At some point in adulthood, between groaning when you get up and staying in on a Friday night, a bizarre realization will dawn. “My parents were right!” First, it won’t sit well with you. How could you possibly sympathise with the people who should now be footing your therapy bill? But when you let it linger a little bit, you will start to come to terms.
People online have confessed all these realisations, and all we can say is, “same!” All the bizarre punishments, weird habits, quirky sayings- they all ended up having a purpose. And heaven forbid, people are now applying them to their own children with varying degrees of success. Bored Panda has collected some of the biggest “a-ha” moments so that maybe we can all learn a little something together.
#1
My mom would be so quick to ground me when I got in trouble at school. While my dad did not ground me. For a long time, I thought that it made so sense to not ground me. But as I got older, I really understood why he didn’t. He didn’t because communication is what mattered, not punishing me. He would always sit me down and we’d discuss what happened, and we talked about what I did wrong, and what I can do differently next time. I learned that communication is key. If you just communicate, you will get a lot more accomplished.
Image source: GSB-32, August de Richelieu
#2
My parents and grandparents always tried to influence the need for financial planning and finding a supporting career which would greatly benefit me later in life towards supporting an early, comfortable Retirement. Little did I ignorantly know at the time, how right they were. As it turned out, by listening and paying attention to their teachings and lessons of experience, I was able to comfortably retire my 50s with a full pension and great benefits. “Life is great if you pay attention.”
Image source: Retired-Recluse, Pavel Danilyuk
#3
My mother never gave me snacks to eat😭
Sounds sad but instead she always gave me fruits and nuts . Well I didn’t understand it then, but I guess she just wanted her kid to be healthy and I do appreciate it deeply as it improved my gut and kept my physique in check✅
Image source: Anagha-Menon-79, Tim Samuel
The appreciation moment is not random, though. A landmark OnePoll survey found that the penny tends to drop around age 22, right as independence kicks in and adulthood starts presenting its invoices. That is when the bizarre rules and seemingly harsh calls your parents made begin to rearrange themselves into something that looks a lot like foresight.
And if you have children of your own? The shift goes from logical appreciation to full emotional crisis. Understanding why your mother looked permanently exhausted is a completely different experience when you are the one awake at 3 am with a baby attached to you and no instruction manual in sight.
#4
The crucial importance of kindness and courtesy as you go through the day. And that includes kindness and courtesy to siblings, however annoying they are, as well as to everyone else you encounter. I remember so clearly my grandfather saying how much it pained him to hear us kids verbally brutalize each other. That stuck with me.
Image source: Ellen-B-Cutler, Getty Images
#5
Rather than saying, “Clean your room”. It would be, you can either “Clean your room or do this even more annoying/time consuming/disgusting job”. Sometimes it would be a genuine decision, like “Mow the lawn or Clean the car”.
Providing the choice actually reduced the natural teenage habit of rebelling.
I used the same thing with my kids who, I discovered after a stupidly long time, had being doing back to me!
Can you pick me up or pay for an Uber?!?
Image source: bungle_bogs, Tahir osman
#6
If two kids have to split something like a brownie one gets to cut it and the other gets first pick for which piece they get. The cutter will be oh so careful to make it as even as possible.
Image source: Shyfiver, Ferks Guare
One seemingly bizarre hack that experts love to suggest is to try to avoid answering your kid’s questions directly. It shouldn’t be because you are lazy, but you should use it as a deliberate strategy. If they ask: “Why is the sky blue?” hit them back with: “What’s your theory?”
The Kid Counselor notes that this habit forces a child’s mind to actively seek solutions rather than passively receive them. The child who has to construct a theory learns to trust their own thinking. The child who is just handed answers learns to wait for them. Both approaches will get you through childhood. Only one of them gets you through much else.
#7
Mom caught me smoking. Told me I was old enough to make decisions like that (of course I wasn’t), just that she was kinda disappointed, because she had thought I was smarter than that. She left it with just that comment and I never touched another cigarette in my life. .
Image source: Sipyloidea, Lesli Whitecotton
#8
My mom had me convinced as a kid that steamed broccoli with butter and lemon juice was an after dinner dessert.
Image source: H0B0aladdin, Louis Hansel
#9
They pushed me out of my comfort zone while letting me be a kid. I was always the shy smart one. They’d make me go to birthday parties and events I said I didn’t want to go to because they knew I always had fun once I was there. They didn’t let me skip second grade despite the teacher suggesting it because they thought it would harm me socially (they were probably right). And they wouldn’t let me live at home and go to the local state college when I had outstanding grades and SAT scores.
