Let's face it: sometimes, kids turn out to be smarter than their parents even before they become adults. There can be a very awkward moment when, like a switch being flipped, a child suddenly realizes their mom or dad is not the all-knowing genius they thought they were.
These people recalled the exact moment when they looked at their parents and thought, "Hey, maybe you're not right about everything after all!"
(Content has been edited for clarity)
Oops, You Missed One
“My Mom didn’t know there was a First World War. As a kid, when I asked about it, she said I had mixed up the number: ‘It’s World War TWO, not World War ONE.’
I followed up, ‘Then why do we put a TWO at the end?’
She said, ‘Because the war was so big, we have to multiply it by two to accurately describe it.’ She was dead serious.
And just the other day, she told my 3-year-old niece (her grandchild) that all turkeys came from the country Turkey. She was not joking.”
Can We Pretend This Conversation Never Happened?
“My dad was giving me the bird and the bees conversation when I was about 15.
He tells me, ‘Don’t go around just sleeping with every girl you think is good looking because you will end up with a kid you didn’t expect. Make sure she’s good for more than a roll in the hay because she won’t look that good forever.’ It was in that moment I knew he was reflecting on his own experiences with my mother. That started a snowball reaction of realizations.”
Smart In Different Ways
“I wouldn’t say my parents are not smart, they’re just not well-balanced in their intelligence.
My mother is, academically speaking, dumb as a box of rocks. She started to struggle to help me with my homework when I was about 9. But that said, she has a terrific amount of common sense, and her emotional intelligence is off the charts. I’ve never known anyone who gets people and gives such good personal advice.
Dad is the exact opposite. He’s a mathematical wizard with a Ph.D. and three masters degrees (currently doing a second Ph.D.), who went to Oxford, etc. He’s an incredibly smart man. But he doesn’t have a drop of common sense. He pays money to play ‘spot the ball’ street scammer games and has a sticker for ‘left’ and ‘right’ inside all of his shoes. He regularly takes about five minutes to get the punchline of a very simple joke. I realized he was a bit useless when my mum went on holiday for a week with her sister when I was 7, and Gran basically had to move in with us while she was gone. He set fire to the kitchen twice in two days. When I was 5, I cried after my lizard died, and he didn’t know what to do so he poured me a glass from the bottle he was drinking.
I’m happy with how I balanced out. I’ve met enough people to know I’m a decent bit smarter than average, and enough really smart people to know that I’m still a total idiot.”
I’m Glad You Realized The Truth
“I knew when my dad asked me, at 9 years old, how to spell a simple word. I started paying attention then. I saw how he had a bunch of credit cards, was repaying loans, spent tons of money on cigs and dumb stuff. He never used the stove or oven because he couldn’t follow recipes, so all we ate was TV dinners and ramen noodles. He refused to ever get any government assistance for anything.
As I got older, he blamed us for his financial downfall. I started having mental breakdowns over any kind of spending, even going to McDonald’s, because he made me feel intense guilt over it.
When I became an adult, I realized it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t bankrupt my dad. He was just an idiot who blamed his inability to budget or ask for help on his kids.”
He Fell For The Oldest Trick In The Book
“My dad came into the living room and asked me about a ‘free up your disk space’ popup he got on his laptop. I told him it was a scam and to ignore it. He walked right back into his room and paid the guy $350 on his debit card to log in and run the standard defrag, clean up programs! Then they locked him out of his computer and wanted more money to unlock it.
We had to toss the laptop in the trash. It was old, anyway. I went with him to get a new one. We had to cancel his debit card so they would not just hit his account again, and I had the phone company issue a new IP so they could not contact his new computer (the phone company suggested this move).
The man has a masters in Mathematics, worked on the guidance systems for the Pershing and Tomahawk cruise missiles. At 84 years old, he is still teaching GED math students at two high schools. But he falls for every scam.”
