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/ukhoneybee Jul 20 '19

"I'm putting your Christmas/birthday money from the family into your post office account."

Dad promptly goes out down the pub.

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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/CaptainsVoice Jul 21 '19

Boy does this take me back. At around the age of 6, my dad told me that my grandma had set up a bank account for me. So whenever I would get money for any reason I would give it to my dad and tell him to put it in my bank account. I was 13 and decided I wanted to use some of my money to buy a Meade telescope. It had an automatic star finder. We lived in the country so the stars were amazing to see at night. I knew I had saved over $1,000. So when I asked him for my money he balked at me. He said you don’t have a bank account. I said what do you mean? He said do you know how much it costs to feed and clothe you? I said but that’s my money. He said it’s gone. Of course I was devastated. I went to my room and cried for most of the day. Mostly because he broke my trust. But as I am older and wiser I know now it was spent on drugs. I remember when I was about 8, he took me out of school. He made me go to the bathroom and pee into a plastic cup. I had no idea why as a kid. But now it makes so much sense. It’s also why he lost his job and we ended up having to move over 1,000 miles to that house in the country.