My grandpa told me if I put salt on a birds wings it would not be able to fly away. Obviously I was very gullible and spent a long time on this, to no avail.
Like many people here, I was told I'd be taken away if I was being bad. Except my parents weren't all that creative - I'd be taken away by a man with a bag never to be heard from again. Looking back though, one of my favorites was that if I whistled ants would burst through the floor and eat me alive. I must have sucked at whistling.
That the man I knew as my dad was actually my dad. Until the age of 23, when I was told it was some random donor (not in a Maury/Jerry Springer way, more in a medical science way), only because my mother wanted to avoid embarrassment from potentially senile relatives who may blurt it out at family get togethers.
My mom always told us to stick out our tongues if we lied because there would be a black mark on it. She always got us with us because we would never want to stick out our tongues when we were lying, and she said only parents could see it so there was no point in looking in the mirror. One time we were driving through a an area of town that was going under development, and I was bugging the shit out of my brother about him not being in Scouts and how awesome I am at all the shit Scouts do because I just came back from a camping trip in the woods. We were like 10 and 8 respectively, so he was getting really annoyed, as he was big into army stuff and thought that he was the bees knees when he was playing pretend with his friends. So he kept whining and whining when my dad pulled into a side street that was being worked on, like literally, just piping for the sewer lines, some electrical cables and markings of where the homes would be once construction started, jumped out of the driver seat, swung my door open and told me if I was such a bad ass, to make my way back to the house in 1 hour or he would have all my shit on the curb. He then got back in the car, spun the ties kicking up gravel, and then drove away while I was chasing the car screaming how sorry I was. Him and my mom let me sit there for 25 minutes, as I was bawling and thinking how fucked my life was. They had just pulled onto another street and were watching so I didn't do anything stupid, but they sent my brother around to the back of me, almost like a fucking flanker, and he came and jumped on me and scared the shit out of me so much that I just collapsed into a ball and whimpered please dont hurt me over and over again. My mom and dad drove up laughing there asses off, but when they saw how upset I was (like the huge breaths of air where you almost puke), they took me to McDonald's and got me an ice cream cone. I guess it settled me down enough not to turn into a serious mental fuck up, because I mean, I still live at home. Well, there's a deep rooted psychological issue right there.
My mom told me that drugs made you do "gross things", like be gay. She told me that going down on a man was degrading to a woman. Oh, and that all parents beat their kids. That was a doozy. I don't miss her, strange...
PIMPTRESS reminded me of another one. I had a huge interest in the culinary industry in high school. This was before Emeril, before Food Network was so popular. I used to watch freaking Graham Kerr and Julia Child to learn things. I begged the chef/owner of an Italian restaurant every day for 3 weeks to let me have a job so I could just be around a kitchen. I collected cookbooks. I wanted to go to Le Cordon Bleu in San Francisco. My mom said that I would come back gay and therefore couldn't go as if gay was something I could get by being sneezed on. The gay has got a hold of me! I gotta find someone to bust my be-hymen!
My parents used white lies to get us to behave growing up. The funniest one I can remember was at bath time, when we wouldn't get out (and yes I still love bubble baths to this day and am not ashamed of that fact), Dad would pull the plug. That weird drainage noise would soon start up, and Dad told us it was tigers in the plug hole and they were hungry for children. ...It never really occured to me at the time that they're much bigger than a plug hole and wouldn't fit through.
Focus My parents used to keep the belief of Santa clause going for my younger sister as she'd get an xmas gift on xmas morning and we'd all open ours xmas eve. Alt focus I tell my daughter when she doesn't listen that the Grandma police are on the way, as her Granmother is rather stern with her and she doesn't pull anything with her.
I heard this one all the time. I understand not having the money for things like a bike, nintendos or holidays, but all I wanted was a pair of sneakers and maybe another t-shirt (since I only ever had one pair of sneakers at any time up until I started working, and usually had to rely on a circulation of 3 shirts). My parents, combined, earned well into the six figures in the early 90s. Degenerate gamblers and drinkers tend not to have money for anything else but booze and gambling. I guess, technically, they weren't lying.
My dad used to tell me that if I ever spilled anything roaches would find it, smell my scent on it, follow the trail and try to eat me while I was sleeping.