People Are Sharing The Hilarious White Lies Their Parents Told Them As Kids

A little white lie probably won’t hurt your kid, and this Twitter thread proves it

When I was pretty young, my dad told my brothers and I that it was illegal to order pizza if there were leftovers in the fridge. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that’s not even a little bit true, and that was just a white lie Dad told us because we loved ordering pizza and pestered him to do it every. Single. Night.

Can you blame him for telling a harmless alternative fact to get his kids off his back? Probably not, because it turns out the kind of white lie my dad told is insanely common.

Writer Nicole Cliffe told a similar white lie to her kids in an effort to get them to eat some healthy snacks — that is, until the babysitter accidentally blew her cover. Cliffe posted about it on Twitter, writing, “We had so many great months of the kids thinking that Scooby Snacks were plain whole wheat crackers, and then a babysitter bought a box of Scooby fruit snacks and the whole system collapsed in under three minutes.”

And now, the replies to that tweet have become a hilarious treasure trove of anecdotes of the harmless white lies parents tell their kids.

They range from simple, like

To hilariously complex, like the parents who invented a very particular burglar to target a noisy toy:

This mom had a genius excuse for eating her kids’ Halloween candy:

There’s these parents who didn’t want to spend every waking minute at Disneyland:

It actually turns out avoiding Disneyland was a common thing.

Dealing with the death of a pet can be hard for a kid, so maybe try this story instead:

Or control their sugar intake with this tried and tested trick:

Need to control a kid’s outbursts? Here’s one way:

These parents were clearly just trying to save their kid from the dangers of processed foods!

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/955622261310058496

At the end of the day, what makes all these posts so hilarious is how relatable they are — everyone has a story about a little white lie their parents told them. Sure, lying to your kids is a little bit wrong. But we all turned out OK, right?