Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, "eating carrots will make you see in the dark," "TV will rot your brain," "we're almost there" – parents say all sorts of untruths to their kids! Perhaps it's for protection, to make things more understandable, or to keep the magic and fantasy alive.
Sometimes though, it's not all that jolly – so here are a few tales about the worst lies people ever caught their parents telling!
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That my parents split up cos they was young. At 13 I found out that my dad had "cheated" on my mum and she couldn't forgive him. I then found out that this "cheating" had resulted in a 12 year old boy (yes they split when I was 5 weeks old) who both my parents knew about but I didn't.
At 21 I found out my father was r***d. Men being raped by women, especially in the military, didn't really happen 30 years ago. No one thought anything of the barmaid serving my dad free drinks all night and insisting on taking him to his room.
My dad woke up the next morning to 4 things
A note from the woman telling him she had a good time
My mums engagement ring from when she'd caught him
A hell of a custody battle on his hands which he lost
A lifelong alcohol addiction.
Just a side note - when my dad eventually told my mum as adults that he didn't consent to the "cheating" and he sought help she was really understanding and they are now good friends and coparents
That my mother was schizophrenic. I was 15 and knew she had been battling depression for years. Schizophrenia runs in our family and as an angsty teenager it was very easy for me to believe that she was crazy. She was completely convinced that my father had a secret second family. She was diagnosed and medicated for years. He did have a second family.
That the 2K I earned at my summer job would be safe in my mom's savings account until I wanted to withdraw it later. Never saw that money again.
When I turned 5 my mom told me that my dad sent me money to buy a bike from prison for my bday present. He didn't, she just didn't want me to forget him so she gave him credit for it.
one year I made an agreement with my mom for my holiday present. I would pitch in $100 and she'd pitch in $100 and she'd get me a nice $200 laptop. Which was decent enough for a teen at the time.
Instead, she took my $100, and bought my brother and I each a s****y $50 notebook style laptop with no battery, no wifi, and a barely functional mouse ball. I was disappointed when I saw what she got and immediately suspicious. This was NOT a $200 piece of tech. I found the receipt from her order and had the receipt from the withdrawal and demanded to at least get my money back if she was going to reneg on our deal. She denied ever making such a deal, ever taking money from my account, and said I should be thankful I got anything at all.
For reference my family was by no means poor. My mom had a second antique car she drove in the summer. Dad had a boat, motorcycle, and ATV all high end bought new. And they took 2 vacations a year without us kids minimum. While I struggled to have lunch money on a consistent basis. This was the moment that solidified my belief that my parents didn't give a single f**k and I needed to *never* rely on them again.
Oh man. That's a hard one to thin down to just one answer.
I'd have to say mine is this: my mom says I "started a fight" so that I could move out of her house. In reality, she tried to tell me that I couldn't go camping with my then 3 year old child (I was 18-19) and that she would call child protective services on me if I did. We got into a big fight, she told me to get the f- out of her house, so I grabbed my kid, some toys for her, some of her clothes, and my laptop -- and I left. If you ask my kid, who is now 14, what her earliest memory is, she will respond by telling you something along the lines of "my grandma holding my mom against the door by her throat".
It was great 🙄
One night I went downstairs to ask my mother something. My dad was a light sleeper and would get really pissed if anyone woke him up, so I whispered, "Mom! Mom!"
All of a sudden my dad sat up and yelled at me to get lost. They told me I should never sneak up on them because they had a gun and my dad thought I was an intruder and almost shot me.
They scared the beejeezus out of me. Sometimes when I tried to get to sleep I'd remember how my dad almost shot me. For years. Even after I moved out.
Decades later, I mentioned it to my mom. She started laughing and told me they were having sex. There was no gun.
"I won't get mad at you."
The worst lie? I was diagnosed with a chronic cancer at 16, and my mum got drunk and told all of my friends that my doctor had told her that I only had a year to live.
Found out through my friends when they started giving me excessive condolences.
Emailed my doctor, he never said that. Still don’t know why mum did that, my main theory was that she was scared.
Wanting some attention, get people to feeling sorry for her. Or to show that prayers work for cancer?
Found out when I was 25 I have a sister one yr older than me that they gave up for adoption, I'm 37 and been searching for her for the past 10 yrs.
"We are going to denmark for only a month" we are still here after 4 years
That they couldn’t afford to pay for college. So I took a job during the day and paid my way through night and weekend school.
Turns out I had a decent trust fund from my grandfather. I could have graduated and started working for a higher wage 4 years earlier. I tell myself that graduating in 2008 wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway.
