“Honestly, stop lying to your kids.”
We all heard one or two untrue statements from adults in order to get us to behave when we were kids. Joel Wood and Lia Hatzakis are here to provide us with some lockdown entertainment by telling us about the lies they were told growing up. Some you might recognise and others you might’ve never heard of, in which case you’ll have a great laugh learning about.
Starting off, Lia mentions the fountain pens everyone used in elementary school. You know the ones we’re talking about, that have a pen on one end and an eraser on the other? According to Lia, everyone used to say the eraser was made of “pig’s wee” because it smelled really bad, “Like any of us ever smelled pee from a pig, but we were all like ‘That’s made out of pig’s wee! That’s disgusting!'”
Joel remembers a classic that we’ve all heard from our parents and teachers at least once, namely that if you swallow chewing gum it’ll stay in your stomach for seven years. He confesses to being a little rebel and swallowing it on a daily basis, while Lia shares she still believes that “it’s living in there for seven years”. Joel says he did Google it to see if it was actually true and it turns out it isn’t.
“Think about it practically, why would chewing gum stay in your system, but anything else doesn’t?” No one knows the answer to that one; it must be a parent thing. However, Lia raises a valid argument, saying, “If they hadn’t taught us that lie, they wouldn’t get chewing gum under the desks in school.” Guess adults brought this one on themselves.
Speaking of chewing gum under the desk, Joel and Lia continue their discussion about the horrible feeling of chewing gum stuck under the desk, especially “the occasional one that’s still fresh and gooey”. Joel asks Lia if she had to scrape gum from under the desks during detention, and indeed she did. We couldn’t agree more with Joel when he says that it should be considered child labour. Although, it seems like his teachers were more creative with detention by sending him and his mates on impossible quests, like getting “tartan paint” from the art room. Sorry, Lia, but we prefer Joel’s detention!
“If you swallow the stone of a plum it would cause a tree to grow inside you.” That’s another lie we all heard at one point in our childhood, and as Lia points out, it applies for any sorts of pits. She says she actually remembers a girl from her school saying she had a tree growing in her tummy, to which Joel gives the very sassy reply, “No, hun, you’re just pregnant.”
The next one is a favourite of teachers. All of us have heard at least once of the infamous former student “who swung too far back on the legs of their chair and they fell backwards and cracked their head open”. Both Joel and Lia recall that exact feeling when you’re swinging in your chair, start to lose it, and think, “I’m gone”. Their discussion then moves into how kids always seem to cause mayhem doing the same annoying things, like swinging on chairs or kicking the person on the chair in front of them. Joel’s sass makes an appearance once again when he says he’d tell someone to grow up if they did that to him.
The next lie which children get told is that your eyes turn square when you watch too much telly. Lia says she’s always interpreted this one as “you’re going to have to wear glasses”, which sounds like a very logical explanation. Joel suggests another theory: that it’s just one of those generation gaps, because nowadays we have our phones practically to our faces.
The next one neither Joel, nor Lia have heard of. Admittedly, we haven’t either. It’s that “if the wind changes direction while you’re making a face, your face will stay like that”. However, Lia recalls that she might’ve been told this before going on a theme park ride.
The last lie is the well-known turning on the light in a moving car is illegal. Lia again admits that she believed this one for a long time because no one told her it wasn’t actually true. Joel brings up the very valid point that “if it was illegal, it wouldn’t even be in the car”, but kids these days wouldn’t understand that issue because they have phones that light up.
As Joe and Lia sign off, they come to the conclusion that maybe children wouldn’t lie to adults if adults didn’t lie to them. They end the video with an applause for all the teachers who have to put up with children, while also clapping for the audience and all YouTubers.
Want more?
Find out about Reb Day‘s experience of being a comedy sketch producer. Alternatively, you could read about what Anthony Padilla learnt after spending the day with COVID-19 survivors.
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