Skip to main content

Hey kids, here are the secrets adults aren't telling you

Four children shot from the chest down standing in wellies on dirt
Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

I'm in my fifties now and all my children are grown up. I think it's time to tell you kids what the adults (particularly parents) aren't telling you. I don't expect many kids will come across this, so if you don't have young kids of your own you could share it with them.

You don't have to go to school

(This applies to the UK, and probably many other countries.) When our kids said, "we don't want to go to school", we would say, "the law says you have to be educated". Notice we didn't mention school. That's because you could get your parents to home educate you. So you could suggest home education to them and see what they say. Or, depending on what your parents are like, it may be a worse thought than school, in which case, yes, you're going to have to go to school.

Elbows on the table isn't so bad

In some cultures it's OK to put your elbows on the table. So you could point that out that by putting your elbows on the table you're justing appreciating the rich diversity of other cultures. There is a chance that you might get a slap on the ear for that, while they point out that in some cultures it's acceptable to hit your children. So get ready to run.

If your parents are Christians

If they're about to punish you then ask them, "if Jesus took all the punishment for my sins then why are you punishing me?" There is an answer to that which means you still get punished, but if they don't know that answer you may get out of the punishment.

Don't run with a kite

This isn't really a secret, but just something I've learnt. If you have to run to get a kite up then don't bother, because it won't stay up. If there's not enough wind to lift it up then just try another day. There's almost always another day. 

Parents have favourites

Of course they shouldn't, but they probably do. They try hard not to, which is why they'll deny it if you ask them. You don't want them to answer honestly, because there's a chance it's not you, and that ruins your childhood. It also changes as time goes by, so even if it was you when you ask, it may not be you the next day, or the next hour.

Don't ask for equal treatment with your brothers and sisters

If your parents have a chance to do something fun with one of your brothers and sisters and not with you, then you may want to moan about it. The trouble with that is that, on another occasion, they might want to do something fun with you and your brother or sister may moan. So to keep everyone happy they don't do anything fun with one of you unless they can do it with all of you. So better to not moan and then everyone gets more fun.

Yes, they are keeping things from you

When I was a kid I had this feeling that the adults were keeping things from us. When I became an adult it turned out that there were things they were keeping from us. They were all boring things though, like insurance and taxes. There's nothing particularly fun that adults do that isn't for children. No sir, not at all.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Follow up to Matt's "Three feelings" post

This is in response to Matt 's post Three feelings I don't have a word for .  (A blog post in response to a blog post. How quaint.) "Imagined vastness" sounds like a very specific instance of the more general "sense of wonder" or sensawunda . For me I get that feeling of imagined vastness when reading Iain M Banks' Culture series. I don't get the Stack Overflow vertigo he talks about, but I do have a feeling of holding something almost physical when I've got something on the clipboard and I haven't pasted it yet. It's similar to the feeling that I (maybe it is just me) get when I know there's a bit of coffee left at the bottom of the cup. Atemporal hotel lobbies is something I can't really relate to. I do have my own unnamed feeling though: Cycling to work It's that moment when I whizz down our sloped drive and start pedalling up to the road. Because I WFH I go out at lunchtime these days, and the feeling just isn't the sa

20 years of blogging: First post

Back in 1999 it mostly cost money to run a blog (from what I can remember). You had to sort out your own hosting. Then Dave Winer  made on offer on his blogging platform editthispage.com  for a 60 day free trial , so I was away. So what was my very first post? What words did I choose to post for all on the internet to see?  23 December 1999 I'm stil trying to decide what to do with this. Click on the skull to add your suggestion. Oh, that's not very good is it. A typo in the second word too. The URL was morrissfamily.editthispage.com. (I think. Everything I say could be unreliable, because it was a while ago.) I also created an FAQ page that day: Who are the Morriss family? We are just a normal family with a dad who likes exploring the internet. Why don't you have more information? Because I'm not sure want I want to do with this site. I think there are no typos there. The idea was that I would share family news. Come back in January to see what my next

20 years of blogging: fourth post

4/1/2000 Things are moving   We've had the letter from Wycliffe about "raising support".  They want us to aim that 25% of our income comes from other people by the end of a year, and 50% by the end of two years.  Other news: I've officially asked for voluntary redundancy Spoiler: after 4 years of trying I didn't even get to 20%, so I was paid a salary after all.