We moved when I was 4, and we didn’t bring my parent’s 5-year-old cat with us. When I asked, they said they put her in a shelter and she’d be fine, some little old lady would probably adopt and coddle her.
They euthanized her. She was perfectly healthy, and they didn’t even give her up to the shelter. They just straight-up had her killed because she sometimes had hairballs.
After my mom died, my dad fell into [illegal substances] hard. My brother is autistic and he would get both Disability and SSA by check (this was before the Direct Express cards). Several times a year he would go to cash the checks, stay gone all day and then come home and claim his wallet was "stolen". Then the next day his wallet would *miraculously" reappear with everything in it except the money. I'm not even sure how in the world he managed to pay our rent or if he wasn't, why our landlord never kicked us out. We certainly didn't have electricity on (legally) most of the time, nor a phone or internet and what little food we had was through food stamps and me babysitting for my neighbor. I suppose you could claim he was using the money to pay the rent but the rent was only $350 (our landlord was a slumlord) and my brother got about $900 each month. I eventually got to the point where I didn't believe the "stolen wallet" story.
My mother inadvertently confessed to me that she read my sister’s diaries to catch her in a lie, but that she could never let my sister know she did it because it would destroy their trust.
Years later I asked her if she’d ever read any of her kids diaries, after I realized she knew something about me she couldn’t have known otherwise. She gave me a puzzled look and said she’d never snoop through her kid’s stuff because it would break their relationship if she got caught. I reminded her of how she did it to my sister. She looked very nervous and said “I didn’t think you’d remember that..” and quickly changed the subject.
So, not confirmed but I’m mostly certain my mom has read through my journals as a kid and went through my room when I wasn’t home .
Not the worst lie, but yeah.
My grandmother did this to my mom and she never journaled again after that because she didn't feel her private thoughts were safe anywhere else but her mind
*"if you go to a private college, we'll pay all your tuition."*
got accepted to an amazing private college, handed them the bill and...
*"no, not like that!"*
needless to say, I did NOT go to that amazing private school. 23 years later and I'm still bitter about it.
I was lucky enough to win a scholarship and obtain grants for college, and I graduated owing my parents about £2000. I had that paid back within 3 months of starting work. 30 years later, my mother still harps on about the sacrifices they made to be able to afford to send me to college, how hard she'd worked, how much money they'd given me and how ungrateful I was. All this, continually, despite me having evidence of how much they'd actually given me and when I paid it all back. All the money I handed over to them a few years later so they didn't lose their house never gets a mention. Some parents are just toxic.
They had no idea what that weird smell was in the basement when I was a kid. From around 8 years old to about 16, my mom would go down to do laundry and my Stepdad would go down to talk to her. I thought for the longest time it was just their little adult gathering place. They would even had their friends go down there as well. When they went down, a few minutes later, I would smell this odd smell.
As I got older, and got in high school, I had a more "rebel" sister. I finally found out what the smell was through her.
It was marijuana...lol. Oddly enough, going through D.A.R.E and all that, I always thought it would basically rot your brain and turn you into some type of zombie. That was a lie.
My Dad used to tell me that he learned all of his cool tricks and skills in "Daddy School." I'm now 28, married and still have not been enrolled.
That because of my 3.2 high school GPA I may have to "go back" to the German equivalent of high school — even though I had graduated and was in my first semester of college — if I moved there when my family did.
My Dad's company was transferring him to Germany in 1990. I had graduated high school in 1989 and was in my first year of community college (at the time).
Truth is they just didn't want me to come along because I was 19 and to them I should be on my own already. So they made it sound like I would have a very hard time getting into college in Germany because of their very high educational standards.
I knew my situation was weird because I was an adult and Germany's education (especially higher) system works differently, but I know plenty of young adult peers who followed their parents over when they got transferred (I came from a town where the company employed just about everybody, so a lot of families continued to be friends overseas). I bumped into two people I went to school with when I would visit them, and their GPAs in high school had been lower than mine.
The result is that my kid brother got the best education someone might get, while I ended up trying to make ends meet after my attempt at the military failed. That's not jealousy or envy, I say these things to show what the results of believing or making up BS stories instead of just being honest can do. I actually don't regret the path I've taken, but I do wonder how my life would be different if I had been able to live over there with them for a while, and it does make me angry to think my parents would make up something like that just out of some notion that a 19 year old adult son barely out of high school would be "dead weight" for them.
I would hide in the pants 👖 displays at Walmart as a child. My mom told me “you know how they make shorts 🩳 don’t you? A man comes by with a chainsaw and cuts the pants into shorts. & if your inside the rack. He will cut you in half.
That’s normal sibling rivalry.
