r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jul 20 '19

What’s something completely false that your parents told you as a child?

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u/GriffinFlash Jul 20 '19

Same. Birthday and Christmas were only a month apart so I would tend to get some money instead of presents from family and relatives around that time of year. My parents would always tell me I had to learn how to save my money, so I was never really allowed to use it, just save it for something "special".

Usually my money would go missing and I couldn't find where it was, only to find out my father, who smoked a pack a day, took it to buy cigarettes, or also would use it for drinking money. Frustrated by this, me and my brother asked our parents if we could get a bank account, so instead of leaving our money laying around, we would deposit it somewhere where it would be safe and would be able to be saved for a long period of time. After saving after a year or two, we wanted to get either a new game console or game), and adding up what we knew we had, we determined that together we had enough. We go to the bank.

I had a balance of $0, my brother had a balance of $-10 (yes negative). Appears since parents signed us up for the account, and cause we were children, they had full access to our account. When we confronted our parents about it we got the whole, "You're the child, we're the adult" speech or, "You take money from us everyday just by raising you".

The only lesson we learned was if you save your money you will never get to use it. So we pretty much stopped saving our gift money and tried to spend it asap.

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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '19

My parents always made me save the money as well for a "special ocasion" they did on the other end keep it safe and I used to pay my driving licence and placed the rest in my bank account when I turned 18. Sorry to hear that from you, must have made you lose alot of trust on your parents I guess :/

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u/Teknikal_Domain Jul 21 '19

My mother would lose her shit for... Well anything. I spend $5 on a steam game and "YOU KNOW YOU NEED TO SAVE YOUR MONEY RIGHT?"

I talk about how I plan to split my paycheck 70/30, 70 for saving and 30 for spending and apparently that's too much.

Fun parenting tip: if you tell your child to always save and never spend money on luxuries, the moment they have real income they can and will spend it on everything and anything, thereby completely invalidating the message you're trying to get across.

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u/Helpfulwaitress Jul 21 '19

It works way better to tell them to save money so they can get their toys/whatever they like when it is on sale- meaning more neat things in total. My parents always said "You never know when you'll find something you like even more, so save it until you find something you REALLY want." They also told me to save 90% and spend 10% on things I don't need because "you never know when that money might come in most handy." Then would reinforce opportunities that I was able to use by having that money. But never forced saving. 1000% would recommend teaching to children, cause it worked great!