He Called And Called, But She Wouldn’t Answer
“Here was probably the biggest indicator: I was 12 or so at the time, and I got dropped off at the bookstore for an afternoon. I was given some money to get something to eat and drink, maybe buy a book or Pokemon cards, and enough money to call when I needed a ride. This was pre-cellphone, so I had to use a payphone. Calls were 50 cents each at the time, and I burned up $3 calling every ten minutes until my mom answered. It was 4 when I started calling, and 5ish when she finally picked up.
‘Hello…?’
‘Hey Mom (feigning that I wasn’t annoyed or upset), I’m ready to get picked up from the bookstore.’
‘I just dropped you off.’
‘Mom, that was almost 5 hours ago.’
‘Fine. I’ll be right there.’
In unfavorable traffic, it was maybe a 20-minute drive. 40 minutes later, I called her back.
‘HELLO.’
‘Hey, Mom…’
‘Oh-KAY. I’m out the door (in a tone of me inconveniencing her).’ CLICK.
40 more minutes go by. I call again, and it goes to her voicemail. With a clear tone that I was being a bother to her, she had changed her voicemail message to: ‘Hey everyone, I went to go get my kid. I’ll be back later.’ My parents always had the same voicemail message, so I was a.) confused and b.) felt my anxiety get overwhelming as I felt as though I was being bothersome to her and whoever may have tried to call.
My mother arrived about 15 minutes later. She chided me on the ride home for just staying at the store and reading books instead of trying to work on bettering myself. After the anxiety swelling had decreased, I came to the conclusion that my mother was implicating I had to go and improve my social status by making more friends and going to parties, and that the path I was on wasn’t going to lead to ‘a happy or respected lifestyle.’
I started using substances a few years later, and even though I quit a long time ago, the effects on my personal life still linger. I also stopped reading as much. I’ve been trying to get back into it lately.”
Adults Are Always Right
“My dad is actually a very smart man, but my mother, oh god. Putting aside all of the idiotic parenting things she’s done that have messed me up, here are some of the amusing things.
When I was a kid I was (and still am) absolutely obsessed with animals and books. So I had this book about the classification of animals, and I mentioned to my mom that insects were a type of animal. She insisted I was wrong, and I was confused. I was like seven, so my mom must know better than me, right? But I had also been reading about this less than a half hour ago, so I knew insects were animals. I showed her my book, and I think she realized she was wrong but was upset she was outsmarted by her first grader, so she said not to believe everything I read and to stop being so disrespectful.
Going off the ‘don’t believe everything you read’ thing, she believes everything she reads on Facebook, but when I try to show her a credible source saying I’m right, she pulls that line again. She once slept with onions in her socks because Facebook said it would ‘draw out toxins.’
I have a lot of succulents, and I water them with a spray bottle. Once, she said she thought it was cool that she could see they had been breathing. I was confused before I realized that she meant she had seen the moisture on the windows behind them. From my spray bottle.
She tried to tell me that snakes don’t have bones. I had a pet snake at the time, and had, as I said before, been obsessed with animals all my life, so I generally know what I’m talking about. I even showed her pictures of snake skeletons and stuff, but she insisted it was fake.
She just really hates being wrong, but is usually wrong.”
He Knew What He Wanted
“Let me start off by saying that my dad is one of the smartest people I know, and I fix robots for a living with a bunch of engineers, so that is saying something. He is uneducated and has been a farmer his entire life, but as a result, he can fix anything and is very mechanically minded.
Now to the story: We had just gotten dial-up internet in the late 1990s and I was very excited because I always had a knack for computers. Anyway, I finished setting it up, installing AOL onto the computer, and my dad asked if he can look something up on it now. I said sure, took him to yahoo.com and explained that all he has to do was type in what he wanted to look up and press enter. He got excited and I imagine he is going to look up one of his siblings that he hadn’t seen in years, or maybe look up the projected market for soybeans.
His exact search was ‘ladies with big knockers.’ Then he scrolled down the page for awhile and said, ‘This is the best decision I ever made.’ He never touched the computer again after that, as far as I know, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t getting off using the computer at night because, er, that’s what I was doing.”
