Kids tell little, itty-bitty white lies. I did it, we all have (and some still do) because let's face it, no one wants to get in trouble when their mother or father finds out. Especially, if you can smell the punishment from a mile away. And if you happened to be in the know about a child's 'little white lie,' please don't rat them out - that's just foul.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
The Rock Investigation
“I was only about 9 or 10 years old. When my older brother would get home from high school, he would constantly ring the doorbell for me to open the door. He had his own keys but he just kept ringing. It annoyed me almost every day.
One day I start yelling out, telling him to open it himself.
He kicks the window by the door, it shatters and a tiny shard cuts my foot. No big deal, just a band-aid fix.
We call mom and dad said someone threw a rock, and my brother even found a rock outside as evidence. Mom and dad called the police later when they get home. The police arrive and wrote a full report.
And my brother and I have never mentioned the story again.
I’m glad that it wasn’t some hardcore detective case, where he asked how I injured my foot.
Another story.
I was still in primary school and had a day off school. So I was home with my dad and he was asleep most of the day; tired from working a night shift.
I went to open the curtains and my brother who was supposed to be at school was sitting behind the couch with a few magazines to keep him occupied for an entire day.
He said don’t tell dad, and my dad never found out.”
‘That Time I Fell Off My Bike’
“I didn’t split my head open falling backward on my scooter, my ‘best friend’ at the time threw a big rock at my head and I didn’t want him to get in trouble, even though he didn’t even apologize or feel bad about it. I didn’t want people to freak out before my parents got me because my plain white shirt was soaked in blood, so I grabbed an empty fruit punch Gatorade out of the trash and said I spilled it all over myself.
I was never allowed to do anything without a helmet outside.”
‘It’s Been 15 Years’
“My mom collects these painted plates and hangs them up around the house. There is one plate with this creepy old man and lady on it that for some reason my mom loved, but my brothers, sister, and I hated. Well, one day, my mom came home to see her beloved plate on the floor in pieces. She sent each of us to our rooms and interrogated us individually. Each one of us gave the exact same answer ‘I don’t know, it was like that when we got home from school; it must have fallen on its own.’ She was ticked off and we had our TV privileges taken away for a couple of days because we were obviously all lying, but we never had to see that dish again.
Now we all know exactly how that plate came to be destroyed, and every now and then my mom will ask, but the answer is always the same, ‘I don’t know, it was like that when we got home from school; it must have fallen on its own.’
It’s been 15 years, and it will be a secret we take to our graves.”
During The High School Reunion
“For some reason, my parents’ high school reunion was in January in Ohio.
They decided to get a hotel closer to the event space since we lived in a rural area, leaving the kids alone in the house. Naturally, we threw a giant party. Everything seemed to be fine around 3 a.m. when we noticed that people had parked on the grass leaving tire tracks all over the lawn. So at this point, we knew we were in it deep. The next morning we woke up and were blessed to find a full blanket of snow covering everything in sight. It stayed on the ground for ample enough time that the tracks became unnoticeable.
And 19 years later, our parents still have no idea.”
‘I Replaced It Through A Guy On Facebook’
“My mom and her new husband took a belated honeymoon to New Orleans, which was where he used to live in his early adult life. While there, they ran into one of his old friends who was selling artwork as a street vendor. My mom secretly bought a beautiful, one-of-a-kind drawing from the vendor as a Christmas gift for her husband, and I suggested I build a frame and mount it while my less crafty brother paid for materials. She agreed and gave me the drawing to work on the frame.
The house I was living in was small, so I had just enough space in my room for a desk and craft station in my room when the door was closed. As I was working on it, my roommate slammed open my door and knocked over an ink bottle from an unrelated project and ruined the artwork. After talking about what to do, my brother and I decided to use clues from my mom’s trip photos to find the vendor and we eventually found him on Facebook. We messaged him, bought another similar drawing, had it sent overnight, and I finished up the frame on schedule.
My mom never found out, and it’s now prominently displayed on the wall inside their front door.”
The Chucky Doll
“As a child, I was a huge horror movie fan (still am). My mother was cool and allowed me to watch horror films a lot of kids my age weren’t allowed to watch. One year for Christmas, my mother bought me a life-size super freaking realistic Chucky doll from the movie child’s play. According to my brothers, she searched high and low on the internet for weeks and spent way more then you’d ever want to spend on a doll. She pretty much went the whole 9 yards for this gift. Please keep in mind that even though I was a horror fan I was still a child and as thoughtful as the gift was, it scared me so much when I received it. But seeing how excited she was to give me the gift I didn’t have the heart to express how terrified I was. So what did I do? Well, what child would do to keep their mother happy, I pretended to LOVE this doll.
