Do your parents lie about your childhood achievements?
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Anonymous
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My son has a few speech delays and part of the process is filling out paperwork and mentioning if any family members were late talkers. It can sometimes run in families. A few things they remember: - Potty trained fully at 10 months - Could identify and say all colors at 15 months - Could identify all music notes at 9 months on flash cards.. MIL would say bring me the a half note and my DH would crawl and get it for her It is a real mystery my husband didn’t end up at Juilliard! |
Anonymous
| Aww, that’s sweet. |
Anonymous
| Yep. I have a DD with delays and this is common with memories of grandparents. They are not realistic about any developmental or emotional or behavioral milestones. My mother claims I toilet trained myself one day when I was a year and a half and I spoke in complete sentences by the time I was a year old. |
Anonymous
| By the way, I wouldn't call this lying. I think their memories are just not realistic anymore. |
Anonymous
| The few times I have asked my Mom about milestones and the like she simply says, There were four of you and it was 40-50 years ago. I don't remember. |
Anonymous
Potty training at 10 months is outright impossible. Sorry. The kid isn’t even walking in order to get to the toilet. |
Anonymous
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As a scientist, and the parent of a special needs child, I just want to point out that lies or non-disclosure about health or childhood development can really come back to haunt you. Actually, they can kill, if the older generation is a carrier of a heritable disease, which modern medicine can catch with additional screening in the course of a patient's life. Like cancer! Hopefully in this day and age there is less taboo about it and we won't lie to our kids when they ask. |
Anonymous
That's what I think it was. My mom's memory of my sister and me is like that. She'll say things like, "oh, you and your sister were both basically talking in full sentences by 18 months old." That's clearly BS, but I know her memory is fuzzy at this point about those things. I understand it. DD is almost 3 and if someone asked me what she was doing at 12 months versus 18 months, I'd have little idea. I could give you broad strokes, but without looking at the few things I noted in her baby book, I wouldn't be able to give you exact dates. |
Anonymous
| Omg yes lol! According to my mom, I walked at 7 months, I sat on potty by myself at 1 and was potty trained magically, eating a four course meal with fork and knife at 13 months, could read at 15 months, and do calculus at 2 years. Seriously.... idk how she thinks this but maybe it’s been a while (we’re Eastern European so maybe a cultural thing). |
Anonymous
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I think they are fudging the truth, tbh. I have a pretty good memory (still) of how my own children's language developed.
I remember pretty vividly when they said their first words, when they started to crawl and when they each walked. Some things they did on the early side of normal, some things they did right on time and other things (like being fully potty trained) took longer mainly because I didn't press the issue and waited for them to be fully ready to start the process. My own kids are late teens and I doubt that my memory is going to change much by the time they have their own children in 10 or 15 years. I think that early childhood education has made parents more aware of milestones and destigmatized delays. For the past couple of decades parents have been more likely to seek evaluations and early intervention for their kids. If a parent still has the paperwork from a developmental evaluation done decades ago and that paperwork backs up their memory of events....then I'd say that's a pretty accurate accounting. |
Anonymous
Seriously? This is not lying, it’s fondly misremembering. |
Anonymous
| My mom claims she never did a thing to potty train me; I just spontaneously started using the potty. Who would believe that?! She also remembers confiscating a Kiss album from me due to questionable content...even though I’ve never owned a Kiss album and would have been around 5 years old when the album came out. |
Anonymous
| My mom just can't remember. She just rounds up or down or tries to remember about what time what happened. There were also 4 of us and our childhoods get smashed together. Its not malicious but I know its also no accurate. Now we were potty trained early because we had one set of cloth diapers and when a new baby was coming the "older baby" had to potty train which in our family was 17-19 months old. But we also never really left the house much and we just were naked for a few months till we got it. |
Anonymous
When we had a second kid, the oldest decided that she was done with diapers (because they're for babies) and threw them in the trash. Then she asked me if she could use the potty, and she's been dry since. I actually did nothing. I think it's more a commentary on how absolutely lazy I was with potty training rather than how brilliant my child is (I had a rough pregnancy and just ignored the idea that she'd ever be out of diapers). She was nearly 3 when it happened. |
Anonymous
NP. My father was potty trained by 12 months, the old fashioned way. His mother sat him on the potty every so often and beat him for accidents. He learned and made sure that neither his children nor his grandchildren were taught that way. And one of my kids walked at 10 months and the other at 20 months, I remember and also have videos on my phone to remind me when I eventually forget. |