They never pushed me beyond my limits, but didn’t let me coast either. Thanks to them, I have an ivy league PhD and an excellent job. I also like to think I’m a relatively normal and well-adjusted person whose only mental health issues have been briefly postpartum. I’m forever grateful to them.
Image source: nerdsnuggles, Curated Lifestyle
Connected to this is the two-options strategy, which behavioral researchers at The Behavioural Hub describe as one of the more elegant hacks in the parenting toolkit. Pick two outcomes you are completely fine with, offer them both, and let the child choose. Don’t make it about whether the task happens, but which item or when.
Keep it to two options so nobody gets overwhelmed. What feels like freedom to the child is actually a very tightly managed situation, and by the time they figure that out, they have already done their homework and eaten their vegetables. Genius is often just misdirection with good intentions.
#10
My mom would serve us vegetables like cucumber slices or carrot sticks before dinner as “appetizers”. We were hungry enough to eat them and felt fancy and grown up for having appetizers to eat. We had our veggies before dinner and wouldn’t have to be nagged to eat more veggies during the “entrée”.
Image source: izwotitiz, cottonbro studio
#11
My grandfather told me, in his eternally sagacious way, that my Gameboy’s batteries would last 100x longer with the volume off.
Image source: LurkethInTheMurketh, Luis Quintero
#12
My dad told me not to worry about what other people thought of me, if they didn’t like me that was their problem, not mine. When I wa sa teen, I was so envious of the popular girls and boys, I wanted to be the girl that everyone liked, but now his advice makes sense
Image source: Sylvia-Jenkins-12, cottonbro studio
Few cultural moments quite capture this moment of reflection and role reversal quite like Freaky Friday. In both the 1976 original and the 2003 Lindsay Lohan remake, this whole dynamic is depicted more accurately than most parenting books manage to. So maybe a little rewatch is in order, strictly in the name of research, of course.
A teenager and her mother swap bodies and spend a deeply uncomfortable stretch of time learning that the other person’s life is harder than it looked from the outside. The mother discovers the social gauntlet of high school. The daughter discovers that running an actual life takes too much effort.
#13
When i was a little toddler, my mom worked at the convenience store next door and had to bring me while she was working. i would get so bored just sitting around waiting for her to be done work. so she would pass the time by telling me stories of this *super-cool* club for kids.
where *only* kids who are potty trained get to go, just to play all day! where theres all kinds of wonderful toys and a big park attached to it and if i was good, then *someday* even i would get to go there.
but, parents arent allowed to come cuz its for kids only…so she told me i had to be ready to not see her for the *whole* day if i wanted to go to this super cool play place…..and she could only bring me if i was *reeeaally* good and worked hard to leave the diapers behind
yall i worked so hard to get out of diapers so i could go to this fabulous fantastical place of toys and fun. when i could finally go i thought it was the best thing ever. i was so excited and i made so many friends and it was awesome. i was really confused about why some of the other new kids were so upset about going to the kids-only-super-fun-club-of-fun. they would cry when they were dropped off but i would cry sometimes when i had to leave
guys…..it was just daycare. i thought *daycare* was a super exclusive theme park for kids. i thought i was hot stuff for being accepted into their cool club. its one of the coolest things my mom managed to do tbh. so many kids were completely devastated and i never had to go through that feeling of abandonment that i saw so many of my (eventual) friends go through when they first started daycare.
Image source: princess_kittah
#14
Half of my allowance was cash, and the other half was book tokens. Parents didn’t restrict how I spent either, but it gently encouraged me to become a lifelong reader and will be a structure I replicate for my own children.
Image source: scullyscientist, cottonbro studio
#15
Toys/games were a no no out of birthday and Christmas. But books? Any day, whatever I wanted, there and then. No waiting, no fussing, just “YES” let’s go get it.
Image source: GrumpySimian, Alexandra Krainyukhova
One parenting call that divides comment sections every single time is the no-sleepover rule. To a child, this is social exile. To a significant body of research, it is a defensible position. Registered child psychologist Tammy, from the Institute of Child Psychology, notes that 70% of peer-to-peer mistreatment happens between children, and that sleepovers introduce a set of variables that are hard for any parent to fully account for.
You must think about older kids in the house, unsupervised screen time, unknown household rules, and even potentially accessible firearms. The family seemed perfectly nice at school pickup, but how much does anyone actually know about someone else’s home at midnight?
#16
My parents told me that instead of carrots, the Easter bunny liked to eat greens.
So every year I’d go out and clear weeds from the front and back garden to collect food to leave out for the Easter Bunny.