I had to force myself to carry it around everywhere I went, even sleep with it in my room. I was living my own personal nightmare but I knew it made her happy. Flash forward to about a month after Christmas when we took a road trip to Disney. Take a wild guess who my mother made sure came with us? The Chucky doll of course! She sat it between my youngest brother and me for the car ride. Due to the fact that my father and two older brothers were taking a separate car and driving in front of ours, we had plenty of room for Chucky to have his own seat! So picture this: my brother and I sat the first three hours of this trip so tense because this doll was in between us that we didn’t say a single word. I remember expecting this doll to turn its head and say something to us. This was the point I realized this whole thing had gotten too unbearable, this doll was ruining my life 8-year-old life and I wasn’t going to let him ruin my Disney trip. So while my mom was singing her heart out to Tom Petty I made eye contact with my younger brother and we devised a plan.
Waiting for the chorus of the song so my mother was distracted, I rolled down my window and tossed the Chucky doll out. The doll launched out and landed on someone’s front lawn, so a nice suburban family woke up to that surprise (which I still can’t help but laugh at when I think about it) but the Chucky doll was gone and my mother never saw it happen! About three hours later. I decided it was time to break the news, ‘I left Chucky at a rest stop.’ My mother was heartbroken, but I knew this was the way it had to be because she would have been way more upset if I had told her the truth about hating the doll. To this day my mom mentions the Chucky doll and ‘what a shame it was I lost it’, my younger brother and I just nod agreeing ‘what a shame it is’. But little does she know, the life-size Chucky doll landing on someone’s front lawn is probably the biggest joke between my brothers and me.”
The Fall From The Roof
“We had a huge snowstorm once that ended up getting us the day off school. My mom still had to go to work but she trusted me to watch over my two little brothers for the day. At the time I was 13 years old and my brothers were 9 and 5.
As soon as she left, we decided to go outside to play. My youngest brother and I convinced our middle brother to jump off the roof of our house into a big pile of snow in nothing but his boxers. He climbed up to the roof and started to freak out. We convinced him everything would be fine, and with a surprising lack of arm-twisting, he belly-flopped off the roof. He hit the deep pile of snow and started screaming before we could even laugh.
He stood up and his knee looked like raw chicken. There were bloody chunks of meat hanging out of the wound and he was in excruciating pain. The crying wouldn’t stop, and I knew I was going to be in trouble. We knew mom was going to kill us when she came home so we came up with a plot. He would just need to suck it up for eight hours and we’d be in the clear. As punishment, he made my brother and me each kiss him on his bare butt cheek. Still not sure what that was about.
As soon as my mom came home that evening, my brother limped to the garage and said he was going to ride his bike to his friend’s house. He made it to the end of the driveway, fell over, and started screaming and holding his knee. My mom rushed outside, saw the injury, and took him to the hospital.
All these years later and she still has no idea about the belly flop from the roof.”
Left Out In The Blizzard
“My little brother (9) and I (11) once left our cat out in a blizzard for three days. He accidentally got out and we could never find him. My parents were both stuck at our grandmother’s house because of the blizzard while my brother and I were stuck at home. On the third night, we heard a howling from the back porch. We go downstairs to see a howling, wet, shivering, cat on our back porch. We didn’t even recognize him at first.
Eventually, we let him in, washed him in our bathtub, dried him off and skyped a friend of my dad’s who happened to be a vet. He was fine. My parents never found out.”
Insurance Covers That
“My brother’s truck wasn’t technically broken into. He accidentally locked his keys in the truck while shopping at Goodwill for a tie a job interview. 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.
I forgot to mention that while he was on the phone with the insurance company, he mentioned that they broke into his car to steal his wallet. They asked how much money they stole, and he said $50. It turns out that the insurance also covered everything in the car that was stolen, so he got an extra $50 on top of that.”
Playing On Our Parents Bed
“My sister and I were once playing with our little brother and throwing him onto our parent’s bed.
I was holding his feet, she was holding his hands, and on the third swing, we would let him go flying onto the king-sized water-bed. On one throw, my sister was laughing too much and let go of brother’s hands right at the bottom of the swing. I ended up swinging him by his feet into the bottom of a bedpost. His head was split open a quarter inch or so. We cleaned everything up and convinced him to stop crying by the time that my mom and dad got home. He was maybe 5 years old at the time.”
