What Things Did You Think Were Normal Till You Grew Up?

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What Childhood Memory/Experience/Belief Did You Not Realize Was Untrue/Traumatic/Strange/Not Normal in Other Families etc Until Later?
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What Is Something You Believed/Did As a Kid That You Grew Up to Find Out Wasn't True/Didnt Apply to Other People?

Im bored and watching YouTube videos and I remembered this question from one of our Tuesday Talks in my comm class
Some people have the most interesting answers lol

I'll start with a rather lighthearted one:
My family calls the TV remote a 'flippy-doo' and it took me till I was (no joke) 13 to realize that other families did not

Saying grace before eating dinner

Eating free donuts after church every Sunday. In fact, my old church still gives members of the congregation free coffee and free donuts every Sunday after Mass finishes, but I avoid it regardless of what others will say.

Getting punished for being clumsy, for saying "I don't know", and for forgetting to say "Please", "Thank You", or "You're Welcome".

Calling Osage oranges "brains" (because they look kind of like round, green brains) and maple seeds "helicopters" (because they spin like a helicopter's blade on the way down).

Calling Bartlett Pears "Pickle-Pears" because we always ate them before the starlings got to them when they were small, green, and sour.

Standing outside in the rain to watch the funnel clouds form.

Eating the leftover cold pizza on Sunday mornings because my parents' band had come to my parents' house for an after-session party.

Skinny-dipping in the abandoned gravel quarry.

Didn't everybody do these things?

We called them helicopters too! My brothers and I used to throw them off our grandparents balcony and make bets on whose would reach the ground fastest

Parents using names that sound like insults but are actually said out of love and affection, such as "ragamuffin" and "gangster". That second one was usually said when we kids were being playfully mischievous, but you'd think we were going around carrying little black violin cases or something.

Yeah ... for many years, I thought that when my uncle referred to me as "that/you little bastard", he was just being a grumpy old uncle expressing endearment toward his favorite nephew. That is, until I figured out that there were only seven and one-half months between the date of my parents' marriage and the date of my birth.

A railroad track ran along the back of my parents' property. If us kids were in the back yard and heard a train coming, we would run to our "positions" where we had piled up ballast stones, just to throw those stones at the railroad cars.  Sometimes, we'd wait until a long string of automobile carriers went past, and start chucking stones at the windows in the cars, just to see if we could hit one. When we did, we would all take off running.

When we got older, we would wait for a slow-moving train, and try to get onboard to ride the train into the next town. Then we'd repeat the process and be back in about an hour or two.

Of course, this was during the summers of the "Free-Range Child" who would disappear soon after breakfast and return by suppertime.

What?

Didn't everybody do this?

In my family we have called dragonflies helicopters, because of the sound some of them make when they fly and their shape.

When I was about 10, I joined some other kids in throwing pebbles and small rocks at cars from a bridge. This was something we would do on our way home from school.

Male and female people are equal, and that girls can do "boy" things and boys can do "girl" things, and there was nothing wrong with that whatsoever.

The parents help each other out with household chores and raising the kids.

If the mom is away for a while, the dad has no problem watching over the kids, cooking them meals and keeping the house from falling into total chaos, even though cartoons and TV sitcoms told me the exact opposite.

You were not driven to school by your parents, you walked to it every day if you lived close enough to the school. Of course, this was normal for many kids back in the early 1800s.

Bullying was a part of going to school, and the only to deal with it was to turn the other cheek, even if the bully hit that other cheek as well.

Older teenage brothers could invade your privacy by barging into your room, where they'd sit on your bed next to you and proceed be as disgusting and annoying as humanly possible, tease you over your seemingly odd interests, and refuse to leave you alone and your parents wouldn't do a single thing about it, and they weren't usually at home at the time anyway.

I assumed all humans had hyper-sensitive senses since most of the female relatives I interacted with had crazy senses like I do.

I also thought being full of anxiety/stress was a normal state since I experienced it so often. It wasn’t until I saw something describing the symptoms of anxiety that I realized this wasn’t a normal state and not everyone was so stressed all the time.

I knew I had problems with maths, but I thought it was hard for everyone, I didn't realize at first that it was harder for me.

I also thought a boy in my class who read poorly was just misbehaving when he read out loud.

It took me until I was about 9 before I started to understand that people had different abilities in the different subjects.

Having a full blown conversation with myself out loud.

Honestly, I must've been 17 or so before I realized that not all adults keep their houses clean and in order. I mean, I knew there were alcoholics and such who often had a messy house, but I thought that all adults who had their life in order kept their places at least somewhat in order, meaning no clothes all over the place and such. I did think that was normal for a teenager's room thanks to my siblings, but a whole house in the spaces that the parents ruled? No way. Except then I went to a certain friend's house and that place was like that. And yes, it was a middle class family of four with both parents working and the kids doing well in school, so it felt weird... so far that's the only such a place I've seen, but it was an eye opener.