25 Things Kids Kept Secret From Their Parents And Intend To Keep It That Way

I still have cancer — my mom thinks I’m “cured” (she has Alzheimer’s so we’re not correcting her).

That my brother's truck wasn't *technically* broken in to. He accidentally locked his keys in the truck while shopping at goodwill for a tie for his interview he was on his way to. So he immediately called the insurance company telling them his car was broken into and was asking if it was covered. They said yes, so he takes the tire iron out of the bed of his truck and smashed his own window in to get his keys. Insurance fixed the window AND he got the job.

That I got lost in the woods hiking. The police had to rescue me. It was a whole big scene. I texted them with the little battery life I had on my phone and told them I was staying at a friends, so that they wouldn't worry. The police eventually found me, and I got home at 5AM. They thought I was at a friends, and I've never told them the story.

Edit: As soon as I realized I was lost, I immediately called the police. I lied to my parents because I didn't want them to freak out, and I needed the phone battery to talk to the people trying to find me.

My grandmother had a collection of fairly expensive rings and when she died she left one to every woman in the family. I was 13 and told not to wear mine out of the house because it was a bit loose on me. I did and lost it within a month of her death. Every now and then my mom asks about it and I'm just like "yeah it's in a box in one of my drawers, I don't wear it because I don't want to lose it.".

When I was like 10-12 I threw a soccer trophy at my door during a tantrum. It put a hole in my side, but not all the way through.

I stuck a bumper sticker for my favorite college team over it.

I'm 28 and it's still there.

Lately, everything I do. They have a nasty habit of giving unsolicited advice and judgment in everything I tell them, even after explicitly telling them how much it bothers me when they do. So they ask, and I don't answer.

That the month i was "living a month in Spain" was actually spent in jail. I had friends to post fake Instagram pictures for me too

Edit: Wow, would never expect such a response! Since so many of you have been asking heres some more info:
I was sentenced to 1 month for DUI and the month I was supposed to do my sentence happened to be at the same time as I was actually going to Spain for a month. So instead of traveling to Spain, I went to jail. No questions ever asked from my family. Now, I knew my friends would notice, so I had to tell them and they were the best and helped me keeping this a secret. This was the first (and last) time I had ever been into any trouble.
Most awkward bit was to figure out excuses for not driving the following year.

Im from Norway btw, so sorry if I messed up prison/jail.

When I was about 8 my little sister and I broke a candy jar. We told our stepmom when she called and she said “it’s okay, throw away all the candy it’s old anyways.” Being the unsupervised children we were, we ate every last piece, probably about 300+ pieces of candy total. The next day we were throwing up all day and our parents assumed it was the flu. We didn’t touch another piece of candy for several months after that

That I am currently in a long-distance relationship with a woman twice my age who lives across the country. And that I'm flying out to go see her, not to go on a spontaneous vacation. (I'm in my 20's).

I’ve been married for 6 years. My husband and I have been together almost 40 years but we were crazy kids who didn’t need a piece of paper to prove our love. After a health scare my husband’s sister made a comment that implied she had a closer legal relationship than I did. It was offhanded but it made us think. We already had wills, medical power of attorney, etc., paperwork done but we decided to get married just to make it more cut and dry. Only a few people know we’re married. Our kids and a couple of close friends. And now some people on Reddit.

When my dad and I lived with his then fiance years ago, her oldest daughter and I used to fool around.

My mom found some used cotton swabs in the shower covered in a brownish red substance, she thought it was battery acid. She wanted to know what it was. She asked everyone in the house, no one knew. For some reason, it really bothered her. She went ballistic over it. 'Someone in this house knows what this is!!! They didn't just appear out of thin air!!!!' Nobody knew. Later that day, it dawned on my that they were probably the qtips I used to clean out my ear (had a pimple or something) and it was dried blood. She was so mad, I didn't want to confess. So I never told her. I am now 45 and still haven't told her. She has even brought it up a few times over the years. I'm taking this one to my grave.

That I have a tattoo. It's been 4.5 years and they have never seen it.

My dad always comments on how confident and chill I seem. I’m usually experiencing a lot of anxiety, mostly about money and my future. Hard to let those feelings show, though.

Edit: it’s great a feeling to see that there are so many other people out there who experience this same feeling.

I watched all 8 seasons of GOT without my parents knowing. My mom would never let me watch it but I told my dad after I was done and we talk about it all the time when she’s not around

That my little sister didn't break her arm by accidentally falling off the bunk bed, but rather that she broke her arm when we flung her off of it during a game of King of the Hill (bunkbed)

My parents were out at aerobics class, in a very pre-cell phone age. We just tried to keep her comfortable and waited patiently for them to get home.

We did finally tell them last year, and they thought it was hilarious. We kept that secret for close to 30 years.

I stole my moms earrings to give to my girlfriend in 3rd grade. She never found them....

I’m a teen and they’re somewhat strict - they don’t let me have my phone after 10:00 at night. So I found my moms old phone, reset it, set it up with my ID so that it would forward text messages from my normal phone to it, and I keep it in my room.

Edit: back when I had the apple restrictions on my phone I also found a way to disable those

I am terrified of them

I shot myself in the leg when I was 8 and fixed the hole with a wad of toilet paper and some duct tape. There's still metal in there 20 years later.

edit: I'm going to answer some of the more common questions here so they stop getting asked.

* In my memory the bullet was huge, but in reality was likely just a .22LR.
* I have since seen a doctor, when I was 15, and he said the remaining metal wasn't worth the risks of removal. It's inert and mostly embedded in my shin. (This makes me like 0.00001% more Wolverine than you)
* The wad of toilet paper was actually 2 whole rolls of it, but at least half of it was flushed to hide the evidence.
* The fragments are too small to set off metal detectors. Next time I go through I'll ask them to wand my leg and see if the wands can sense it though.

The story is pretty boring. My cousin and I were messing around with a fire behind his garage. Making flame throwers out of things that we're lucky didn't explode in our hands, like WD-40 cans and the like. In our horsing around my gun, actually I think it was my cousin's gun, was knocked into the fire and I fished it out. While inspecting it I accidentally shot myself. This all happened pretty late at night the evening before a wedding so all the adults were wasted and we snuck into the downstairs bathroom to tend the wound.

Seems to be a right of passage in my family. My dad was shot for the first time when he was 9. Some crazy guy in a boat with a shotgun who ended up having to spend 2 nights in jail for it. My dad shot himself when he was 15, in the foot, and all the blood made his little brother feint so my dad had to carry his little brother out of the bush with a hole through his boot. So I come by the gun shot wounds honestly, at least.