‘I Got Into A Fight’
“My younger sister went to a party in high school and had one too many drinks. She was staying the night with a friend that night, and her friend’s mom ended up bringing her home at about 2 a.m. My younger brother and I carried her into our house to her basement bedroom. I locked her in her room, set my alarm for 6 a.m., and got a few hours of sleep. I got her up the next morning, and she was still gone, and I snuck her out the back door. She walked about a mile to a gas station, called her friend who came and picked her up. My mom picked her up around noon.
When she passed out, she fell and scraped her temple and cheek. My mom questioned her and she claimed she’d gotten in a fight.
30 years later, my mom was reminiscing about that night and the fight. We spilled the beans, my mom was stunned that we got away with it because she was such a light sleeper and I never got away with any kind of deception as a teen.”
Replace The Lizard
“I don’t think they know about the time we got into the unwrapped Christmas present stash and looked at all our presents (about a week before Christmas). They never said anything about it. But I felt guilty about it, especially when it came time to unwrap and I had to fake surprise. I never wanted to get into the Christmas stash again after that.
At one point, we were playing with our pet lizard outside and he ran away, so we panicked and went off to the pet store to replace him before our parents got home. We confessed that one to them after a few days, mostly because the replacement was pretty obviously a different lizard. They responded with ‘oh, ok. We honestly wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t replaced him. Why would we care if you have three lizards compared to four?'”
‘I Had To Drive My Sister To School’
“I drove my brother and sister to school when I was in high school back in the mid-80s. One morning, it had been raining all night and all morning, my sister asked me to pull my car across the yard and up to the front door so she wouldn’t get wet. We had a huge yard, over an acre. I got stuck in the land barge, I was driving a 1972 Monte Carlo, cutting two deep trenches 100 feet long across the yard to the front door. I destroyed the yard.
My dad would get so upset if we ever drove on the grass (no we didn’t have a nice yard, he was just an angry guy who loved to drink) so I had to fix it, fast. When we got home from school in the afternoon, my brother and I collected pine cones and pine needles from all over the yard and covered up the evidence. It was obvious, but my dad had one too many drinks as per usual and didn’t notice. The next spring, he saw the trench and thought he did it.
He died a few years back and I’m not sure we ever told him. I told my mom a few years ago, and all she could do is laugh.”
‘I Still Don’t Know How This Worked’
“Pretty much all of our online activity from age 12 onwards was kept secret from our parents. Our house had a fairly strict ‘no online activity’ rule, and my brother and me being children with little else to do, broke that rule extensively. When we were 12, we weren’t careful, and our parents caught us playing video games a few times. After the last time, which caused a huge fight, we became much more secretive – keeping our internet use hidden was one of the reasons we founded our secret spy organization.
Since then, our parents have caught us once or twice, but never at anything major. Our secrecy can’t take all the credit, though; they are not hard to fool. Once my mom came into the room when I was watching YouTube, suspected I was doing something online and demanded I show her the computer. I had, like an imbecile, closed the laptop without closing my tabs, so there was no way I could show her without showing her what I was watching. With that in mind, without saying a word, I got up, took my computer, and walked out of the room. I never heard another word about it, and I’m still not sure how that one worked out.”
My Best Friend
“Nice try, mom and dad.
I have five siblings. I am number five out of six, and six and I are ‘Irish twins’ and troublemakers.
We survived a bad car accident 10 years ago. My parents know that there was an accident and that it happened because my brother was going too fast for the road conditions. They do not know that we rolled down a hill, I was knocked unconscious, had to cut myself out of my seat belt when I regained consciousness, and he had to break a window for us to escape the car. Paramedics gave us a once over and we got a ride home from a friend.
I took him to Mardi Gras to celebrate his 21st birthday. The original plan was for him to visit me for a week (I lived over 300 miles away at this time). We had too many drinks his first night there and banded together a motley crew to drive to Louisiana with us the next morning. We stayed with a friend in New Orleans, got separated on a famous street, and were reunited in the French Quarter where we indulged in what all the city had to offer.
We wanted to try other stuff and the most comfortable place we knew to take it was at my grandmother’s house, where we spent a majority our times as kids. So we dropped by and played scrabble with my grandma as we were coming up and spent the rest of the night outside in the woods with a bonfire. She thought we were messed up and kept trying to feed us popcorn and cookies. We were both with her when she died nine years after and reminisced about that night.
My brother is my best friend.”