What Were YOUR Erroneous Childhood Beliefs?

[Sollywos]

I was very young at that time but thought Michael Foot was Margaret Thatcher's husband.

Oh I rather like that thought!

Did anyone else have this belief in their younger years?

ummmm are you telling me that those sweets are not medicinal? lol

Actually we didn't have a car when I was little but when I noticed them in other peoples cars I assumed that they were for car sickness prevention. A sort of upmarket version of barley sugars that we had been told were for that purpose and were consummed on coach journeys ha!ha!

 

[Sollywos]

I used to wonder why we didn't just build a ladder to the moon. Yes of course I'd noticed that the moon moved about but just considered that we'd have to build it and then wait for the moon to dock! I never did get as far as thinking about what would happen to the earth end of the ladder once docking had been achieved. There's always a flaw in all my plans!

I thought that all water was anxious to get back to the sea eventually. When we had a mains water supply brought up to the house (just the one tap in the kitchen) we didn't also get mains drainage so dad dug a little open drain to take it across our lawn to the ditch around the fields. Looking at the water rushing along all on its own when previously it would have been carried to the ditch in bowls I felt sorry for it so used to run along beside, singing to reassure it 'The sea the sea the wonderful sea you're going to the sea'.

 

[merricat]

Ah, you reminded me of how much I dislike Fisherman's Friends. I was an adult before I realised that they weren't some sort of pepperminted fish.
A friend of mine would offer me one every single time I saw her, year on year, regardless how often I politely declined.

 

[Sollywos]

I was sure we would have flying cars and reusable space ships.

And were you looking forward to going up to Saturn for a wander around looking up to see the rings? I was!!

 

[Earthly oddity]

Oh I rather like that thought!

ummmm are you telling me that those sweets are not medicinal? lol

Actually we didn't have a car when I was little but when I noticed them in other peoples cars I assumed that they were for car sickness prevention. A sort of upmarket version of barley sugars that we had been told were for that purpose and were consummed on coach journeys ha!ha!

We didn't have a car when I was really small but when we did get one I was always sick. At least I am not the only one who thought they were supposed to be anti-nausea. I am convinced they said on the tin they were to prevent sickness....They were hard boiled sweets but not barley sugar - at least the ones I had weren't barley sugars. Some were fruity. Were there butterscotch flavour too?

 

[merricat]

When I was a very small child, I used to dream that I was a meaningless grain of sand in the immense expanse of the universe. I could feel it viscerally. And I could "see" that this universe itself was a globe, suspended to the ceiling of a child's room, among many other similar globes.

I know this is a quote from a couple of years ago but it struck a chord with me. I had a very similar experience when young, although I pictured our universe riding on the back of a flea, attached to a dog, attached to planet earth.....and so on and so on. And then you imagine even more fleas attached to the back of the same dog, then every dog, and there are so many universes opening up and folding back in that it starts to hurt your mind. Infinite origami.
I was around 12 at the time, and have met quite a few people who shared this experience, although we all tend to visualise it in a different way.

I love the idea of the universe suspended like a snow globe in a child's room very much!

 

[Sollywos]

I am convinced they said on the tin they were to prevent sickness.

Do you know I think it must be the tin that gave them the elevated status. Common or garden barley sugars came in a paper bag! They were all sorts of flavours. Mabe all it claimed on the tin was that they were 'travel sweets' and we just imagined the bit about 'sickness prevention' because it went together with 'travel'.

 

[catseye]

Do you know I think it must be the tin that gave them the elevated status. Common or garden barley sugars came in a paper bag! They were all sorts of flavours. Mabe all it claimed on the tin was that they were 'travel sweets' and we just imagined the bit about 'sickness prevention' because it went together with 'travel'.

I bought a tin of Travel Sweets last year for a long drive! I always thought they were to suck to stop you from feeling thirsty, to negate the 'I need a weeeeeeeeee!' cry that seems to happen roughly every ten minutes when there are kids in the car.

 

[Aydee_Aitchdee]

When I was probably 4 or 5, I thought my toys were having fun and playing games when I was gone, so when I'd come home I'd tiptoe quietly to my room to catch them in the act but the stairs always creaked!

 

[Herr Cloaca]

My mum explained to me, as best she could, the situation in Northern Ireland. Having given the matter great thought, I decided the best thing to do was have a great big digger go along the border, digging away, and then Northern Ireland would break loose and drift off into the Atlantic and they could get on with things themselves.

 

[merricat]

When I was probably 4 or 5, I thought my toys were having fun and playing games when I was gone, so when I'd come home I'd tiptoe quietly to my room to catch them in the act but the stairs always creaked!

They always remain one step ahead.....you'll never catch 'em!

 

[Iris]

When I was little I had a teddy and a doll which I used to take to bed.
I also took my bat and ball as I thought that they wouldn't like to miss out.

