My mother was once tickling her newborn grandsons belly button when the babys father walked in and threw a fit telling her to stop because if she didnt his insides would unravel. My mother just looked at him and then busted out laughing.
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3,402 beliefs in this area
When I was in elementary school I absolutely loved African animals, safaris, etc. I figured that this must mean I was African American (strange because I'm very much Caucasian). I told all my friends "Hey, did you know I'm part African American?" We were so young they believed me.
I had a book about puberty when I was little that said how you go pubic hair without explaining what it was. It also had a series of pictures of girls getting older, but in it the girl in the picture's hair went from dark to light. I was convinced pubic hair meant your hair went blonde, no matter how much my mum tried to convince me the pictures in the book were of different girls. That fear was my most traumatising thing about puberty. That there were grown ups with dark hair didn't seem to penetrate at the time.
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When one of my friends was a kid her nanna told her that if she touched her belly button then her tummy would fall out!!! She believed it until she was six.
When I was very small I used to think that I had two sets of lungs: one set for breathing with your mouth, one set for your nose. I was convinced that the ridges on the roof of your mouth was the ribcage that protected your mini nose lungs from your food.
When i was real young i thought that if i covered my eyes with my hands, other people couldn't see me becouse i couldn't see them. I was always the first one found in "Hide-and -Seek."
I used to believe that your belly button held your skin together, and that if you "undid" your belly button, all your skin would fall off. Needless to say, I never let anyone go near my stomach. To this day I hate people touching my stomach, although I don't honestly believe my skin will fall off anymore.
A girl in my class told me that going for an eye (sight) test involved the optician taking my eyeballs out of my head to check the back of them. I had visions of the optician gently breathing on my eyeballs to mist them up, then rubbing them up and down his sleeves ito clean them, must like how my mom would clean the lenses on her glasses. I was terrified!
When I was young and my mom would wash my hair during bathtime, she would sing this song that said "I'm gonna wash that man right out of your hair". For years, I was convinced I had a man living in my hair who would get washed away during bathtime, but kept coming back.
I used to believe that all children had sugar behind their ears because my great uncle would always say "Come give me some sugar!" and then he'd pretend to get the sugar from behind my ears. So I always wondered how the sugar got there and how come only us kids had it!
When my son was in Kindergarten he suddenly turned into Howard Huges - washing his hands so frequently that they became raw and chaffed. I asked him about it and he wouldn't give me a good reason for doing it so I put a limit on hand washing. He then started wearing his leather baseball gloves night and day - which was weird but I allowed it at home.
About a year later he finally confessed that a librarian at his former school told his class about a girl who often chewed on her hair. Because the girl swallowed some hair in the process, it created a massive hairball in her stomach and killed her. My son then became terrified that if he swallowed even one single hair (human, cat, stuffed animal, whatever) that he would die.
When I was feeling confident about counting up to 20 I began to count how many fingers people had - I always thought that the number of fingers depended on how old these people were but when I counted them I always ended up with 5. I was dissappointed UNTIL I made my mind up to give it another try; I tried to count my father's fingers and I had 6! I was so happy and loved my father for having 6 fingers!
This is embarrassing.
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My brother was born with one brown eye and one blue eye (seriously!) When I asked my mother why, she said because he couldn't make up his mind.
Before emigrating to America in 1952 at age 8 as a WWII refugee with my family, I really knew nothing about Indians in the U.S. -- that is, until I saw a Western movie in the camp we eventually shipped out from. Not knowing better, I thought the Indians actually had feathers growing out of their heads.
My mom would always ask me if dinner 'hit the spot' so I always imagined my stomach as a big ball, similar to the bottom of a thermometer, empty or full of red liquid. I knew what my stomach really was, and how it looked, I was just a weird kid.
My dad has always had a really long embarrassing hippy haircut. When I was a kid I used to think that other people's dads were bald because my dad had stolen all their hair!
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I knew a little girl who thought the word "eyebrow" was "eyebrown." I don't know how she explained black or blond "eyebrowns."
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I thought the white circles you see when looking at a bright window were what atoms of air look like.
I was about 4 when my sister was born, and my mum would breast feed her. I remember watching my mum drinking a glass of milk with her dinner and thinking she must be filling her boobs up for my sis!
My dad told me that if i unscrewed my belly button, my bum would fall off. i beleived this till i was 10!
Fortunatley my parents are now paying for my therapist.