"Didn't Do It": 34 Times Kids Were Caught In The Act But Still Denied Any Responsibility
InterviewA child’s life can be one of such wonders. They don’t really know how anything works so everything feels possible. The laws of the material universe can bend and twist to their screwball plans and every day can be an adventure. Unfortunately, for the parents who have to follow in their wake, this can also involve bills, messes, and frequent facepalms.
Internet users shared the most confusing and hair-pulling examples of kids doing things they really shouldn’t have. We also reached out to Brenna Hassinger-Das, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Pace University-NYC to learn a bit more about children’s creativity. So scroll down and upvote the stories that made you feel happy it wasn’t your kid and comment if you have any tales of your own. If you want to see some more documented examples of children’s brilliant plans, click here and here.



Image credits: LLcoooltweet
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I have to shake my socks and shoes before putting them on, since my two cats love to somehow get random stuff into it, like dead bugs (ouch)
animal logic; if there are 1000 good places to put something put it in the worst possible place.
Load More Replies...No! There definitely were not potatoes in the socks! Mine just have kitten fur and claw-sized holes in them.
Put on my favorite boots the other day just to hear a crunch as my feet hit the bottoms. 5 year old (who frequently hides food around the house for later) made sure to avoid eye contact at that moment. Still trying to solve the great mystery of who may have put bbq potato chips inside of them...
good to know i'm not the only one whose child has done this. although mine was 7 and in her defense, the downstairs toilet was broken 🤷🏻♀️
Imagine the cat! Bouche won't share her box. If anyone comes near, even to clean it, she runs to use it.
i did the same but we had dogs so it was in the garden I was 2
We asked Dr. Hassinger-Das why children need creativity for their self-development. “Creativity is the process of developing flexible thinking and coming up with new ideas and new uses for existing objects and materials. This process of exploration also helps children develop other critical skills. For example, as children use art materials like scissors and crayons, they also work on their fine motor skills. Devising new ways to use a favorite toy encourages children's problem-solving and development of executive functioning skills. Solving problems together also helps children foster social interactions and relationships.”
She also had some advice for parents trying to figure out how to introduce creativity into their children's lives. “Play is a great context for fostering creativity. Play allows children to exercise agency and explore new ideas within a familiar context. Parents can co-play with young children, using guided play techniques such as asking questions about what children are doing and helping to get them thinking about new concepts and ideas. With older children, parents can support their interests in art or games, from drawing comic book characters to playing creative video games like Minecraft.”
My kids have done similar things "mom, dad didn't take us for ice cream" and such... Adorable little rats!
Me, to my young daughter who had just cut the middle out of her bangs leaving long pieces on each side, "Erica Jane! Why did you do that?" Her, "It was in my eyes so I tut it." Can't argue with logic. She's 40yo now and has been "tutting" hair for 20.
“I think the most important takeaway about creativity is it's more about the process than the outcome. The process of exploration and thinking differently about everyday experiences helps children to build a toolkit of ways to deal with problems later in life,” she added. All in all, the experiences shown in this article can be seen as learning moments, even if it costs a decent degree of frustration from the parents. At least they got a funny story out of it.
I swear all is go through this! Years ago my friend and her daughter were visiting, the little girl found a sticky pad and put Reina was here now everywhere. I still find them occasionally
Ha! When I was like, 5, my brother(6) and I decided to play "barber shop". We took our stuffed animals and cut off their "hair" with kiddie scissors, then after we had the great idea to cut EACH OTHERS hair. Lets just say my mom wasn't thrilled, especially since my brother had SCHOOL PICTURE DAY in a few days(I basically snipped off all of his hair, and he cut me some bangs. He wore a hat in his school picture😂)
My father and aunt also gave each other haircuts after overhearing my grandparents worry about the cost of that and sweeping the chimney. The haircuts were nothing compared to their attempts at sweeping the chimney.
Load More Replies...What is with kids and butter? There are many things in the fridge, but they seem to always target butter.