She Only Knew How To Spend Money
“It wasn’t obvious from a single interaction, but I noticed once I was in school:
-Her response to everything I was interested in was ‘I don’t care about X,’ or ‘I don’t know why anyone would concern themselves with X’ and that she effectively never knew anything about really any topic. If I did ask her what she was interested in, she didn’t have anything to say or share that wasn’t about spending my dad’s money (she didn’t work).
-She only judged people based on their wealth and how their house looked when I was dropped off. Again, this is a woman who never had a career and whose parents paid for everything until her second husband (my stepdad) swooped in and picked up the bill for her life. She could never articulate why it was a potential warning sign to her — she would just call them names and make it harder for me to leave the house or spend time with friends.
-She was unable and unwilling to learn how to explain anything. I’m talking the simplest things; there were no steps for anything like hygiene or life skills of any kind. If I didn’t learn in school or from my grandparents, then I taught myself, and she would get violently angry and belittle me when I didn’t know how to do something.
-She had a horrible temper, so I just stopped bringing home things like report cards. I was on the honor roll all through school, but she would take away all of my belongings (anything I liked or enjoyed so my room would just be empty) if I didn’t achieve 90s or higher in every subject. She would scream at me for being a slacker. I just stopped bringing home the report cards and she never asked or noticed.
-She had no listening skills whatsoever. She had an inability to understand that someone outside of her has a different experience and becomes very upset when that reality is broken.
-She gets all of her news from ‘US’ or ‘People’ Magazine — not that everyone who reads them is like my mom — but I have never seen her read a real book.
-Oh, also her and my stepdad’s hobbies are gambling and drinking excessively. I can sort of understand my stepdad’s perspective as he has a super stressful job and is not stupid, but has very low emotional intelligence so he just represses all of his feelings and then goes wild on gambling, but my mom’s life is the opposite of stressful and she gets super into recklessly throwing away money.
I made this list because as a child, it is really upsetting when this is all you know, and you think something is wrong with you. But your parent can absolutely be a narcissist, and also not very smart. It doesn’t mean that it is you that is the problem though.”
Never Pour Water On Burning Oil
“Luckily, I was at school working on the newspaper when this happened, but apparently my step-mom was heating oil to make tostadas when it caught fire.
My step-mom screamed for my dad and ran over to the sink to grab the hose. Luckily, he stopped her from killing them both, but then decided the best course of action was to pick up the flaming pan and attempt to carry it outside. I walked into a kitchen that smelled like burning oil with a giant scorch mark on the floor and black marks up and down the cabinets/walls near our back door.
My step-mom has also attempted to argue that Alaska is attached to the United States, and that I was misinformed about what grade levels were in the school I attended.”
Mom And Me And ADHD
“When I was younger, I’d often get extremely frustrated with my mom because of how hard it was to get her to understand things.
When I got my ADHD diagnosis at 25 and started treatment, I slowly came to see our similarities and realized that so much of what frustrated me was just how she’d learned to cope with her undiagnosed ADHD and severe anxiety issues. It’s made me a lot more patient with her and has really improved our relationship.”
He Couldn’t Understand Why He Had No Friends
“There’s a difference between intelligence and wisdom. My parents were very book-smart: my dad has a PhD in engineering and my mom was an artist. They just didn’t always do wise things.
My mom married my dad for his financial stability: he was in the Navy at the time, and the man her family wanted her to marry (a family friend) was in medical school. She wanted kids and from the onset, he said he hated children. After 9 years of marriage, she went off birth control because she was lonely, and nine months later I popped out. My dad has resented me ever since. She did it again eight years later and had my sister, who my dad forced her to give up for adoption.
My dad was a sociopath, pure and simple. He doesn’t think he’s better than everyone else, he’s assured of it. He thinks the rest of us are funny like we’d think of a puppy falling down a flight of stairs because he got scared of his own foot: funny in their stupidity. He thinks religion is a fraud, professional certifications are a fraud, the medical industry is a fraud, etc. He is supreme in his intelligence, but he left the Navy because he couldn’t get promoted. I was told by one of his fellow shipmates he was the ‘Frank Burns of the crew,’ trying to befriend powerful people and backstabbing anyone else. He was just really bad at it. My dad has no friends (he says he doesn’t need them) and job-hops every few years, making a ton of money as a defense consultant. A real unlikable guy.