Honestly? I found it really fun as a kid. Hilarious to think back now that they just wanted the gardens cleaned.
Image source: hoginlly, Dominika Mazur
#17
We were offered $50 each to not attend the annual show. This was like a state fair, with overpriced rides, food and show bags. We always took the $50 (because it seemed like a huge amount). Now I know what it costs to attend, parent probably saved a few hundred by not going.
Image source: Chesterlie
#18
When my sister’s and i were little were fighting in the car and my mom needed a break, she would get us kiddy frostys but only let us use the straw. It gave her able 10- 15 minutes of pure silence and we tried in vain to get that chocolate goodness
Also we were allowed to stay home sick from school anytime we said we were not feeling well. The catch is that some you were sick, you had to stay in bed. This was before cell phones. No TV, no radio, no getting up to play, just in bed with a book. She would go so far as to bring lunch to you in bed. Now, if we were verifiable sick- fevers, strep throat, pneumonia, chicken pox, vomiting, etc we could lay on the couch and watch tv. But because it was so boring to stay home when you didn’t feel sick, none of us faked sick but a few times.
Image source: Relevant_Struggle
None of this is a reason to spiral into permanent suspicion of every parent at the school gate. But it does explain why the parents who said no to every sleepover without ever fully explaining why were, in many cases, running a fairly rational risk assessment. The frustrating part is that the full explanation would not have helped much anyway, because children live almost entirely in the present moment.
Researchers explain that without a fully developed prefrontal cortex, they cannot connect current circumstances to future consequences. This is also why a child bouncing off the walls at 9 pm will tell you with total conviction that they are not tired. They are not lying, but they genuinely cannot feel what is about to happen to them in twenty minutes or how they will feel in the morning.
#19
I learned that ‘my’ advice wasn’t something that my kids wanted to hear. So the advice I gave them always came from someone else, mostly ‘my’ grandfather…
Image source: spence602
#20
Dinners were always for family, no tech allowed. I wanted to play my gameboy, or watch TV but my mostly lax father was very strict on this one rule. I have a ton of good, strong memories of just sitting and talking and joking over dinner now and I’m so glad my dad never gave in.
Image source: tkkltart
#21
Imagine my surprise when I learned that the “music truck” in fact, sold ice cream.
Image source: elibbebeth
“Because I said so” has a bad reputation and a fairly solid defense. When parents reach for it, they are usually several hundred micro-negotiations deep into the day. Every boundary is potentially a debate, every rule has to withstand cross-examination, and children cannot always process lengthy explanations logically anyway.
Child behavior researchers point out that explaining every decision has value some of the time, but that limits do not always need a full rationale to be legitimate. Sometimes “because I said so” is a parent running out of bandwidth. And sometimes the lesson is that the world will not always justify its rules to you, and learning to function within them is something you are going to need.
#22
My dad would give us outside chores but disguised them as games. For example, he would divide the deck into sections, give each of us a section, a paint brush, and a bucket of water and tell us we needed to paint the deck. Whoever finished first would get to choose their treat first when we went to the ice cream shop. The catch was we had to ride our bikes to the ice cream shop and we couldn’t take the short cut. So not only did he have us outside for hours washing the deck, weeding the garden, washing the car, sweeping the garage, raking the leaves – we then had to ride to the ice cream shop and back. We thought it was a fun game that always ended with ice cream – he got help with the outside chores, a bike ride with us kids, ice cream and 3 very tired little kids.
Another thing they did was when we would have garage sales any of our possessions that got sold, we got to keep the money. We also ran a popcorn & lemonade stand but we had to pop the popcorn and make the lemonade. As long as we did all the work we got to keep all of the money. We learned the value of hard work and the value of money.
Image source: neinta
#23
When I was around 10, my mom took a blank deck of index cards in fun neon colors and on each one wrote (in gel glitter pen) a fun activity I can do on my own in the house. She then titled the stack “things to do when you’re bored, shuffle the deck and pick one.”
It cost nothing and I used it for all my pre teen years. Each card was specific to me and my interests and what we had around the house. I loved it and thought it was so fun and cool.
Image source: Head_Fishing_1259
#24
My dad told us that if a bird gets sprinkled with salt they freeze and you can pet them. We’d be out in the yard running around with salt shakers trying to catch the birds. It didn’t hit me until I was in my 20’s.
Image source: Annual_Wolf_9682
Then there are the white lies, which the thread has complicated feelings about. Plenty of people grew up believing that the toy store was mysteriously closed every Sunday, or that carrots genuinely improved your eyesight. These feel harmless, and in some cases they are. But research from NTU Singapore, led by associate professor Pei Pei Setoh, found that white lies only significantly increased children’s likelihood of lying back if the child already knew they had been misled.