 

[Eyespy]

Does anyone on here from the UK remember the travel sweets in a round flat tin, that had loads of white powder with them?

I was a very travel sick child in the 70s/early 80s.

I believed they were supposed to stop you being ill. My mother probably told me this to try to convince me not to be sick in the car.

I was sick so often, there was a yellow potty under the car's front seat from my baby days, conveniently placed in case I had any medical emergencies when we couldn't stop driving.

I always believed the sweets were supposed to stop sickness. I even thought the white powder was medicinal and probably ate as much of that out of the tin as possible in order to try to avoid being sick. They didn't work.

In recent years I mentioned this to my mother who seemed to have no idea why I thought they were medicinal sweets. I suspect my mother has conveniently forgotten making up this lie since she presumably believed my travel sickness was all in my mind, and making up this lie would cure it.

Did anyone else have this belief in their younger years?

Yes! I’m so relieved I am not the only one who was fobbed off with this. I still have motion sickness bouts, buses are a big problem for me and it’s really hard to find those magic sweets.

 

[Iris]

I was always car sick until I was allowed to sit in the front seat.
By the time my sisters came along my mother used to bring a bucket on trips.

 

[Tigerhawk]

HORROR OF HORRORS..
Which reminds me, whilst travelling - As a very young child I was terrified of those enormous furry beasts which brought on a full scale panic whenever I saw the sign 'CAR WASH". I would actually scream in terror as they came undulating towards me, convinced that they were a portal to some other, freakily disturbing dimension that was about to swallow me whole. As I grew a bit older I might certainly have calmed down somewhat, but never, ever trusted those dreadful, dreadful things. It wasn't so much the size as the way they wiggled and moved in such a suspiciously sensual, almost sentient way...ugggh.

Looking back, it was a complete physical revulsion, which seemed to turn me inside-out with terror. Like being tickled too much, just absolutely unbearable.

Just like members of this forum....

 

[Floyd]

I bought a tin of Travel Sweets last year for a long drive! I always thought they were to suck to stop you from feeling thirsty, to negate the 'I need a weeeeeeeeee!' cry that seems to happen roughly every ten minutes when there are kids in the car.

They always say to take ginger in some form for travel sickness.

 

[catseye]

Yes! I’m so relieved I am not the only one who was fobbed off with this. I still have motion sickness bouts, buses are a big problem for me and it’s really hard to find those magic sweets.

Garden centres sell them. At least, around here they do. I bought a really pretty tin with a lovely Kew Gardens type design on the front, they were melon and ginger flavoured, and they were gorgeous.

I don't even suffer from travel sickness, I just like the tins. Plus, having a source of sugar in the car can be useful for those days when you get stuck in a traffic jam and just want....something to distract from the misery.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

My mum explained to me, as best she could, the situation in Northern Ireland. Having given the matter great thought, I decided the best thing to do was have a great big digger go along the border, digging away, and then Northern Ireland would break loose and drift off into the Atlantic and they could get on with things themselves.

I was a kid when The Troubles were in the news constantly, and totally didn't understand it, or even where Northern Ireland was.

My dad was a civil servant which I also didn't understand but he explained that he worked for the Queen. So I spent a good bit of my childhood thinking my dad would be car bombed. It got worse when my mum died, as he was my only parent and somehow I think I focused a lot of the fear from being left without a mum into that, but I totally couldn't articulate it and I totally didn't understand the politics til I did the history of it as part of A Level History, years later.

Had totally forgotten this whole thing, that fear someone would come to kill my dad, until recently, husband said summat that just brought it right back to me.

If I'd just articulated it to an adult, any adult, they'd have no doubt reassured me in seconds.

There's also one I remember from my time teaching. I had a little girl in my class who was struggling with everything, academically. And there were some strange blocks there, that I couldn't account for, because she seemed to be not too thick at all. (Technical term there).

Then one day, I got talking to her and she confided something she'd never told another grown up. That a couple of years earlier, before I was at that school so I had no idea about this, her baby sibling had died of cot death. They'd died in her room as the cot was in her bedroom. She heard the term "cot death", didn't understand it, and thought she had somehow killed the baby, that it was her fault.

I was able to explain it and reassure her and - her work did pick up after that point. Not miraculously but noticeably. They never prepared us for those sort of moments during teacher training.

 

[Sollywos]

Then one day, I got talking to her and she confided something she'd never told another grown up. That a couple of years earlier, before I was at that school so I had no idea about this, her baby sibling had died of cot death. They'd died in her room as the cot was in her bedroom. She heard the term "cot death", didn't understand it, and thought she had somehow killed the baby, that it was her fault.

Oh the poor girl! Such a hard thing for the siblings to understand. I expect the mother was so busy blaming herself that it didn't occur to her that her daughter would be doing the same.

