We don’t really understand that others have different “thought bubbles” than we do until we are about four or five years old.
When this mental shift happens, we also realize that people have varying levels of knowledge based on their own unique experience, and that some of their beliefs can be shaped by what we say. That’s when lying becomes a real tool in the childhood toolkit.
Reddit user Renegade5399 tapped into this developmental milestone by asking, “What’s a small lie you told as a kid that somehow spiraled way out of control?” The answers were hilarious, bizarre, and sometimes oddly touching.
#1
When I was probably four or five years old, my grandparents bought my sibling and I one of those electric keyboard pianos. It had a mode that would light up the keys red to teach you how to play the song. Little me discovered there was also a setting that plays the correct key regardless of what you press when it was on, and it also stopped the red lights from showing. I did my best dramatic pianist performance in front of my mother, she was FLOORED, thinking I was some sort of reborn Mozart, a piano prodigy out of no where 😭 She called all of our family members over to watch me perform and exclaimed to them “My baby is going to Julliard”! I got nervous with all the people around and ended up confessing in front of 6+ family members that the piano was basically playing itself lmao.
Image credits: Kasanala
#2
In second grade I bragged that my uncle invented the Post it note. It snowballed until the PTA tried to invite him for career day, so I claimed he’d moved to Antarctica to test glue in the cold. People were still asking about him when I hit middle school.
Image credits: Recent_Painting_8150
#3
I have a friend whose grandfather told him giraffes have long necks so they can reach over the wall at the zoo to eat little kids. He had a weird, but understandable fear of giraffes.
Image credits: Sandpaper_Pants
#4
When I was in 6th grade, we had a day where the entire elementary school was doing spring cleaning. All the grades 1st-6th had an assigned duty. My class were in charged of sweeping and mopping all the classes. I was assigned to the 2nd grader’s class, along with 3 other from my class. As is expected of 2nd graders, they kept running into the class for one reason or another, and that made it hard for us to do our job.
Now, the 2nd graders class for some reason, is the only class with a curtain and it’s always closed. Even though it faces the back of the school and there’s trees covering the window and it’s not facing the sun at any part of the day. So, I made up a story that in the past someone hung themself on one of the trees and the reason it has those curtains is because sometimes during the day time, the ghost of that student can be seen sitting on a branch of the tree. And it just so happen that day at that time, the ghost decides to hang around the tree. I made my group go along and we pretended to see the ghost and ran out the class(we needed a water break anyways). The story worked and it spread to all the 2nd graders in about 1hr. None of them wanted to come back to class. And my group was able to finish the work.
Now 20+ years later, I found out from one of my younger cousins who later went to my same school, that apparently it became a school legend that the 2nd grade class is haunted. There was never a story like that the entire time I was there, so I guess I created an urban legend. And the story that’s passed down, has all of my made up details with a couple added on. So I know it was the one I made up 20+ years ago lol.
Image credits: Favoniuz7
#5
I so adamantly pretended I thought my doll was real and could hear her telling me to do things that I had to be evaluated by a therapist.
Image credits: LeftStatistician7989
#6
I once told my little brother carrots made you see in the dark if you ate enough. He believed it until high school biology class. To this day at family dinners, someone will pass him the carrots for better night vision.
Image credits: tkmma420
#7
After we completed a module on red brown color blindness in middle school biology, I told my classmates that I was red/brown color blind in one eye. They would have me close my “good” eye and have me guess the color… it was incredibly dumb but seemed harmless. Unfortunately, they were so fascinated that it became disruptive and the teachers overheard.
The teachers told my parents that I was apparently losing color vision in one eye and it spiraled to me continuing to fake the situation until I had to come clean to a neurologist who was about to send me for a (not covered by our insurance) MRI.
Image credits: jantessa
#8
I told my friends that the parade that coincidentally happened on my birthday weekend every year was a parade for me and not the community.
Image credits: anon
#9
My cousin told me there’s this clown that visits kids at the middle of the night and plays with them. I think she was trying to encourage me to use my imagination more.