Instrumental lies were more damaging regardless: “behave or I’ll call the police” or “finish your homework and we’ll go to Disneyland” increased dishonesty in kids no matter what. The takeaway is not that all parental creativity backfires, but that kids are tracking honesty far more carefully than most adults give them credit for.
#25
The silent scream contest. To make my sister and I shut up in the car, Mom would challenge us to see who could fake screaming the longest. It worked, but goodness knows how it looked to anyone looking our way.
Second place goes to her faking falling asleep and letting us have the tv remote if we gave her a backrub. Even now I’m in awe of how she played us.
Image source: Blue_Moon_Rabbit
#26
Two things my parents did that were genius and that I used with my kids.
1. I almost never got yelled at. Instead, when I acted up or was otherwise an idiot, we had to discuss it. At length. It was excruciating. I was certain that getting yelled at and punished was better.
2. My mom only said she was disappointed with me once. That was nearly 50 years ago and I remember it vividly. She was absolutely in the right to be disappointed in me and I worked very hard to never make her disappointed in me again.
RIP mom and dad. Thank you for all you taught me.
Image source: Steakonanopenfire
#27
My very first semester at school, my GPA was 0.77.
I did terribly that first semester. I partied too much in the dorms, I enjoyed independence too much, I cut class all the time, and I absolutely bombed.
And my parents were footing the bill 100%.
I came home after that first semester, and gave them the bad news.
You know what they did???
> “We know you aren’t proud of this, and we know you’re sorry, and we know you can do better. We still believe in you, we still know you’ll succeed. Try again next semester, all we ask is that you do your best. We love you”.
No punishment. No yelling. No “you’ll pay us back for this”. Just love, support, encouragement, and forgiveness.
And you better believe I took that to heart. And I never messed up like that again. I got my degree with a GPA of 3.25, went to grad school (paid for that myself), and enjoyed a rewarding, high earning 35 year career in software.
And my folks were never prouder.
Image source: whomp1970
What the thread captures is the accumulated weight of small, consistent decisions that did not announce themselves as important at the time. Nobody registered the dinner table as doing developmental work, and nobody thought the chore chart was building anything lasting.
It just happened, over years, in ordinary kitchens and ordinary arguments that felt enormous and are barely memories now. Looking back and seeing the shape of it is its own kind of gift, even when it arrives a decade later than anyone would like.
Did you ever have a lightbulb moment where your parents’ weird choices finally made sense? Share it with us in the comments!
#28
My parents very casually made reading a priority. We never did the thing where the parent sets a timer and the kid has to read for 20 minutes; it was never a chore, it was just something we do for fun. My parents owned a lot of books and subscribed to several magazines (National Geographic, Nature, Sail, This Old House…). Dad read to us nearly nightly (he worked some nights) and both mom and dad read in front of us regularly. We visited the library every Saturday morning and never had restrictions on what we could check out. We gave and received books as gifts and loved it.
They did similar with music, but to a lesser degree. Mom played violin casually and dad played trumpet in a low-key local orchestra, and occasionally in the pit orchestra for musicals. We all had piano lessons and the option to pick up a second instrument. We listened to all kinds of music on the radio: orchestral, big band, swing, oldies, classic rock, and country (plus the occasional baseball game) and went to orchestra and choir concerts. My favorite were the Messiah productions at Christmas.
These things — especially the music lessons — make it sound like we were well off, but we really weren’t. We scraped by and got a boost from government assistance at times. But we sacrificed in some areas (very rarely had name-brand anything from cereal to shoes). Mom and dad just prioritized things like reading, music, education, and travel over new cars or the latest fashions. .
Image source: RagingAardvark
#29
I lived a 45 minute bike ride from school. I’m the summer cycling was default, but in the winter, my parents had a deal: if you bike through the winter months, you get half the cost of the monthly bus fare as pocket money. Everybody won, I got money and exercise, parents saved on bus fare.
Image source: Nothing_above
#30
My poppy used to collect rusty old washers in an old coffee can and when my little brother or I were being too chaotic he would set us up in the garage with the can, an ancient table vice and sheets of sandpaper of various grit and ask us to do him the favor of sanding his washers clean so he could use them for x or y project. We actually loved it, and it wasnt until I was an adult talking with my dad about how poppy used to recycle his washers that my dad pointed out to me that my poppy used to collect our meticulously polished shiny washers, chuck them back in the can, leave them out in the rain and have us polish them again. Their sole purpose was to keep us busy lol.
