I think some people used to believe that a swallowed piece of gum might cause appendicitis. I don't know how accurate that belief is, but maybe your parents weren't trying to be mean, just cautious.
My parents told me something very similar about gum, and a whole lot of other weird things over the years. Is this a universal experience? I wonder if it's a helpful evolutionary trait, sort of like training your "mental immune system" the same way that your mother chewing your food and feeding it to you, germs and all, strengthens your actual immune system.
My eight-year-olds have gotten quite good at detecting when I'm pulling their legs. I never deceive them about anything serious, but I want them to learn to think critically about what authority figures tell them. My five-year-old is thoroughly convinced I can read his mind by putting my nose to his ear and smelling his brain; I established credibility when I was confident I knew what he was thinking. It works great for "I'm not tired" when he clearly is, or "my tummy is full" after two bites of food. Also, if he eats his eggs, at bedtime he will be strong enough to win a wrestling match with me.
I also enjoy planting small "easter eggs" for them...e.g. whenever we drive through the Holland Tunnel I hum the Super Mario underground theme, which I have explained simply as "tunnel music". One day they'll get it.
Not sure how helpful it is. I wasn't told much lies as a kid. Plenty of wrong things, yes, but those were all common misconceptions (some still widely held by people today, plenty of them present on this Wikipedia list[0]).
Someone close to me, however, was told a lot of such lies in their childhood, and continued to believe them into adulthood. When we met during our university years, I unknowingly debunked a few of those stories during casual conversations, and the person later thanked me and told me that, sadly, this completely shattered the trust they had for their father.
If you get in contact with your friend: point out to them that part of being a parent is building up an independent, bullshit tolerant, reality questioning adult.
If none of the things you debunked were serious, then it may have been seed planting for later epiphanies.
I've made very sure that the kiddos I spend time with have a rich mix of truths, half-truths, and jolly equivocations to sort through in their life, and they have no end of fun working their way to proving me wrong.
I consider this an investment in their future development of bullshit filters to keep things running when mine have finally given up the ghost (May it not happen in the forseeable future).
I’d tell my kids a lot fewer lies if they actually fell for them. Half the fun (and the entire point) is watching them get a more and more sophisticated nose for bullshit.
Yes, it is universal, at least in my circle. I think it’s not a trait, but simply our evolutional tolerance to stupid things parents say when it comes to parenting or to just being reasonable. You don’t die from not swallowing a gum, avoiding black cats or praying to invisible dude. So these things can live ages.
Only to my 30s I began to realize how much of this non-contextual nonsense was put in my mind, from gums to proverbs to rules to… basically everything was a subject for reevaluation.
My mother told me that picking my nose would result in my nose becoming like a cow's nose. She was right; my face is now indistinguishable from a cow's.
First hand account here from back in the 80s of grandmas chewing adult food for babies. No they were not birds but humans, all of them. Make what you want with this information.
I read a comment recently by a person born in an Asian country, where it was normal for babies or children to be fed by their parents “pre-masticated”. Makes complete sense to me. You might also do it for someone who was ill.
They mentioned that getting fed food was something they still occasionally did, that it was a supremely intimate thing to do.
The brother of an old friend got curious, went downstairs really early in the morning, found his dad's tools, and tried to unscrew his bottom. He poked around in his belly-button with a screw-driver until it started bleeding. This guy became one of the best car-mechanics later on in life.
"Somehow it was all tied up with a story he’d heard once, about a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. For twenty years he consults doctors and specialists all over the world, trying to get rid of this screw, and having no success. Finally, in Haiti, he runs into a voodoo doctor who gives him a foul-smelling potion.
He drinks it, goes to sleep and has a dream. In this dream he finds himself on a street, lit by green lamps. Following the witch-man’s instructions, he takes two rights and a left from his point of origin, finds a tree growing by the seventh street light, hung all over with colored balloons. On the fourth limb from the top there is a red balloon; he breaks it and inside is a screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle. With the screwdriver he removes the screw from his stomach, and as soon as this happens he wakes from the dream. It is morning. He looks down toward his navel, the screw is gone. That twenty years’ curse is lifted at last. Delirious with joy, he leaps up out of bed, and his ass falls off."
I thought of the same thing when I read the title of the post as well. Lovely book, made me laugh many times.