I worried when my baby died of cot death for my two older children. It was such a hard time as being consummed in grief myself it wasn't always straighforward to know exactly how my two others were feeling, both under three and a half.

A neighbour spotted the oldest walking round and round in the garden obviously trying to process it. He was saying over and over 'There used to be three of us, me, (named the other two) that's one, two, three, but now there are two of us, me and (named the younger one). So one, two yes two of us now but there used to be three (named them all again).

He'd walk into a room and find me changing his brothers nappy and say in such a sad disappointed voice 'Oh I thought the baby had come back!'

Not having a clue what to say to him I had to say that their baby brother had gone to heaven which when you think about it is just as confusing as he couldn't understand why we couldn't go and get him back. Quite frankly neither could I, it's hard enough understanding the (probable) finality of death as an adult let alone explaining it to a child about a child anyway. Sad but easier for a grandparent or even a pet but another child not so much.

One day we drove past the local goal and he looked up at the high walls and asked, 'Oh is that where our bother is?' in a sort of relieved voice like he'd solved the big mystery. In fact three years later we were on our way to Cornwall for a holiday and as we went by a sign for Devon he got all excited thinking that was the place his brother must be!

When he was much older we were tallking about it and he confided that he had indeed had a very hard time processing it. I know that he's always told any new friends about his baby brother that died.

I'm glad you were able to get to the bottom of that little girls distress @Ghost In The Machine I bet she still remembers you with gratitude

 

[catseye]

Children internalise things. When I was a child there was very much a culture of 'we don't talk about those things.' Before I was born, my mother had a baby boy who was stillborn. This was absolutely and totally never ever mentioned or talked about. I only found out about it as a late teen, when an aunt let something slip and I put two and two together. But there had been remarks or half-heard things that had made me imagine all sorts of dire events in the family - I even managed to build a case for my father having been put in prison! (Probably some combination of a misunderstood side-comment), which, for anyone who knew my father, was so ridiculous as to have been laughable but, I feared, it had happened once and it could happen again and I had low-level fear that one day he would be taken away.

If only it could have been talked about. If my elder brother could have been mentioned. It would have made some of my mother's behaviour much more understandable and I could have been more sympathetic towards her. I truly hope that younger generations have much better levels of emotional communication than were common in the 50's and 60's, because there must have been some dreadful levels of pain that were just never mentioned.

 

[Sollywos]

there must have been some dreadful levels of pain that were just never mentioned.

Very true that! Talking can't make the pain go away entirely but buried it can grow.

Besides they often have a habit of coming out eventually as you have illustrated!

 

[Sogna]

Children internalise things. When I was a child there was very much a culture of 'we don't talk about those things.' Before I was born, my mother had a baby boy who was stillborn. This was absolutely and totally never ever mentioned or talked about. I only found out about it as a late teen, when an aunt let something slip and I put two and two together. But there had been remarks or half-heard things that had made me imagine all sorts of dire events in the family - I even managed to build a case for my father having been put in prison! (Probably some combination of a misunderstood side-comment), which, for anyone who knew my father, was so ridiculous as to have been laughable but, I feared, it had happened once and it could happen again and I had low-level fear that one day he would be taken away.

If only it could have been talked about. If my elder brother could have been mentioned. It would have made some of my mother's behaviour much more understandable and I could have been more sympathetic towards her. I truly hope that younger generations have much better levels of emotional communication than were common in the 50's and 60's, because there must have been some dreadful levels of pain that were just never mentioned.

My mother also lost her first child in the 50s, when the baby was a day old. She was just taken away from my mother and buried somewhere in a mass grave, we don't know where and she didn't even get a death certificate. It was more common in those times apparently and the mothers were expected to get over it and get on with the next one. With my sisters' permission I am hoping that her name and dates will be included on my memorial when I die.

 

[escargot]

Learning about a preceding sibling of mine who died very young explained a lot about my early life. Like switching a light on.

 

[catseye]

My mother also lost her first child in the 50s, when the baby was a day old. She was just taken away from my mother and buried somewhere in a mass grave, we don't know where and she didn't even get a death certificate. It was more common in those times apparently and the mothers were expected to get over it and get on with the next one. With my sisters' permission I am hoping that her name and dates will be included on my memorial when I die.

My brother managed to find the burial details for our older brother and we took our mum to the gravesite. It is possible, if you know where they were buried, to find the place. We took some flowers and hopefully it helped our mother (she was suffering with dementia by then) to find some degree of closure.

 

[Sogna]

My brother managed to find the burial details for our older brother and we took our mum to the gravesite. It is possible, if you know where they were buried, to find the place. We took some flowers and hopefully it helped our mother (she was suffering with dementia by then) to find some degree of closure.

I'm glad that you found him, and I hope that it did bring your mother some measure of peace.