Probably due to brain development being rather intense in early childhood and using a lot of energy. Looking at my three kids and seeing also other kids around me, most have a period while they are around 2-3, where they are eating butter with spoon. I didnt restrict my kids, but it stopped without any obvious reasons. Probably energy tanks got full again :)
Load More Replies...If I was that parent I wouldn't have said a thing just observed shook my head and gone back to sleep.
I love butter and would like to eat butter sticks. I don’t but I totally see the appeal.
Many of these stories come from younger children, who are just old enough to walk and have some agency, but not yet old enough to wrap their heads around more abstract ideas. Behavioral researchers believe that at this stage in a kid’s life, they are not actually aware of ideas like betrayal or imagination. However, they are fully capable of, inaccurately, personifying inanimate objects. For example, if a child hits their head on a door by accident, they might describe the door as “bad.”
i don’t get this one whatsoever as in i don’t understand what it’s saying
Then it obviously wasn't coming from the fire extinguisher. I wonder what did cause it.
There's no way to know what caused it. It's one of those life's mysteries.
Load More Replies...I once had Norwegian family visiting, and we were staying at a hotel with a water park. One of my cousins accidentally pulled the fire alarm- their words, not mine- but apologized after everything had settled down.
This stage, sometimes called the preoperational stage, normally lasts until the child is about seven years old. During this stage, they do not really understand how to see beyond their own point of view. This no doubt helps inform some of the attempts at deception in this list. Who could ever see past the masterly plan to disguise wrongdoing by saying “wasn’t me.”
Better than them being alive when she put them in there.
Load More Replies...Are we just going to skim past that dead chipmunk thing because I feel we really need to discuss the dead chipmunk thing.
Parent's never blame the girl, especially if the brother is older. Just straight facts.
I'm the girl and the oldest. #2 suspect but the #1 suspect is fully deserving the title of #1.
Load More Replies...last week my mom's student (a 4TH GRADER) stuck a freaking safety pin in an electrical socket. on purpose. during a show.
Load More Replies...Before the age of seven, many kids also go through stages of magical thinking. In cases of grief or sadness, the child might believe that if they just think it didn’t happen hard enough, then any negative event would simply disappear. This logic and we are really stretching the meaning of the word here, applies to other things as well. So kids do really believe that by giving adults a cunning, alternative story for the evidence in front of them, i.e a missing cake, a half-eaten stick of butter, they will actually escape punishment.
I am sure the cat is gonna seriously consider scratching someone
The cat spent the next 10 years plotting its revenge, until the day the kid was finally close enough to the edge of the pool...
Apparently I had a very early urge to emulate schrodingers experiment at the age of 3 involving our long suffering cat and an ice cream tub. Thankfully my mother's "suspiciously quiet child" sixth sense kicked in before any harm done.
I used to be good at guessing what I was getting. Once present when I was about 10 was a real mystery, so I carefully opened it and resealed it so well that no one knew. On Christmas morning, I told everyone that one is a new watch, and proceeded to explain how I knew so they would all be proud of what a great job I did putting it back together perfectly.
This is my time! When I was like 8 my dad told me to go wrap one of my moms birthday presents and I happily walked off singing 🎶 I’m gonna wrap a medicine ball medicine ball medicine ball… 🎶 so my mom turned to my dad holding back laughter and said “I wonder if I might be getting a medicine ball” 8 years later they still tease me about it
On the flip side, these are all signs that the child has a working and active imagination. They will want to supplement their imagination with new information and details, and constantly ask parents about how and why things are how they are. This poses a bit of a challenge since often enough, adults don’t actually know how to explain things. Like do you actually know why the sky is blue? The short answer, to save you a quick Google search, is that air molecules ‘scatter’ and blue light has the shortest wavelengths. Careful with this answer, however, as a more perceptive child might start following up with more hard-to-answer inquiries about physics.
my friend accidentally called coleslaw cholesterol once- 👀
Load More Replies...After reading a lot of these butter-loving tweets, it's like the quitting game... when adults used to throw their cigarettes down the toilet swearing to never smoke again, except it's kids with butter 😅
First time we ever got Nutella my little sister snuck in to the pantry afterwards and went nuts, she had Nutella covering a big chunk of her face and her hands/arms (she was three or four) but despite being caught chocolatehanded she denied all knowledge of where the Nutella went, it remains a mystery to this day.