No it wasn’t normal. You guys just didn’t want to deal with s**t and the s**t you caused by setting up a situation where you pitted my older sibling against me and then punished me when I fought back.
....This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you....yeah, right.
"I hit you because I love you" (not my parents, but someone else's).
They told me if I was lying there would be bubbles on my tongue. So when they asked me something and they thought I was lying they'd tell me to stick out my tongue. If I knew I was telling the truth, I'd open my mouth confidently and show off my bubble-free tongue. If I was lying, I'd try to scrape the bubbles off with my teeth.
I now use it on my son. Still works.
Classic. At one time parents used to tell their kids that their noses grew bigger when they lied, and they knew the kid was lying if they started rubbing their nose afterward.
That kids in africa are dying if i don’t eat my whole plate
My mom tried to tell my daughter, at my dinner table infront of my husband and I, that I had wanted to get married in her backyard. This was an attempt to validate her taking over my wedding (and ruining it for me) and to 'back me into a corner and agree with her.' Hubs and I shut that down real f*****g fast.
Up until I was 8 years old, they told me that daddy was away at college. We would go see him on weekends. Found out later that he was in prison. I wondered why we could only talk to him behind glass on a telephone...
When i was 4 We had a dog called Tilly, my mom said that she gave her away to a boy who couldn't speak and she died while saving him from drowning in a river
Years later when i was around 13, my mom was on the phone to her friends and they were talking about their pets that passed away, turns out that tilly died because my mom was drunk and let her out the house, she ended up getting hit by a car
That we (4 kids) would inherit about $9k each when our grandmother passed. There was some loophole my dad exploited (he said with his mother’s blessing) where he got all of the money (almost $40k, on top of whatever she gave him otherwise) and that giving it to us was a lie just so he didn’t have to pay taxes on it. At that point, why even tell us? I don’t think he really was meant to take that money.
I’d still be salty about it BUT he did pay for the first couple years of college for all of us (and my one brother’s entire Bachelor’s degree from Rutgers), so I guess it doesn’t matter in the long run. Still, s****y lies were told.
My Dad screwed us from inheritance form his parents when I was a kid :/ He called to say my Mom that she has to turn it down because we will inherit a lot of debt. Mom found out a year later that in Greek law at that time children could only inherit debt from parents, not grandparents... Not to mention it was the last time he called my Mom and he knew I was nearby because she was talking to me and didn't even ask about me... Eh someone hug me please, old wounds :/
They lied to me about my dog going to school, but it turns out he's dead😔
My dad told me that every pickle you eat adds 5 minutes on your life. I was like 5 and damn did I ever take that to heart.
The whole story about Sinterklaas (the Dutch equivalent of Santa)
When I was 8yo I was devastated when they confirmed my suspicions he doesn't really exist. Not so much because of the fact he isn't real (I had figured that out on my own) but because they had lied to me!
For years I couldn't believe how parents can justify it to themselves to blatantly lie to their own children and promised myself I would never do that!
But then my daughter was born and I happily told her the same 'lies'.
Oh the hypocrisy 😆
I have zero regrets about lying about Santa, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy - any of it. The joy and wonder it gave my son for those years was so worth being caught out as a lying liar that tells lies. Putting a little magic in someone's life, especially a child's, is never wrong even if it's not 100% true. These are not rotten, stinky black lies but glowing, shiny white lies and should be forgiven
My dad went into the ER with stroke-like symptoms. He ended up having a severe brain bleed that required immediate and major surgery. While he was laying in the ICU, my mother, who opened their computer to get insurance info, found messages on his linked in page, that he’d left open earlier that morning before I took him to the ER, from a woman he was engaged to in college. They had been having an affair for over a year.
When my sibling and I were young, we were tossing toys around that the Easter Bunny had left for us. My mom started yelling at us, “I did not buy those for you to treat them like that.”
Tbf, Mom could have been overwhelmed and simply wasn't thinking properly at the time. Not that it's right, but this pales in comparison to many on this list. Moms make mistakes too.
They told me the burnt pizza was just brown cheese….
that they knew how the world worked
You will break the PC if you touch the mouse during boot.
More of an omission: I was shooting the s**t with my grandmother, I can’t remember what she was talking about but she related it to my mother’s fight with breast cancer the year prior……..what fight with breast cancer?!?! I just nodded like I was in the loop. I guess it makes sense why I’m so reluctant to open up to people, look who built me lol
Although...as a Mom with breast cancer, I can understand. My son was young when I was diagnosed and I intended on sharing after I was in remission. His dad lost a partial leg and my son had endured enough. I only shared with my son earlier as it is unfortunately terminal cancer. Parents protect children when possible although not coddling them to allow them to live in utter ignorance hopefully.
