me "oh, he must have come back!" Broke my heart when I finally twigged that it wasn't the same one.

Although to be fair I was the little sod who let the first budgie out in the first place.
(Ash Oops, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:31, Reply)

Spoggy
My parents told me that if I swallowed some spoggy (chewing gum to you southern wufters) then it would block my arteries and kill me stone dead. To this day I never swallow spoggy.
(unkle77 Click sig for totally ambient tunes!, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:27, Reply)

When I was just starting Primary
There was a teddy bear that I really wanted. One day my mum went out and bought it for me, but she told me that the bear had flown over to our house on its own accord. Of course, I related this story to Teacher the following day, and much to her credit she didn't laugh.

A friend of mine was told when he was young that "Scotch on the Rocks" was served with real rocks. He believed it right up until he was 18 and asked a friend (who had ice in his drink at the time) whether he had ever tried it "on the rocks". An interesting conversation ensued.

Poor fucker.
(Captain Skippy pooed in a bag and left it on your doorstep, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:22, Reply)

My Mom
Told me she loved me :|
(loverat, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:20, Reply)

Crap
when returning from the toilets on a beach in Florida, my father expressed his delight with his efforts saying "that was a good c-rap (sea rap)". My mother quickly interviened to say that he meant there was a big wave that had just crashed on the beach.
( Dr Drink, Wed 14 Jan 2004, 15:20, Reply)