Looks like you should have gotten Saul Goodman or Phoenix Wright as your Attorney
Load More Replies...Oh, I win the Stupid Prize: My Ma left me in the car while she ran into the department store. Bored, I leaned over and began chewing on the dash in our new (beloved!) car. Ma comes back, sees the dash, and is LIVID. Not wanting to get into trouble (she beat us for the most minor of transgressions), I thought it best to blame someone else and settled on my ill-behaved cousin Tommy. She’s wasn’t buying it. “It WAS Tommy, Ma! He was walking down the street, came in, and chewed the dashboard! I swear!” I got the beating when we arrived home. I still wince at my insisting he did this on a whim. Argh.
hmm, perhaps a somewhat fast raccoon pilfered the peel, and when he realized that he couldn’t leave the scene quickly enough, he stashed it in the toilet bowl in a panic.
Thank you for the explanation, Waddles. It's good to have a nice pig around.
Load More Replies...Nobody caused lots of trouble at our house when my brother and I were small.
My parents had the same problem. My dad would say "let me guess,6 of y'all and nobody did It"
Load More Replies...There are 3 ghosts that inhabit your home once you have kids, Nobody, Ida Know, and NotMe
If I ask my son what he's doing and he says what he's doing than he's not getting in trouble. If he says "nothing" he was for sure doing something bad. Poor kid wonders how he always gets found out
My father is an elementary school teacher. He says the first person to say it wasn't them is usually the guilty one.
Load More Replies...America's Funniest Home Videos had a tape of a little boy decorating the bathroom with his mommy's butterfly stickers (pads with wings).
I got framed for several things in school. I also got ratted on. Come to think of it, I hated school prior to college...
Why does your 4yo have easy access to a blade or scissors unsupervised?
Anyone that's ever tried this will know how much force is needed to cut even a little bit into a tyre, certainly more than any 4-y-o is capable of.
They must’ve been the tires on a Barbie bike 😂
Load More Replies...A 4 year old has the strength to cut through a tire? Maybe "cookie dunkin' goat f**k" did it and blamed the 4 year old?
Omg I hadn't read the name above and I thought, wow that's a very specific yet creative insult
Load More Replies...I once stuck some thumb tacks in the tires of a family whose kid was a bully. Didn't think that through, but anyway they saw me and told my parents. Thumb tacks can't pop a car tire, but I didn't know that and my parents told me I had poped the tire and had to pay for a new one. So I had to do chores until it was paid off. Taught me several valuable lessons like look for cameras before vandalizing someone's house, don't commit a crime you can't pay for, and how to deal with my kids if they ever try to vandalize anything!
Sounds like something I'd do if I had any sort of inclination to do something like that
This post is perfect for confirming I made the right decision in never having children.
My brother got access to lipstick somehow and put it all over the bottom of our table. He was covered in it and he blamed me and my sister!
Our eldest went through a tiny phase where he would bite his younger brother and try convincing us that he did it to himself...the bite marks were on the back of his brother's shoulder. Like I said, it was a tiny phase because he finally understood why we didn't believe him.
This post is perfect for confirming I made the right decision in never having children.
My brother got access to lipstick somehow and put it all over the bottom of our table. He was covered in it and he blamed me and my sister!
Our eldest went through a tiny phase where he would bite his younger brother and try convincing us that he did it to himself...the bite marks were on the back of his brother's shoulder. Like I said, it was a tiny phase because he finally understood why we didn't believe him.
