Childhood misconceptions

[helgaleena]

My great misconception? Similar to Hhuck's. If it was in a book, it was a fact. I thought there was a Fairytale Land and a Seuss land and a Pooh land someplace and wanted to write them letters. Sadly, the same error sometimes took me over in grad school as I nearly lived in library stacks for much too long...

 

[nudeyorker]

OK all the book talk brought something up... When I was about 10 years old I found a copy of Death Be Not Proud and read it. I was so unconsolable when I finished that book and cried so much I gave myself a "child migraine" From that point forward up until I was finished with college; (OK sometimes even recently) every time I got a headache I thought I was dying of a brain tumor.
It was a major drama at the doctors office as a child of why I thought I was dying and the subsequent conversation my mother and step father had with me of...Why in the world did you read that book and did you really fully understand it?

 

[B_subgirrl]

Short and sweet - I thought women gave birth out their bum holes until I was about 10.

 

[willow78]

When I was little I was terrified of going to high school - my older brother and his friends (who hadn't actually reached year 7 yet*) convinced me that the blackboard would be FULL of stuff that you would have to copy. After 5 minutes, the board would be wiped clean, filled with more stuff to copy within 5 minutes...and so on. ALL DAY LONG! I thought, "Oh no! I can't write that quickly! I'll never be able to keep up with everyone else and I'll be left behind!"

*Here in Australia, we don't have "middle school". 7th, 8th and 9th grades are part of high-school along with 10th, 11th and 12th grades.

 

[B_subgirrl]

When I was little I was terrified of going to high school - my older brother and his friends (who hadn't actually reached year 7 yet*) convinced me that the blackboard would be FULL of stuff that you would have to copy. After 5 minutes, the board would be wiped clean, filled with more stuff to copy within 5 minutes...and so on. ALL DAY LONG! I thought, "Oh no! I can't write that quickly! I'll never be able to keep up with everyone else and I'll be left behind!"

*Here in Australia, we don't have "middle school". 7th, 8th and 9th grades are part of high-school along with 10th, 11th and 12th grades.

Scarily, this is what maths lessons were like for me in years 8-10. And plenty of people DIDN'T keep up.

 

[D_Lanksesbye Sleepingrawe]

When I was little, I asked my mom where all the garbage went when the trash truck took it away. She considered it for must a moment and answered with complete seriousness, "Detroit." I thought it was a city sized dump until I was ten. I think my mom, who is 76 still believes it.

 

[nudeyorker]

When I was little, I asked my mom where all the garbage went when the trash truck took it away. She considered it for must a moment and answered with complete seriousness, "Detroit." I thought it was a city sized dump until I was ten. I think my mom, who is 76 still believes it.

I've been to Detroit. Your mother was correct!

 

[NCbear]

Until I was probably six or seven years old, I thought everyone in the world was in my time zone, experienced the same weather I did, and enjoyed the same climate.

I also thought everyone spoke the same dialect of English (i.e., Southern ) as I did.

Finally, I thought that projections of world maps onto two-dimensional rectangular surfaces somehow meant that the reverse side would show a different world. Ever since, I've read different science fiction and fantasy novels for pleasure, searching for that different world--and found several enjoyable ones.

NCbear (who's amused by my own and others' childhood misconceptions :tongue

 

[Gillette]

No fear involved with the misconception but there was a mote of concern from the response that voicing it elicited. It was even arrived at logically (if based on fallacy).

I knew that dinosaurs had died out a long time ago.
My mother had told me what it was like when TV was first invented.
The Flintstones had both dinosaurs and TV.

I was 5 when I asked her what it was like living with the dinosaurs. The reaction was not good.

 

[LittleDicky]

Three misconceptions come to mind:

• When I was about 3, I was amazed to learn the CLOWNS had hands! Prior to that, I didn't realize that they were people in makeup. I thought they were some sub-human animal species. (BTW, I've never found clowns funny.)

• Because of their slinky nature, I assumed all cats were feminine and therefore female. And, all dogs, because of their rougher more aggressive nature, were masculine, hence male.

That would have posed some problems in reproduction.

• When my mother told me that prior to her marriage, she had been "fired" from her job, I asked her why she wasn't "all burned up."

Didn't know what "fired" meant. :dunno:

 

[deleted213967]

As a toddler I was very disturbed by the thought of foreign people unfortunate enough not to be able to speak "normal". I wondered how they could possibly live their lives without understanding us.

 

[rbkwp]

As a child i thought, 'this is it'
going to live like this ( a child forever)
be happy and what a Life
No worries no problems nothing, just exist, as a child
then i bloody grew up and grew up
had to go to school, had to learn things
had to get a job
had to be responsible
eventually started aging etc etc
WTF' .. is this all about
enz

 

[B_lrgeggs]

Girls were Icky...now that I think of it, I still have that misconception.

 

[vince]

My brother and I were convinced that when you passed a cemetery, you had to hold your breathe, otherwise you'd be the next one in it. It wasn't so bad when we were in the car, but in grade two, there was a small graveyard on the route we walked to school! I used to run past it.

 

[Calboner]

This is a great topic, though at the moment, I am having difficulty recalling my childish misconceptions, though I must have had as many of them as anyone else. Here are just two:

Stephen Jay Gould, a second-generation American, somewhere recounts the shock that he experienced when he first met some people who were grandparents yet spoke without a foreign accent. I recall experiencing the same perplexity, though I don't recall how old I was at the time.

About human reproduction, I remember reading an illustrated book for children that explained conception, pregnancy, and birth, but it gave me no clue as to how the sperm from the daddy got into the body of the mommy. I assumed that it was something that happened in consequence of the marriage ceremony. Then I saw an episode of a television series set in 19th-century America in which there is a big scandal about a woman who arrives in town who has a child but no husband and is not a widow. My theory was overthrown, and I had no idea what could explain how a woman without a husband could bear a child.

 

[HiddenLacey]

I thought babies came out of belly buttons.

If you swallowed a seed (eg watermelon, apples etc.) they would grow out of your ears.

Horribly embarrassed to admit that I thought I was pregnant because I had kissed a neighborhood boy and I skipped my menses for a couple of months. I believe I was 11 or 12. I knelt beside my bed and prayed everynight that I wasn't... I even cried while talking to God.

 

[ronin001]

I guess the misconception about going blind or growing hairy palms if you masturbate

 

[earllogjam]

As a kid I always wanted to be a grocery clerk because I thought they kept all the cash register money.

I always thought Tang was health food because Astronauts drank it.

As a latch key kid growing up in the suburbs my parents weren't around much and didn't teach me much. I was pretty much educated by the TV. Sad huh?

 

[drumstyck]

i thought "drinking and driving" pertained to any liquid. i yelled at my mother for having a soda in the car.

i used to think that non-english speakers were constantly translating things in their head. for example, if you held up 3 fingers to a spanish person and asked how many, their brain would process " 'three' in spanish is 'tres' " and then they would say "tres"

 

[Calboner]

i used to think that non-english speakers were constantly translating things in their head. for example, if you held up 3 fingers to a spanish person and asked how many, their brain would process " 'three' in spanish is 'tres' " and then they would say "tres"

When I was 10 or 11, one of my schoolfellows was talking about learning a foreign language (modern Hebrew) and said that he only began to acquire some fluency when he could respond to utterances by thinking in the language rather than translating them into English, thinking of a reply, and translating it back into the foreign language. I responded with derision, as I felt quite certain that no such thing was possible!