For some reason I pictured the creepiest cow dressed up as a clown, flying in from the sky in the middle of the dark with an evil grin going “time to play” in the corner of a dark room.
I couldn’t sleep at night bc I thought it would randomly come. Idk what happened but eventually my mom found out I was scared of some random clown and spoke to my cousin. We all laughed after but I still have no idea why my brain turned something so casual into such a horror.
Image credits: mvytsm
#10
I told my grandma that I lost a tooth so the tooth fairy would come, but it was actually a mint candy. My grandma believed me, and the tooth fairy brought me money.
Image credits: happy_hot
#11
Not even a lie but when I was a kid I went out for a walk and found this burnt out car in the woods and in school the next day I told my friend about this car I found, some how in just that one day it spiralled into me being the one that stole the car and set it on fire, ended up having police visit the house to interview me a few days later lol.
Image credits: Lockhearts_
#12
Pre internet days my Mom asked me to watch the lottery draw on TV and write down the winning numbers. I found her ticket on top of the fridge and wrote her numbers down as the winning ones. Needless to say, she wasn’t impressed.
Image credits: TheGarageFather
#13
I had a friend who was an early teen back in the 60s. She went to summer camp and heard ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ by the Byrds for the first time, and she taught herself to sing and play it on guitar.
When she returned home she was showing it to her friends (who had not yet heard the song in the radio)…and she claimed that she had written this song.
A few weeks later the song finally hit the radio in her hometown.
“Oh no SethrymirsFriend, they stole your song!”
Obviously they eventually figured it out.
“Nobody ever looked at me the same after that” she said.
Image credits: Sethrymir
#14
Said I liked vegetables so I wouldn’t disappoint my grandma.
Next family dinner: full plate of boiled Brussels sprouts.
I cried. She cried. The Brussels sprouts won.
Image credits: Personal-Pitch25
#15
I was out of school for a funeral. When I told my teacher, I said my uncle died. The problem with this is that the great uncles and older cousins in my family get called uncle, and my deceased family member was in his 90’s and I’ve only met him once. I ended up getting pulled out of recess every day for a week to talk to a counselor.
Image credits: SheZowRaisedByWolves
#16
Not me but a classmate in like 2nd grade was always bragging about the fact that her mom was Xena Warrior Princess in real life. Constantly telling literally everyone as if she truly believed it herself….and then parents day at school happened and everyone was clamoring to see this girl’s mom and uh, yeah she was *not* Xena.
Image credits: genevawesomeart
#17
Trying not to laugh. In 4th grade I told a girl new to our school that she had to say the word 💩 or nobody would like her. Oddly enough, we became best friends for years. Lol.
Image credits: Rouxsgirl
#18
When I was 7, I told my neighbor that my family had a pet monkey. No idea why. Just blurted it out one day like it was totally normal. She got super excited. She wanted to come over and meet it immediately. I panicked and I made excuses. It turned into this whole soap opera of a story. She told her whole class about it. Eventually my mom found out because someone asked her how the monkey was doing. She made me go back and tell the truth. It was so embarrassing and my neighbor looked so betrayed.
Image credits: Cherry_zsa
#19
My friend (let’s call her Eva) lived in Germany for a year and thought wild boar were a myth or extinct. Her sister went to visit and they decided to go for a hike, so Eva started winding her sister up like “Beware of the wild boar, they will get you!” just joking around, until her German housemate told her “Wild boar aren’t a joke, they’re pretty dangerous and can be quite aggressive.” in an almost-chastising tone.
This was a shock to Eva. She can be quite anxious so the idea of having been hiking many times completely unaware of a legitimate reason to be cautious was a bit of a shock to her 😅.
Image credits: shrugea
#20
I once told my cousin that eating watermelon seeds would grow a watermelon in her stomach. She didn’t eat watermelon for 4 years.
Image credits: DonMare
#21
For the record, I really was a twin.