So yeah, they were smart, but not very wise.”
How Can You Be THAT Bad At Cooking?
“Oh man, not me but my roommate’s dad. Let me see what I can remember:
He constantly takes random spices from the cabinet without looking at what they are and pours them into food, expecting it to taste good.
At least once a week, he starts cooking a meal, then stops halfway through and turns the burners off to go do something else. Then he comes back an hour or two later and picks up where he left off.
When trying to get Siri to work, he says what he wants and then puts ‘Siri’ in last in the sentence. He then pauses and yells the same sentence even louder. He never understands that ‘Siri’ is the trigger word.
He plugged in a flash drive to his computer to watch a short video that was on it and ended up installing a virus, blaming the computer for the problem.
He’ll constantly drive 45 minutes each way to a gas station to save 20 cents a gallon.
There was the time he paid a master mechanic like $800 to tune up his Pontiac GTO, and it was running really well but he decided he was going to ‘fine-tune’ it himself. As a result, it didn’t run for another four months. He ended up pulling the motor apart to try and ‘fix’ it.”
They Probably Thought It Was The Homeopathy That Saved Him
“They fall for all the alternative medicine scams. My mom is a firm believer in homeopathy, and to this day she still tries to get me to use it.
When I was a kid, I got some rare bone tumors, and they took me to reiki sessions to try and heal me. My mom also took me to some religious woman that started speaking in tongues and stuff. All of that was mostly out of desperation though. They did take me to a hospital from the get-go, where I received proper chemo treatment, so they’re not stupid, just too gullible. The chemo worked, so I don’t have any more tumors, just a messed up back.”
He Taught Him A Lesson Through Ice Cream
“Well, it isn’t really that my dad isn’t smart. He is one of the most successful people I know. But I realized when I was around 8 that he was uneducated. He never graduated from elementary school. He avoided reading books to me for a while, and I learned later that he had never learned to read or write until his mid-20’s.
I never was ashamed of it and didn’t realize people would look down on him for not having a degree. He taught me to be selfless and always made me give my food or money to the homeless when I lived in China. When I was younger, I didn’t want to give my ice cream or food away, but he taught me that I could always buy another one or have it at home. That I was just waiting for my treat, but these people would never be able to have it unless I gave it to them. It made sense to 6-year-old me.
Also, he is a very successful businessman. He stresses to me that people will listen to me if I have a degree. He’s very straightforward about how people will say nice things, but in the end, the one with the better schooling has to put in less effort. I am really proud of my dad, and feel like I fall short in comparison to him even though I have more under my belt education-wise.
She Should Win A Darwin Award For That One
“I was having a debate about evolution with my mom years and years ago, and she countered one of my points with, ‘Okay, so if evolution exists, why don’t cars and houses evolve?’ She probably thought she had won because I was too dumbfounded to reply.
She’s honestly a smart person in general, but is very religious and clearly has never taken the time to learn anything about evolution.”
He Just Focused On The Gameplay
“My father is very much into video games. As an ’80s kid, I played games with him all the time. Once the Super Nintendo came out, adventure games were all the rage, and heavy on text dialogue. My mother and I would sit on the couch watching my father play, and suddenly he just started smashing past the dialogue. ‘Hey hey! We didn’t get a chance to read that!’ He replied back to us that he already knew what it said.
My mother would put my dad on the spot: ‘So then, what did it say?’ The blank look that suddenly turned into a guilty smile made me realize my dad was illiterate. Suddenly, I ran through in my mind all the times he asked me what signs said, or if I could read the instructions off the back of boxes after he had already looked at them, or would make up new stories when ‘reading’ me kid books. These were all ploys to hide the fact he had trouble reading!
Thankfully, because of video games getting heavy in dialogue in later generations, he has made huge strides in reading. Even though he tends to have poor pronunciation (so ‘turrets’ become ‘tur-rents’), I’m still proud of him.”