Dumb Things People Believed as Kids

There's so much about the world that children are expected to just pick up from their environment. That means so many things are only half-learned because we don't realize what we are misunderstanding. Ross McClearly asked Twitter users to share the misconceptions they remember from childhood.

I thought the the Americans were fighting gorillas in the jungles of Vietnam called the Viet Kong, and their leader was King Kong. A peculiar problem of a 1960s childhood. I
— Rufus MacDufus (@RufusLongpaws) September 7, 2018

My daughter told me that when she was very young, she'd watch me do laundry. I would clean the lint filter out and put the lint in the "magic pink box" on the shelf. And after it got full, she'd look in and all the lint had disappeared! Magic!

"Honey, that's a waste basket. I emptied it."

"I know! I felt like an idiot when I got older and figured that out!"

My daughter stopped eating all ceareal as a kid. She told us years later she heard on the news a serial killer was on the loose. Thought he was in the cereal box. Didn’t want to take a chance. And she loved cereal.
— Diane Lander-Simon (@dishwithdi) September 7, 2018

Read some of the other things people completely misunderstood when they were children at Buzzfeed. There's more in the comments, too, and in the original Twitter thread.

Here's mine. My Mom had an 8mmmovie camera and she took movies of us when we were kids. She told me she had to send the film to "Rochester" to get it developed. What she meant was sending it to the Kodak Company in Rochester. I thought she had to send it to "Rochester", Jack Benny's pal on the radio.

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For some reason, all of us believed that earthworms were blood suckers. I was told that by the older children at school and confidently told that to the children who were younger than I, thereby perpetuating this bizarre and unquestioned story. I mean, we even believed that stepping on an earthworm _with our shoes on_ was dangerous-- somehow they could suck your blood through your shoe. After a big rainstorm when the earthworms would emerge was a truly dangerous time on the playground. ????!!!