Image source: Longjumping-Ad-2072
#31
As a kid my Mom would read to me before bed — partially because I struggled with Phonics, but also because it was just fun and a good way to wind down — and overtime, as we made our way through my bookshelf and got into chapter books she’d read less and less. Like she’d read a few pages and then put it away. Eventually it got annoying because I learned I absolutely couldn’t stand non-resolution.. so I’d stay up, finishing entire chapter books before Dawn on my own.
Tldr: My Mom taught me to read by ragebaiting me with cliffhangers.
Image source: kelpey98
#32
The most genius thing my mom and dad did was the Saturday morning routine. First rule: we could watch cartoons until they got up; after that the TV went off. So we were all super quiet so they would sleep as late as possible…sometimes even until 7 or 7:30!
Once they got up, mom wrote out the chore list. There were always five things on the list, some were easy, some were hard. The first kid who had their room clean got first pick, and so on.
This meant as soon as they got up, we jumped up, turned off the TV, and rushed to clean our rooms. After that things dissolved into chaos, so don’t think our family life was perfect, but it was a good start.
Image source: us2bcool
#33
When I was about 8, my mom let me open one of those break-open lottery tickets for her, and I won 50$. She said I was allowed to keep the prize, but gave me the choice of either getting 50$ cash, or 50$ worth of break-opens. I chose to get the lottery tickets, thinking I would win a bunch more money (logical, right?). Nope. As she had correctly guessed, there was not a single big winner among those tickets, and I was sorely disappointed. I forever learned the lesson that gambling gets you nowhere, and I haven’t bought a lottery ticket since.
Image source: NyoomKatz
#34
Apparently the first thing my mum did when she brought my older brother home from the hospital was make the house noisy – radio on, appliances running etc. She says she did this because she hates silence and didn’t want a baby that would wake up if so much as a mouse farted.
She swears it worked and actually might have done – to this day my brother and I could probably sleep through WWIII starting.
Image source: MadamKitsune
#35
We had the “no questions asked” policy. If we ever ended up in a situation we didn’t want to be in, even if it wasn’t where we said we’d be or with people we said we wouldn’t be with, we could call any time of the day or night, and one parent would come pick us up, no questions asked. My mother was a youth and adolescent psychologist; she had seen too many children get seriously hurt because they were more scared of their parents than the danger of the situation they were in. My parents figured, if we had to enact the “no questions asked” policy, whatever had happened to us had already been punishment enough. .
Image source: Scriveners_Sun
#36
Mom played the Grocery Store Game. She had a very limited budget, two kids 6 and 7 years old, and zero energy. When we went grocery shopping, she gave my brother and I a notepad and a calculator and a final total we couldn’t exceed. The rules of the game were don’t go over the final total, and what we buy has to be able to cover multiple meals.
We kept track of the price of each item going into the cart. We didn’t wheedle and cry in the store for candy because the math didn’t work. She taught us unit pricing and we’d figure out which package was the better deal. She pushed the cart through the store with two quiet children doing the mental work.
Image source: Cute-Peach7307
#37
I always spent New Year’s Eve with my grandparents (because they were my fave people). They used to put up the special “New Years Clock” that was analog. My grandpa would wind it forward before putting it up. I thought I stayed up until midnight every single new years until they finally told me as an adult. I had complained to them that I just couldn’t stay up that late anymore and I wished I could hang like I did when I was little. They busted out laughing and said I never made it past 9pm.
Image source: Mmodaff
#38
When I was 9 years old, I had a crush on chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer because I watched a documentary about him on TV. I was swept away by the 20-something Fischer in the documentary, at the height of his career, wearing a suit and looking so smart. I told my grandma and she said “intelligence is not the only important trait in a man. Better consider other traits too.”
Years later as a teenager I had a crush on the young Albert Einstein when I read a biography about him. I looked at photos of Einstein in his 20s and although he was no heartthrob I saw beauty and intensity in his deep set eyes. My grandma said something similar: “intelligence is very important but only up to a point. Highest caliber intelligence without any morals would make for a terrible husband. Such a choice would be a tragedy.”
This pattern repeated. I admired genius men throughout my 20s and my grandma said: “marrying a man who is all brains and no character is a bad idea. That’s only 20% of what makes a man worth the trouble.” As I’ve gotten older I met many people like that: exceptionally bright but without moral restraints or integrity of character. There is nothing more dangerous than an extremely high IQ sociopath like the Unabomber Ted Kaczynsy. I listened to her advice and I realized she was right. A very high IQ partner may be impressive “on paper” (you have bragging rights) but it may not bring you happiness and peace. It may simply bring you sorrow, disappointment, a home life of neglect and regret.
