We recently shared a post highlighting trips down childhood memory lane that proved a lil' cringey from the rearview mirror.
There's something sorta enviable about the naivete of childhood, eh? There were lots of doozies on the original compilation, and you readers had a bunch to add!
Check them out below.
1. "As a kid, I was obsessed with long hair, so whenever I saw a woman with long hair in public I would go stand behind her and start playing with it."
2. "I remember when I was about 4 or 5 my dad did something dumb, and I went to call him a wally because we would always say, ‘Oh, you wally,’ when we did something dumb. This day I forgot the word wally and replaced it with another W word. Yeah, wally and wanker are not the same thing!"
3. "If someone was really attractive, I would follow her around or get really clingy with them. There's quite a few people I want to apologize to if we run into each other."
4. "My little sister used to eat my deodorant. I’d always go yelling to my mom that there were teeth marks in my Teen Spirit again."
5. "My sister talked shit about a little boy and his mom after school once or twice while her son was in the car. A few days later she gets approached by the mother asking her what my nephew meant when he was calling him a cocopath (she called him a psychopath). She played it off, saying he must've been talking about his Coco Puffs or something."
"I wish I could say she leaned her lesson, but she definitely did not!"
6. "I asked my now-stepdad, loudly, in a quiet Chinese restaurant, if he had a big penis. My mom had just told me about what makes boys different from girls, and I felt compelled to ask.
"Not sure why they decided to take me on that date."
7. "When I was about 3, we lived on an RAF base in Germany. One day we were flying somewhere. I used to carry around my stuffed bunny and crayons in this cute, tiny red suitcase covered in rainbow stickers. So, little me put it down in the middle of the terminal and forgot it... Sirens went off, armed guards stormed the terminal to check out the unattended bag, my mother had to tiptoe back to get it and apologise for me."
8. "My mom said when I was 2–3 years old I would run up to older women and call them grandma. Not once or twice — always."
9. "I got this happy meal toy that had the Berenstain Bears kids on a teeter-totter, and in my little naïve mind when they moved it looked like their heads were pecking at each other. So I said, "Look Mom, they're pecker heads," and she got laughing so hard she had to pull the car over."
"She told me I'd understand when I was older. Sure enough, when I learned what that meant, that memory came rushing back. 😆"
10. "Remember The Man Show? Yeah, well, that pinnacle of societal progress had me using the phrase “spank the monkey” because I thought it was a cute little, like, “Oh no, bad monkey” type thing.
11. "When I was about 9, I learned the word 'embryo' not really knowing what it meant, but I found the word funny for some reason. I spent several weeks saying I wanted an embryo."
"I was so embarrassed when my mom told me what an embryo was."
12. "I was 7 when my older sister got pregnant (she was 17). She got married before the baby was born. On Father’s Day, I told him Happy Father’s Day, and everyone was shocked because they didn’t know that I knew she was pregnant. I also told all my neighbor friends' moms."
"I was not aware it was a secret. As a 7-year-old I was happy."
13. "My mom and I were at the store. We went down an aisle and I saw a bottle of Summer’s Eve, and I screamed, 'Momma, do you need some more of your front-heinie soap?'"
"It was a busy aisle...but I was like, 3."
14. "When I was 6, my parents were called into my school because I was showing my classmates my underwear for chips. No clue why that was a good idea in my mind."
15. "I told a dirty joke to a priest: How does Peter Pan fly? If you got hit in the peter with a pan, you’d fly too."
"I was 10. I’m surprised my mother didn’t die of embarrassment."
16. "I used to knee boys in the balls during recess in elementary school. I'd walk up to them, look them straight in their eyes, and WHAM: knee to the crotch. I got away with it for a while, until one of my victims finally told on me."
"I wonder why I didn't have more friends..."
17. "If I had a dish in my room that had been there too long and I didn't want to get in trouble, I would simply just throw it out the window (I lived on the second story). One day I got busted because a friend of my mom's noticed the pile of dishes growing below my window and told her."
18. "Loool, one time I was like 10 and my mom, my little brother, and I were looking at photos, and I said, “Wow, I was an ugly baby.”
"It was my brother. 😅"
19. "When I was 4, my cousin came to our house with her girlfriend's son who was my age, so naturally we started playing together. We were playing Olympics, which was really just us doing cartwheels LOL. But I had a sweat suit on, so I took my pants off so I could cartwheel better since I usually would run around the house with no pants."
"My dad came in the room and was mortified when he saw me. He took me to the back to put my pants back on and explained that I can’t just be taking my pants off in front of boys I just met. Very good lesson that I still use to this day, LOL."
Do you have any childhood flashbacks that are a major no-no through the eyes of adulthood? Let us know in the comments!
Note: Some answers have been edited for length and/or clarity.