54 Biggest Parenting Mistakes, As Shared By Both Parents And Children In This Online Thread

"I was bullied in school so I have made sure my kids can defend themselves and are in fact rather capable of it.

Well, when my daughter was in the 6th grade the gym teacher had a brilliant idea of having kids learn how to dance. And I mean pair dancing.

Boys being idiots my daughter's dance partner thought it a good idea to squeeze my daughter's bum. And I had trained her that if someone touches them inappropriately she can do what she can to defend herself.

So there she is in the gym class giving beating up this idiot boy in front of everyone. Good thing Finns are more forgiving about the use of force than people in the US. But the discussions with school staff were not fun."

peeplup said:
"(Not parent) But, when I was 7 my parents told me I killed my grandpa.

Here’s how the story goes: My mom and dad are super superstitious and they have this thing against white. In my culture white is used in funerals, so living people are not allowed to wear white on their heads (hats, bows, hair bands, etc). Anyway so one day I was playing with white thread and it got stuck in my hair. As soon as my mom saw she ripped it out and yelled at me. Within a week of this incident, my grandpa (who was on the OTHER SIDE OF THE EARTH) died by slipping on something and hitting his head. My parents said that because I was playing with white thread on my head, that’s what caused my grandpa to die.

AS A 7-YEAR-OLD I LIVED WITH THE GUILT OF MURDER FOR 10 YEARS."

tinyahjumma replied:
"That’s horrible! To blame a kid for something both ridiculous and out of the kid’s control."

"Not me but not mom used to yell at people who didn't go when the light turned green "What are you, color blind?" Fast forward to my 2-year-old caucasian nephew yelling at people out the car window "WHAT ARE YOU, COLORED??""

"Five months old:

"He'll be fine. He can't roll over yet." *places the baby in the middle of the king-sized bed and proceeds to finish getting ready for work*

THUMP

He could, in fact, rollover.

I'm sure there are more, but that's the one that really, really stands out."

"Not me, but when I was younger, like 6 or 7, I ate some watermelon seeds and then got super paranoid that they would rip up my insides. My dad sat me down and told me that my intestines were as strong as this trash bag here, then he proceeded to test the strength of the trash bag and ripped right through it. I cried for, reportedly, 2 hours."

"So, my immediate family celebrates Christmas, but in a completely secular way. We don't do baby Jesus or Santa Claus and have expressed to the kids that it's just a time to be generous with one another.

My youngest started kindergarten and started asking if Santa Claus was real since a number of their friends believed in Santa. I explained to her that no, Santa wasn't real, but was a myth based on a St. Nicholas who had been a real person. At this point, my kid asked me if we could visit St. Nick, and I explained that we couldn't because he died hundreds of years ago.

The next day I got a very upset call from their kindergarten teacher because my kid was running around telling their classmates that Santa Claus was dead."

"Listening to my kid's teachers/principals who told me he had no developmental disorder when I knew something was up. He was 16 before he was diagnosed with dyslexia, autistic, and ADHD. I want to cry and scream over the amount of time his life could have been made easier if I had only listened to my gut instinct and not everyone else."

"Not a parent, but my mom tells me the biggest mistake she ever made was letting my grandmother babysit me during the summer and non-school days. She didn't know that a live-in resident had been raping and torturing me for years. She didn't know that my grandmother knew it was going on and beat me over it. She didn't know that my grandmother assaulted me on a regular basis and blamed me for everything that went wrong.

I am a handbasket of anxiety disorders and I don't want kids now. My mom will call me out of the blue and just start apologizing for leaving me with my grandmother and that if she had known what was going on, she would've quit her job and just been a stay-at-home mom."

"The other day some lady cut me off and then stopped in the middle of the lane to turn left despite there being a turn lane. I yelled YOU FU*KING AS*HOLE! Then I hear this tiny voice come from the back of my car "What's a fu*king as*hole?" And that was the day I taught my 2.5 y/o the word fu*king and the word as*hole."

"The first time we took our son out we went to a place called Mothercare which is a store for baby clothes and toys, and this particular place had a large display area filled with various prams and pushchairs. We parked our newborn in his sh*tty hand-me-down pram nearby because he couldn't fit among the sea of display models and gleefully found the Pushmaster 5000 or whatever it was that we had our eye on and then went through the process of buying it and organizing when would be a good time to pick up our purchase at a later date.

We then left the shop and we were 10 minutes up the road before we remembered we had a baby and that we'd left him behind."

"So this is an experience coming from me that my parents did. When I was about 10, my parents took me to Sam's club, and this was when they had demo video game systems to play on. I was playing on one, and my parents kept telling me that it was time to go, and I ignored them.

So my dad thinks he will scare me, and he and my mom leave me there and actually drive out of the parking lot. After a few minutes, I noticed I couldn't see my parents anymore, and stop playing and look for them. After I realized that they had left me, and not being able to call them, as this was before they had cell phones, I decided to walk to my grandpa's house, using the only route that I knew, which ended up being a 4-5 mile walk along busy streets in late winter. After I got to my grandpa's house, he was really surprised to see me and called my parents. Scared the cr*p out of my mom, and taught my dad never to leave me anywhere again."