Image source: A-Manchurian-Candidate, Andrea Piacquadio
#39
The first thing that comes to mind: “No sleepovers”! As an adult, I have heard so many stories of friends just because of the proximity with someone else, that I really appreciate the no sleepover concept.
Image source: Casta-Diva-5
#40
This is a story my Dad always tells me when I am posed with a difficult situation.
Among the many trees in the forest there is a tall coconut tree with a strong trunk which is well rooted into the ground and beside it is a shrub with very flexible and tender branches, a day comes when the trees are subjected to a wind storm and all the trees in the forest begin to uproot the coconut tree standing in all majesty tries to resist the forces of the wind and eventually gets uprooted too while the shrub sways along with the direction of the wind adapting itself to the roars of the storm and the shrub survives the storm. Just like the above story when you are subjected to high stress and difficult situations in life instead of resisting,cajoling and fighting against it learn to accept the situation ,experience it and let go of it , to summarise it go with the flow of life and eventually in no time you will be out of the mess . Learn to let go of the illusion of control:)
Image source: Swetha-Dhanabalan
#41
I earned my first pay check, working as clerk in law firm at age of 20- 21, excitedly I handed over the cheque to my mom, being super excited.
She cooly handed me back the cheque to me saying “ Good so now that you have started earning learn to manage Ur own expenses ,from now on u are going to manage all ur expenses on Ur own and ask for pocket money only in case if need .”
This was a big shock for me ,who was brought up in a upper middle class family , having affluent parents meeting all my demands .
It was a struggle to get my first cheque encashed ,then started the struggle to calculate exact amount of money required for day to day expenses and with draw the same from bank ( it was late 90s and ATM and cards were not common).
Then came the realisation that my meger pay was barely sufficient to meet my day to day needs ,like transportation, hotels, shopping hanging out with friends etc ( this did not include things like food, medicines, college fees ,clothes and other basic necessities as same was taken care by my parents).
I was too hurt and angry to ask for money from my parents and first few months were a real struggle resulting in drastic change in my life style,like preferring street food over hotel food, use of public transport etc.
I learnt to manage my expenses,held on to the job ,look for better job and save money for emergencies and special occasions.
This act of my parents taught me value of money and also taught me to live within means and not splurge money,which is proving valuable till date and I am eternally grateful to my parents for bitter yet valuable life lesson.
Later , when I was working with a big corporate I faced the issue of filing Income tax returns and I sought help from my father,an accountant by profession . He flatly refused and asked me to figure it out on my own. I vouched to learn all about savings , taxes,tax saving instruments etc on my own and was able to self learn quite a bit with help of internet and as on date posses better knowledge on subject than my father ,a retired accountant
Other day he sheepily, admitted that he purposely refuse to help me with my first tax filing as he didn’t want me to be like many working woman who solely rely on their husbands to manage their money,adding to another important life lesson.
The most important lessons taught by my parents are Value of Money and Money management which I appreciate and will continue to appreciate till end of my days!
Image source: Manisha-385
#42
They both gave me a great work ethic, which doesn’t seem to exist today. There seems to be a lot of entitlement being expected as well as respect. I keep hearing about not getting respect, what they don’t understand is you don’t GET it, you have to earn it. How can I respect someone I don’t even know? Respect your elders because they’ve earned it. I’ll treat you with good manners & common consideration but don’t treat me like crap & expect my respect in return. That’s not how it works.
Image source: Virginia-Woodley
#43
This may sound entirely lame to the younger generations. So be it. My father once told me (when I was about 14 and had asked to call a boy in my class) “Never chase a boy. You have to let them chase you until you catch them.” Say what? I remember being very puzzled over that. Finally, when I turned 18 and began really dating it dawned on me what he was trying to say. If you chase a boy they will want you, but maybe not enough to want to chase you. They will take it because it is “easy pickings”. But if they want to chase you then let them— until you decide if you really want them. It was genius!
Image source: Rose-Campbell-51
#44
For me it was their constant monitoring of what I was reading.
Right from when I can remember, my parents were extra careful of the books and any kind of printed matter I had access to. They chose what books they let me read. Even the little picture books I had used to be read through first by my father before he even bought it.
By the time I was 5, I was reading full fledged books (not the picture books) and that is when the restrictions became more strict. I was given books like Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales or 1001 Arabian Nights or even Grimm’s Fairy Tales while my friends were reading Enid Blyton and Archie comics.
