30 Things People Have Had To Unlearn After Their Parents Ingrained Them In Their Childhoods

No, in fact, life experience is an incredibly wholesome thing, and the ability to learn from your own and, importantly, other people’s mistakes is a skill of critical importance. But at the same time, it is important to realize something else - any generalization based on your own experience may turn out to be erroneous. For example, if for some reason you are unlucky with online dating, this in no way means that others will also be unlucky.

“Almost any rule, any tradition and any advice from parents is nothing more than an extrapolation of other people’s life experiences,” says Irina Matveeva, a psychologist and certified NLP specialist, with whom Bored Panda got in touch for a comment here. “The only question is the volume and representativeness of the statistical sample. In other words, if the formation of some folk tradition requires the experience of thousands and thousands of people, then parental advice is often the experience of one person. And not necessarily of the same generation.”

“I remember a semi-fictional story about a woman whose husband tried to find out why, when she boils sausages, she always cuts off the ends. She said that her mother taught her that way, and then, when the couple became interested and began to find out the origin of this idea, it turned out that the wife's grandma simply had a single сasserole dish - a very small diameter."

“In other words, someone else’s life experience is wonderful, but under two conditions. First, it should not clearly cause harm in changed life circumstances. Second, over time, it must necessarily be subject to critical revision,” Irina summarizes.

Another clear example is the famous advice of Thomas Edison: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Advice that sounds cool, especially considering the scale of the author’s personality - however, if you look at it, it was only suitable for one person, Edison himself. After all, the great inventor always suffered from a lack of theoretical knowledge, which he covered with an incredible number of practical experiments. Fortunately, Edison himself had enviable health and truly inhuman perseverance and efficiency.

Be that as it may, there are quite a few things in this collection that you may well consider to be sound ideas - even though some may find them useless. So now please feel free to scroll this list to the very end, comment the most interesting stories, and of course share your own examples of parents' advice which got only disproven by time in the comments below this post.