HOWEVER, I was a fraternal twin. Boy-Girl pair. We had a substitute teacher one day and one of my bullies was picking on me for something or other again. I decided that I had enough and I poured clear glue on her chair. She sat down on it and her skirt got all sticky and stiff. Her tights stuck to the chair, it was a mess. The substitute asked who did it and obviously someone ratted me out. When I was asked about the incident I said “I’m not Phantom, I’m Maria. I’m her twin. We switched places today, I’m supposed to be in the other 4th grade class.” The substitute left a note that said “Phantom’s twin switched places and glued a girl’s skirt, no complaints about Phantom except that she was not in class like she was supposed to be, but another teacher said there was no issue for one day.” My teacher was back the next day and she pulled me aside, telling me it wasn’t funny to switch places with my twin because there are a lot of safety issues and school rules we are breaking by switching. She went next door to the other 4th grade class and told the other teacher about the glue incident. He got in trouble for it.
My twin was already a troublemaker while I was the nerdy, goody-goody twin. When we got home and argued about me getting him in trouble our mom marched right up and asked us to explain. She, of course, did not believe that a teacher would fall for the twin switching story because we were a fraternal Boy-Girl pair. He got grounded at home too. From that moment on, whenever I did something I wasn’t supposed to he would sarcastically say, “Oh, was it MARIA?!” which just ended up backfiring because our classmates ended up thinking I had a twin named Maria and that my twin brother was a really year older but got held back. It wasn’t until high school that one of our classmates, who was also part of a Boy-Girl twin pair, was complaining that she never got to pull the twin switch thing and he got snarky and said “Ask Phantom how to do it, I bet she’d looooooove to share.” I had to confess because he sounded so upset and he had my back about something earlier that day. ^^;;;.
Image credits: PhantomIridescence
#22
6 year old nephew.
We had a bonfire in the back yard, he wanted to go play on the edge of the yard, but there’s a lake on that side and we didn’t want him over there in the dark.
Came up with a monster known as Frog Man (human sized frog) that lived in the lake, and were known to populate other swampy areas.
Now he is terrified of dark swampy water a bullfrog croaking.
Image credits: metalflygon08
#23
Imagine lying about knowing karate as a kid and then getting challenged to a fight on the playground… hypothetically, of course.
Image credits: gelts16
#24
When I was 7 I would make my lips look super dry because I just wanted to be allowed to wear my mom’s lipstick. My parents thought the extreme chapped lips were a sign of something and took me to the doctor and that led to me having surgery to get my tonsils out (and something else too, I don’t remember). I didn’t have the heart to tell them I just wanted to wear lipstick.
Image credits: Substantial_Chip791
#25
Not me but my sister. This was around 1991 in Chicago, so we were 7 and 9yrs old respectively. There was this hysteria at the time about “Homie the Clown”, which was a character on TV but supposedly there was a man in the area dressed as him and trying to lure kids with candy into his van. There were “sightings” reported all over the city by children’s, and the cops and local news was all over it. One day during class my sister claimed she saw “Homie” hiding in a bush by the school, so they put the school on lockdown until the police could investigate.
She did not in fact see Homie, or any other clown, lol.
Image credits: Iwantitallthensum
#26
So my dad was super strict about me leaving the house. In high school, my friend and I wanted to go to the nearby 7-11 and get some cards, and I was under strict orders to go straight there, but then and come right back.
We get to the store. Sold out. But another 7-11 is a few blocks away. Just a few extra minutes. We speed walk there, get the cards, come home.
That was too late. My dad yelled at me for being up to something. Now the problem is he asked how I got to the store, and I actually described the wrong street. So it got even messier. But I refused to admit I went anywhere else. Friend was sent home, and I was grounded until I confessed. This is about five minutes beyond his expected travel time.
I was grounded for a month, with him mapping out his theories on where I went. Just absurd ideas. I finally told him. He was clearly humiliated it was so simple, so I got another month of no leaving the house besides school.
Image credits: PrinceOfPembroke
#27
In elementary school, I told one of my friends that I had a dog and would hold the phone away from my face and make barking noises in the background to keep the lie up when she’d call. It was awfully awkward the day our teacher asked me about my dog in class.
Image credits: halcylocke
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