I did not have a single Enid Blyton book in my home bookshelf. Comics were out of the question. I used to plead with them to let me but comics and every time I would be refused. Their justification was that the language used in them would be detrimental to my growing vocabulary.
Oh how cross I used to get! 😄
While all my classmates would discuss Archie and Veronica, I’d try to regale them with stories of the Swan Princess or Thumbelina. And they’d get bored 😴
During high school, my best friend who knew about my predicament used to bring her comics and story books to class and I used to read during school hours. I couldn’t take the books home as there was always the risk of my nosey kid sister finding them and she used to often randomly rummage my schoolbag for a pencil or eraser when she couldn’t find hers. So I used to read the books at an extremely high speed. A book a day was my usual speed.
Thanks to this, my reading speed is really good even today.
Although I was annoyed at my parents for their interference back then, I realised later that they were only pushing me to have a better vocabulary than my peers and to develop a taste for good literature. Even today, I find myself unable to go beneath a certain level when reading something. I do not like excessive verbal vulgarity or usage of sleaze just for the sake of it. Thanks to all that ‘training’, today my standards while choosing a book to read are set high and not based on any yardstick but my own. I do not choose books based on their popularity with the masses. And just because the literary world is raving about it, I wouldn’t read something I am not inclined to read. And academically, my command over the English language is something my English teachers were proud of. The fact that I have become so popular on Quora is also due to my ability to express myself with clarity.
I have only my parents to thank for all this and more. Had they not been so careful about what they were exposing me to at such a young age, I would never have been what I am today. Today, I am free to choose what I read. But I know how to differentiate between trash and treasure. I still show my father the latest book I’m reading. He would just read the synopsis and maybe give a grunt of approval. He doesn’t say anything else. He knows he doesn’t need to anymore 🙂
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#45
Dad would take me to little family events, birthday parties, or backyard barbecues and leave. He has to earn money from his contracted jobs so he works when he needs to. But I’m alone with family right? Yeah well when one of your aunts doesn’t approve of out of wedlock chilldren, and the other one believes you are an excuse you get the idea. But I could hang out with my cousins. They had video games, and laptops, and just all sorts of cool stuff dad couldn’t afford to get me. We got along great regardless of the adult supervision. Later when we get older I, the youngest by the way, gets drafted. We lost grandma, grandpa stops communication, cousins send me. Uncle had a disagreement with a car situation, they call me to mediate. Two brothers, one being my dad, have an argument they communicate through me. What, why me? And my cousins tell me I remind them of grandma. OMG, I get light headed and dizzy…I…me…how do I remind anyone of grandma. They tell me I spent the most time with her, she taught me how to dress, talk, dictate, and all of the men in my family respected grandma. I sound and behave just like her. Even the preacher at her church confided to me that when I sing on Sundays attendance goes up if he tells people I’m singing next week. Because my dad made me attend family events alone I had to stand up for myself against family. And the one person that could get respect from anyone was my beautiful grandma. Thanks dad.
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#46
Grandfather told me if I said something like “oop-la!” while making an effort, it’d give me more strength.
I used to climb up furniture, so from that moment onwards I started going “oop-la” as I was making my way up the sofa for instance. They’d hear it and instantly run to make sure I wasn’t going to hurt myself.
He basically installed an alarm.
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#47
This was a story told at my friend’s grandpa’s funeral.
They had five kids in a small house and on Sundays he’d put the kids in the back yard and throw about $1.75 in various coins around the yard. He told the kids that there was $2.00 in change and what they found they could keep. The kids would spend forever trying to find that last $0.25 and the parents would have alone time in the house presumably to try and make more kids.
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#48
My dad hired me to edit things for his alumni newsletter when I was 11 or so, $10/hr, style guide provided – my allowance was $4/week so it was *really* good money. He paid me to learn grammar (sneakily) and honestly, with a style guide, a bookish 11-year-old was editing pretty well.
We also played poker with the spare change jar – my buy-in was waived, but I could keep what I won. I play a pretty decent hand of poker now.
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#49
Best hack I’ve ever heard was my best friend. Her family had always gone to the boardwalk like 6 hours away as a group for a week. The year she had to drive down with just her and her young kids (maybe 4 and 6?) she had the best plan.
They always spent time at the arcade together. She had a few rolls of quarters dedicated to this. So she gave them each a little bag. All the way down she bribed them with THE QUARTERS THEY WERE ALREADY GETTING 🤣
Who can be quiet the longest? If you can keep your hands to yourself for 5 minutes you get a quarter. Great job helping your sister with that – here’s a quarter for the arcade. Whining kids don’t go to the arcade…(two minutes later) great job playing calmly, here’s a quarter.
