17 of the Funniest Lies People Have Told to Children

Kids are gullible, and it can be fun to mislead them into believing that something is true when it isn’t with a harmless little white lie or two. Like that mum has eyes in the back of her head, or that eating their crusts will make their hair curly, or the most fun lie of all — that the ice cream truck only plays music when they are out of ice cream. Ha, love that one. My children know it’s not true but we got a few years out of it before they figured it out.

Redditors were asked what were the funniest lies to tell children, and the responses did not disappoint. Here are 17 of the funniest!

#1 More M&Ms for us!

One time I was eating M&Ms and my 3-year-old nephew asked what they were, so I told him it was candy and when he asked for some I joked that it was vegetable flavoured. The green M&Ms were made out of lettuce, the red ones out of tomatoes, etc. He didn’t eat M&Ms for the longest time and it was hard to convince him I was kidding because he started to believe we were tricking him into eating more vegetables.

#2 The Cotton Candy Con

We convinced my brother when he was about 3 that cotton candy was made out of cotton, and me and my older sister kept daring each other to see who could eat a shirts worth.

#3 Well, Shit

When I was first learning swear words, my parents made the mistake of telling me those were “words only mummies and daddies are allowed to say”. So I was playing house with my sister and her friends, and I was the dad. I promptly went on a swearing tirade as the “dad” and got in big trouble.

#4 Using the Force

I convinced my kids I was a Jedi. I waved my right hand to turn up the volume on my car while secretly using my left hand to turn up the volume with the steering wheel controls. I did the same thing with the electronic controls for my seat. When they challenged me to do something else, I replied that I had already done too much because a Jedi should never use the Force for trivial things.

#5 The Pet Rock

My dad said if I could look after a special growing rock, and watered it each day until it stopped growing I could get a dog. I’d water it and every week, while I was at school he’d replace it with a slightly bigger rock.

#6 Ready to Launch

My sister was about 8 and was asking my dad about buttons in the car while my mum and I were in the store. She asked him what the seat-warmer button did and since it had a picture of wavy lines above a chair, Dad told her it was the ejector button and would launch her chair out of the car. She acted like she didn’t believe him but kept asking about it until Mum and I got back in the car. She immediately went for a second opinion.

“Mum, what’s that button do?”
“What, this one?” *presses it*
“NO!!!”

Dad still tells that story 15 years later and can barely get through it without wheezing. My sister is less amused.

#7 The Mythical Moose

My friend’s parents told her that moose weren’t real growing up. Like, unicorns and moose were both fictional creatures. When she got to high school someone was talking about seeing a moose and she thought they were trying to be funny and basically, she found out at 16 that moose are, in fact, real. When she went home to tell her parents her mum was in tears of laughter.

#8 Automatic Windows

My three-year-old thinks the car windows answer to voice commands. I roll her window down when she says “Window open!”

#9 Purple Ears

That your ears turn purple when you lie. My best friend’s mum told her this when we were little, and she covered her ears or took down her ponytail every time she lied until she was 8.

#10 Clouded Judgement

My friend said he was once in the car with his family and they drove past an industrial plant. Smoke was billowing out of a chute, as they do at these plants. He asked his mum what it was and she told him it was the cloud factory and those were the clouds being released into the sky. He said he honestly thought clouds were man made for a better portion of his life.

#11 The Porky Pie

If you put a piece of ham in a DVD player, it will show you a short film about pigs.

#12 Totally Doing This One Ourselves

When my kids were little I used to set the clocks ahead three hours every News Year’s Eve, shout “Happy New Year!”, put them to bed, then celebrate real New Years with the grown ups.

More of a top tip than a prank, to be honest.

#13 The Silencer

That the human body is only allotted so many words a year, and if you talk too much now, you might not be able to talk for the rest of the year.

#14 Poop

That if they don’t eat their vegetables they won’t be able to poop and they’ll explode.

#15 Might Try This Too

That the toy monster steals their toys at night. Specifically, the ones that aren’t put away.

#16 The Wet Willy

I told my 7-year-old sister that if you lick your fingers and wipe it off in your ear you will have way better hearing and when she did it I talked a little louder and raised the volume on our TV when she wasn’t looking. She did this everyday till her teacher said that it wasn’t true. I had convinced my sister to wet willy herself for a week.

#17 The Lollipop Tree

When my cousins and I were younger we always looked forward to visiting our grandparents for the inevitable sugar rush. The best part without a doubt though was the “Lollipop Tree”. We would run out and get to pluck a half dozen or so lollipops each that we eventually realised were just taped onto the low-hanging branches of the only tree in his backyard. Once my Grandma passed away, my Grandad moved into a condo and the tree was left behind. 

Skip forward about 8 years, the first generation of grandkids are visiting and my Grandad goes about his usual habit and starts taping lollipops to the tree in the yard of our house. My sister sees this and just about cries yelling “YOU MEAN YOU MADE THE LOLLIPOP TREE?!?” – She was 16. I couldn’t stop laughing for 20 minutes.

Source: Reddit and Giphy