All parents lie to their kids.

Yes, even the ones who swear that they won’t before they actually become parents and have to navigate the ins and outs of every day, plus have all of the worries about raising kids who are the right amount of savvy and the right amount of naive.

It’s a lot, y’all. Pat yourself on the back if you’re doing it, and don’t feel bad about the little lies.

They can’t be any more ridiculous than these 17. Ha!

17. That’s quite the awkward revelation.

That babies came when a man and a woman love each other soooo much.

I once cried and told my teachers I was scared I’d have a baby with my dad because I love him so much…

16. Luckily, pickles are delicious.

My dad told me that every pickle you eat adds 5 minutes on your life.

I was like 5 and damn did I ever take that to heart.

15. You never know what’s going to come out of your kid’s mouth at school.

Not nearly as funny, but as an imaginative kid, when my mom said that a bandaid will help a cut to heal, I thought it meant that it wouldn’t heal WITHOUT a bandaid.

Flash forward to arriving at preschool with dayglow bandaids on every tiny scratch or discoloration on my body.

Teachers ask why they are there, and I say “I got lots of cuts and Mommy said I needed to put bandaids on to cover them up.”

It was only as an adult that I later discovered the teachers abruptly gave my parents the cold-shoulder and they never knew why.

14. If only, right?

I was told that Star Wars was real.

Didn’t take too long to figure that one out.

13. Those parents were using their noggins.

A friend told me their parents would take them to “the toy museum” aka FAO Schwartz, and nothing is for sale there, they just display the toys.

12. I hope that wasn’t the extent of that talk.

One time I was just chillin in my room and my dad walked in, looked at me and said “son, you know if you masturbate too much you will die.”

And I was like “umm okay dad cool.” Then he walked out. Super weird lol

11. So their dad was a reptile?

My dad has ridiculous cold tolerance. He’s the kind of guy that will be out in shorts and a t-shirt when it’s 36 °F outside.

When I was six, I asked him how he was able to stand it, and he told me he just absorbed heat all summer long and stored it for the winter.

He worked outdoors all summer, so it made perfect sense to six year old me.

10. Smart kids are lame.

My dad tried to tell me that cars were run by hamsters on wheels under the gear shift.

They knew to run because the stick ended in a block of ice that would go on their backs.

I was eight and asked him wtf he was talking about.

He had been told this by his uncle and believed it, and was disappointed it didn’t work on me.

9. That might not have been a total lie.

Sometimes when I was a kid, they would lock their room and start making noise.

Then I would ask from behind the door what they were doing, then they would tell me that they were giving each other massages …

8. This is kind of adorable.

I asked my dad where babies came from.

He told me that he found me and my sisters in my mom’s cabbages.

All he had to do was flip over the leaves and he saw our faces and pulled us out .

My sisters and I spent hours looking for new babies.

7. What if your kid still can’t whistle?

You learn to whistle by eating all of your sandwich crusts.

If you can keep from licking the hole after losing a tooth the replacement will grow in SOLID GOLD!

6. They just wanted you to sit the heck down.

staring at the microwave could give you cancer

5. Well that’s traumatizing.

when I was like 5 my mom said she can give birth to puppies

4. Stealing this.

If we couldn’t decide on a restaurant, my dad would tell us we’d better make up our minds quick or he’d take us to Vegetable World.

I was like 11 before I realized it wasn’t a real restaurant.

By golly, it worked until then though.

3. This is one for the grandpas everywhere.

There’s a 5cent charge every time we touch the light switch so my brother and I were costing them a fortune every time we played with flickering the lights.

2. Ope. That’s disappointing.

“Don’t worry about paying for college, we’ll take care of the monthly payments: we’ll figure it out!”

Narrator: They didn’t

1. There are no words.

I grew up near Tacoma, WA— the home of Ted Bundy— and he was like the real-life boogie man up there. Someone always had some story about the guy or some “knew someone who knew someone” connection— heck, my father even pointed out Bundy’s home on numerous occasions.

So in January of1999 (I’m eleven years old at the time) there’s some discussion going on on the radio regarding that it’s the ten year anniversary of Bundy’s execution. My mother just bluntly asks me, “do you know why Ted Bundy killed all those women?”

I told her I didn’t and then asked why— she calmly and so matter-of-factly responded, “because he saw p**nography when he was a little boy. So just remember— if you see p**nography too, you’ll end up just like him.”

Didn’t realize the f**ked-up-ness of such a statement until that memory randomly wandered into my head on a random day of my adult life.

Parents: We Do What We Have To Do.

What funny lie have you caught yourself telling your kids? We want to hear it in the comments!