Absolute genius!
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#50
They turned buckling our seatbelts into a game. The first one to buckle won.
They never had to worry about us buckling.
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#51
Listens politely to a problem, then “what’s your plan to do about it”.
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#52
I used to think I was really good at not getting caught reading under the covers past my bed time. I’m pretty sure my mom knew and was just glad I was reading.
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#53
You guys have space at home to have your friends over. Within reason, have some drinks (from 16ish, UK, so not insane), make the space your own.
I thought they were just really cool parents until much later when they told me and my sister that if they did that, they knew where we were and that we were safe.
Well played parents. Well played indeed.
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#54
My parents implemented odd and even days between my sister and me to keep us from arguing over everything. One year, I would be assigned odd days of the month and my sister even days. The following year, our assigned day would swap. It applied to everything when my sister and I were given a choice. Where we wanted to eat, what movie to watch that night, what seat we wanted in the car, etc. It also applied to chores. We had to clean the kitchen and vacuum the house every night. Whoever’s day it was got to choose their chore. Of course, there are more odd days than even days in the year which is why we would swap assigned days at the beginning of the year to try and make it fair.
My parents kept this up FOR YEARS and still swear it saved their sanity.
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#55
I don’t remember being told that I was adopted. I’ve always known. Them telling me so early that it was never a surprise and consistently messaging what a gift their children were to them was a beautiful way to handle it. I’ll be forever grateful.
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#56
I’m not sure if my parents intended for it to work the way they did, but it would be genius parenting if they did.
My dad refused for years to buy a color TV set because it was too expensive. I didn’t watch all that much TV as a kid at least partly for that reason and was an enthusiastic reader. My dad got a deal from a friend when I was off at college and finally got the color TV. I was surprised to learn later that color TV rolled out in the mid 1960s—we could have been enjoying it for years.
My parents are both deceased now, so I can’t ask them if this was a complex long-term plan to make TV unappealing so my sister and I would read more!
This exact strategy is not available now due to the unavailability of black & white TV sets. Perhaps it can be adapted in some way by parents in the twenty-first century.
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#57
My grandpa told us a snake had escaped and it was behind the oven. None of us ever got burnt on that over.
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#58
I was under ten when I asked my grandma what her cigarette was.
She made me have a puff.
I never was tempted to smoke again.
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#59
Full access to my dad’s eclectic library, unrestricted. Nothing traumatic, tons of fun and interesting stuff that’s educated or entertained me to this day. From comics to religion to politics. No critiques, no books pushed, just have at it at your own pace.
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#60
I was rather little and saw older kids ‘giving the finger’. Unsure what it meant, I showed it to my mother, who told me how it was a little bit rude but there was no real harm in doing it because THIS FINGER – THE PINKY FINGER. Oh dear god, you NEVER stick your pinky finger up at someone. It’s unspoken of! Those older kids were flashing their middle finger because they didn’t even know there was a worse finger to wave around!
Needless to say, I spent the next few years thinking I was tough with my rebellious pinky finger. Showed all the kids at school :).
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#61
When I would ask my parents to buy me something, they would sometimes tell me that we couldn’t afford it this month. It was a pretty powerful message, you don’t spend money that you don’t have. And it has stuck with me decades later.
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#62
My dad would not just pay me an allowance, but would pay me $2/hour (big money in 90’s cash) to do anything I wanted from a list of house / pool chores. It made me so motivated to help out around the house and track my time diligently. The more I helped, the more money I’d get! Everyone wins.
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#63
My dad drove carpool every day. He wouldn’t turn on the radio or say anything. He would just sit and listen to me and my friends talk about everything happening at school. HE KNEW EVERYTHING. Sometimes he would have me hang back a minute before walking into school to give me advice. As I got older and began driving myself to school, it felt so easy and natural to tell my parents everything that was happening in my life and get their advice. It was a genius way to establish open communication and it shaped our relationship even 30 years later.
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#64
Both my younger sister and I have early January birthdays. When we were old enough to recognize how much certain gifts were worth, our parents instituted half birthday celebrations. So we would get a small present, like a book, on our actual birthday and a bigger present in the summer. We’d also have a little family party on our half birthdays.
When I was growing up, I thought my parents did this so we wouldn’t get all our presents around Christmas and we could space out the celebrations. Now I realize they didn’t have the money to get all those gifts in one month, but wanted to make sure we got something eventually.
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