What innocently childish beliefs did you have when you were young?

My dad had told me I was the last little girl that God had made with blonde hair and brown eyes. I believed it until I went to school.

I grew up in Chicago. In the summer my parents would take us to the beach on Lake Michigan. As a small child I believed it was the ocean, and that across the water was “China.”

Aw, these are great guys! :D

The hairy palm threat. I don’t remember if I was relieved or disappointed when it never happened! lol!

Jesus would save me.

Here are three:
1.) When the Easter Bunny visited our house, he hid our baskets, each labeled with a name. The hours before church were spent hunting for them. Siblings would taunt the others if they found someone else’s first. What later struck me as odd is that EB didn’t hide baskets at anyone else’s home. In fact, some experienced egg hunts. Hmm…

2.) Our family traveled to our grandparents’ house every year for Christmas. One morning, I came down to find no presents for me. There was a note from Santa apologizing for forgetting that I would be there instead of at home and that I would find my presents there upon return. It was a miserable morning watching everyone else open their gifts. When we finally got back home, I was told to help unload the car first before heading down to the basement where the fireplace was. And there they were…

3.) Whenever I took a bath, my friend Whistle would come to visit. There were long conversations between us, and we understood each other perfectly despite the fact that he could only whistle. My parents probably brushed it off as an imaginary playmate, but he was real. (I learned later that it was my older brother who would slip into the bathroom and hide from view in the toilet alcove.)

I could be daring and almost invincible. The risk would be minimal because the government would step in and help me if something went bad.

@woodcutter Um… care to elaborate? :P

Er…meaning I could be irresponsible and still come out smellin like a rose.

That I would stay married to my husband all my life.

I remember being about 4 and thinking that “batteries not included” in advertisements for toys meant that through some kind of magic, the toys never needed batteries!

The happily ever after crap, that if you were good and worked hard life would be a fairy tale. Surprise, life sometimes is a crap sandwich.

@Adirondackwannabe somewhere Tinkerbelle is dying….believe, believe…..

That rabbits lived under my bed, I always took a running leap to get on the bed, they were scary rabbits.

That there is someone out there for everyone

I thought I would stay a virgin until I was married. Man is that anything further from the truth

@creative1 there is someone out there for everyone. Finding them can be hard.

I actually have one for the flip side of this question.
I was born and raised in California. When I was 15 I took a bus trip to Illinois. When I was there, I saw Lightning Bugs for the first time.
I was shocked they existed. I thought it was the same made up stuff they tell kids.

@filmfann My sister in law is from Morocco and she had never seen lighting bugs before she came to the states.

I thought if you swallowed gum, your body wouldn’t digest it for years

I used to think I could marry fireflies in a jar. It was a lot of gay firefly marriages, I realize now…

I believed that if you turned back your lower eyelid (as we did in those days) and the wind changed direction, it would stay that way forever.… Did some other child tell me that? Probably.

The only belief I can recall is that Virgin Mary was God’s wife. My mom was highly into Christianity when I was a child and even had me read a kid’s bible.

If you had a loose tooth and it came out and accidentally swallowed it, it would bite you all the way down. Once a tooth was loose, I would wiggle it and wiggle it until it came out. I wasn’t going to be bit by my own tooth!

All I can think of are the things I would make a wish on! Birthday candles, stars, and dandelions

I used to think there were lots of tiny people inside my body making all the different parts work!!!

Back in the vacuum-tube electronics era of my early childhood, we had a large 1.5v dry cell battery (Rayovac) the size of a soup can. I imagined that, being gigantic compared to flashlight batteries, it had the power to electrocute me. (This belief of mine was not lost on my older brother, who habitually terrorized me with it.) Yet I imagined its insides to be crammed full of complex components somehow working together to generate a voltage. I was quite surprised to see, when it finally got cracked open one day, its very simple construction.

I used to think life was just like it is on television. I was pretty much the most stupid, gullible child ever, really.

I was just learning how to read, and I was reading a soap box that was under the kitchen sink. It said “50 Cents OFF!!!” I thought that meant the box was only 50 cents and it was kind of like an auction. Like, ”‘Off’ meant ‘50 cents END OF STORY!!”

I believed that I could throw black circle of cloth on the floor and jump into it like the Road Runner did. Mom made me one. I was REALLY disappointed!

I used to picture Adolf Hitler looked like Bill Clinton, the only political leader that I had seen photos of. I suppose that I could have looked him up – Dad got dial-up Internet through his employer – but I guess it just wasn’t as important as the Yahooligans! website.

We lived at the upper end in a foothills canyon. Not just me but several of the kids in the canyon, we believed if we ran fast enough, at the right time of day then the orange groves at the bottom of the canyon would open out onto “Sesame Street”.

@Neizvestnaya You have to do that on you bike. Sneakers can only travel so fast, but the bike would work.

@Adirondackwannabe none of us had bikes yet but we did have wagons we’d jump in and steer down the hill as far as we could go, it help ;)

@Dutchess_III That is so funny. Your first lesson in the difference between fantasy and reality

Yeah. :)

@Dutchess_III Imagine if it had worked, though!

I thought of another. TV programming for kids in the 1950s had a lot of westerns. Invariably I’d see horses galloping down the trail leaving huge clouds of dust behind them. I remember asking my mother why all that dust comes out of their rear ends?

Car trips were better, somehow, if I could close and lock my door, buckle my seatbelt, and squeeze my eyes shut before Dad got around to the driver’s side. Don’t quite remember why.

I used to believe it was completely normal for my dad to menace, hit, and terrorize me.