 

[escargot]

My brother managed to find the burial details for our older brother and we took our mum to the gravesite. It is possible, if you know where they were buried, to find the place. We took some flowers and hopefully it helped our mother (she was suffering with dementia by then) to find some degree of closure.

My mother has a vigorous aversion to morbidness which takes the form of forbidding any mention of the dead.
I've come to believe that she can't bear to feel grief because she's afraid she'd never stop crying. Not healthy.

I think also that my father was quite harsh about getting over it after bereavement which didn't help.
She did tell me that he cried when they lost the baby, as if that were unusual for a man. When any father would weep for his lost child. Not remotely unmanly.

When her sister, my spooky Aunt Val, died some years ago I went to see her in the funeral home. I impulsively opened a packet of cough sweets and left one with Val, and took the rest to Mum. She was touched as they'd always shared as children.

Val has of course been seen since.

 

[Analogue Boy]

I was brought up to do what the teacher told me, respect the police, the BBC was the the best broadcaster in the world and Government always had our interests at heart.

I now think the complete opposite.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

Oh the poor girl! Such a hard thing for the siblings to understand. I expect the mother was so busy blaming herself that it didn't occur to her that her daughter would be doing the same.

I worried when my baby died of cot death for my two older children. It was such a hard time as being consummed in grief myself it wasn't always straighforward to know exactly how my two others were feeling, both under three and a half.

A neighbour spotted the oldest walking round and round in the garden obviously trying to process it. He was saying over and over 'There used to be three of us, me, (named the other two) that's one, two, three, but now there are two of us, me and (named the younger one). So one, two yes two of us now but there used to be three (named them all again).

He'd walk into a room and find me changing his brothers nappy and say in such a sad disappointed voice 'Oh I thought the baby had come back!'

Not having a clue what to say to him I had to say that their baby brother had gone to heaven which when you think about it is just as confusing as he couldn't understand why we couldn't go and get him back. Quite frankly neither could I, it's hard enough understanding the (probable) finality of death as an adult let alone explaining it to a child about a child anyway. Sad but easier for a grandparent or even a pet but another child not so much.

One day we drove past the local goal and he looked up at the high walls and asked, 'Oh is that where our bother is?' in a sort of relieved voice like he'd solved the big mystery. In fact three years later we were on our way to Cornwall for a holiday and as we went by a sign for Devon he got all excited thinking that was the place his brother must be!

When he was much older we were tallking about it and he confided that he had indeed had a very hard time processing it. I know that he's always told any new friends about his baby brother that died.

I'm glad you were able to get to the bottom of that little girls distress @Ghost In The Machine I bet she still remembers you with gratitude

Love to you, Sollywos. That must have been so tough on you and the kids. And that grief never really goes away, I'd imagine.

I hope she remembers me. I remember her and almost all the kids I taught. I cared about them very much as many teachers do.

 

[merricat]

My mother has a vigorous aversion to morbidness which takes the form of forbidding any mention of the dead.
I've come to believe that she can't bear to feel grief because she's afraid she'd never stop crying. Not healthy.

I think also that my father was quite harsh about getting over it after bereavement which didn't help.
She did tell me that he cried when they lost the baby, as if that were unusual for a man. When any father would weep for his lost child. Not remotely unmanly.

When her sister, my spooky Aunt Val, died some years ago I went to see her in the funeral home. I impulsively opened a packet of cough sweets and left one with Val, and took the rest to Mum. She was touched as they'd always shared as children.

Val has of course been seen since.

My late mum, who had previously loved ghost stories and odd phenomena just shut down completely after my dad died. In reality she was angry with him for leaving, natural of course, but her aversion to anything even remotely supernatural came as something of a shock. She had loved her virago ghosts, and would sit around happily relating stories previously.

I wonder now if her anger and pain blocked her from that. I still can't work it out. Unfortunately she changed so dramatically after he died that I still can't process it. She dropped out of life entirely and almost willed her own demise. A lot of pain to get through there. She was a sensitive and wonderful woman, a writer and creative who never recognised her own power. After he died she literally stopped, like a clock, and became spiteful and cruel. It was a very difficult time.

 

[merricat]

My mother also lost her first child in the 50s, when the baby was a day old. She was just taken away from my mother and buried somewhere in a mass grave, we don't know where and she didn't even get a death certificate. It was more common in those times apparently and the mothers were expected to get over it and get on with the next one. With my sisters' permission I am hoping that her name and dates will be included on my memorial when I die.

My parents lost their son 5 yrs before I was born, he was 6 days old, and had a heart condition that would be easily rectified now. He was always talked about, but neither of my parents were offered counselling or any respite at the time. This would have been the late 60's. My mum went on to endure shock treatment, which annihilated most of her early memories as a mother. She never could recall my own early childhood, only 5 yrs later, for the rest of her life. I am so glad that these attitudes have changed.