"Not a parent but I have a story on behalf of my parents involving me. When I was about 6 I went to a birthday party of one of the girls I went to school with. Anyways during this party, we were jumping on the trampoline they had in her backyard. Someone got the great idea to jump off of the trampoline and see who could land on their feet, so cue about 15 6-year-olds repeatedly jumping from the trampoline to the ground. Surprisingly nothing happened that day and we all went home happy.

The next day I couldn't walk, every time I tried an intense pain shot through my ankles. Being 6 I solved this by crawling around instead of walking. As a part of my family was visiting from far away my parents dismissed my complaints thinking I just wanted attention and told me to smarten up. I couldn't stand so I couldn't listen to them so I continued to crawl around. Eventually, my mom got so frustrated with me that she tried to scare me into behaving myself by saying "if you don't stop that you'll have to go to the doctor". When I said that I wanted to go to see the doctor my mom still thought I wanted attention but took me to see the doctor.

When I got in to see the doctor he determined that I sprained both of my ankles... I like to bring this story up whenever my parents accuse me of lying and rub it in their faces a little."

"I was a kid about 14 and I was riding my bike in the front yard. Anyway, I end up falling over onto the ground on my bike while standing up and not moving. Long story short it feels like I've just been drop-kicked in my balls. So I head inside and lay on the couch in pain for a while. Ask my parents to take me to the hospital and they refused. Told me I was just being a baby and that the pain would go away. About an hour and a half later and after many tears they finally agree to take me in. Turns out I had given myself a testicular torsion and the lack of blood to that area of my body meant I was going into emergency surgery. I lost a testicle the same day less than ten minutes later. Never forgave them for it."

Adieutoyou said:
"Letting him try chocolate. Now he asks for chocolate at least a hundred times a day."

ELRochir replied:
"Yeahhhhh I gave him some of my bitter, 80% dark chocolate. Jokes on me, the kid likes the stuff and now I always have to share."

User No 1 said:
"Not telling my 12y old clearly that you get your period every month. She had her first period in the same week as me, we ended up stopping by Walmart for some pads/tampons. And she asks me “I thought you had your period when you were 12?”... “yes honey, and every single month since then.”... Well the looks on her face I will never forget and it took her days to process the fact that you don’t just get your period once in your life."

rivertiberius replied:
"Oh, the incredible disappointment. When I was in 2nd grade, we did a project where you wrote down the directions for how to make a PB&J sandwich for an alien. You had to be as specific as possible, knowing that the alien had never encountered sliced bread, peanut butter, jelly, or a butterknife. We then made the sandwiches per our directions, which all turned out terrible, globby, ripped bread grossness. That’s what I think of when we describe periods to girls that have initially zero information. My mom gave me so little info that I had a rough few years before I got the hang of it (no internet at the time)."

"My 1 yr old just tried to feed me broccoli and I bit her finger pretty hard thinking “wow this broccoli is pretty undercooked.” She cried. A lot."

"My worst parenting mistake involved a trip to the ER. It was about 8 years ago in December. It was my wife's birthday, but we weren't going anywhere because a huge snowstorm had hit our area. No problem, though, I would do all the shoveling. Can't have her shoveling on her birthday. My son (then about 7 or 8) came out with me to help shovel. We were doing a good job and clearing off the snow when IT happened.

As I was bringing my shovel up, my son bent down to pick up more snow. I hit his head with the corner of my shovel. The very sharp corner. He shrieked and held his eye. I suddenly worried that I put my son's eye out. Well, I didn't, but I did get him right above his eyebrow and he was bleeding a lot. His coat was getting covered in blood.

We went in and couldn't stop the bleeding well so I put my son in the car, and stopped by my in-laws' house (less than a mile away) to pick up my mother-in-law (my wife stayed home with our younger son who was a toddler then), and drove to the ER in the blizzard.

They were great and "glued" my son's wound shut. (A special glue that they can use instead of stitches.) He was fine, but I felt like the worst dad in the world. His coat was a loss and I ruined my wife's birthday. Plus, to this day, you can see an indentation where I hit my son in the head with a shovel."

"Not a parent but my mother has told me her biggest parenting mistake and I think it’s worth sharing. She drilled into my mind from a very young age the difference between wanting and needing something. So much so that now, at the age of 20, I have the hardest time spending money on things that are a necessity because I convince myself it’s a want, not a need. An example is last winter I didn’t have any boots. I had been contemplating buying some as my feet always ended up frozen and wet on days that it snowed and I had to walk to class. My first thought was “I don’t need the boots because I have shoes and I can just bring an extra pair of socks to put on.” I do understand the importance of teaching the differences between wanting and needing something to your children but PLEASE make sure you’re also teaching them that it’s okay to buy things you want simply because you can. I did end up buying the boots but my mom had to call and convince me I absolutely needed them."

biglebowski55 said:
"Teaching her how to blow a raspberry before teaching her how to eat food was not a smart move."

ellequoi replied:
"Yeah... having discovered raspberries early, my baby has devised a cunning strategy to avoid any nearby spoons by deploying them."

"3 year old woke up in the middle of the night and came to tell me she had a bad dream. I walked her back to her room and talked to her about her dream. She said she was dreaming there were bugs crawling on the walls and in her bed. I told her that it was just a dream and the bugs only existed in her head.

She didn't get back to sleep for a LONG time after being told she had bugs in her head.

She's going to be six in a few weeks, and she was not mentally scarred by this incident!"