What made your parents paranoid when you were growing up?

[BeCraftyFatball]

For myself -Danger when leaving the street

Not paranoid about danger but paranoid about what other people might think. This was quite tiresome: no eating in the street, do not draw attention to yourself, downplay achievements (boasting being the Deadly Sin, or Vainglory) don't show off your knowledge, play card games to lose, on and on.

Railway lines, in the case of my dad. He frequently sat me down and recited:

Piggy on the railway picking up stones.
Along came a train and broke Piggy's bones.
Oh," said Piggy, "That's not fair!"
"Oh," said the engine driver, "I don't care!"

...I was FOUR YEARS OLD. We lived nowhere near a railway line and I wasn't even allowed out of the front door by myself! Focusing on this one dire danger made no sense at all.

The ferris wheel.

I think there must have been a high-profile accident or something, because my dad refused to have anything to do with these gentle relaxing rides but was quite happy to let us go on the ones that whizzed round and round and up and down...

Candles possibly...my mum wouldn't let us have candles in the house unless under Uber strict supervision..I think it's because she nursed a lot of burns victims so there is a reason behind it.

Oh, and boyfriends.

When I did the maths and realised that
of my parents' 4+5 siblings, 4+1 got married due to a pregnancy
all 5 of those marriages ended in divorce (more or less acrimoniously)

...their attitude to their daughters' love lives made a bit more sense 😁

on a lighter note, every time we had fish it became a family joke to say "mind the bones!"

DM - other people’s opinions of our behaviour
DF - glue sniffing (he’d obviously watched that film we had to watch at school)
DM & DF equally - teenage pregnancy, to the extent I was 31, married and pregnant and still nervous to tell my folks 😂

Electricity pylons
Driving it’s the interior light on
using the landline before 6pm

That I shouldn’t go into a pub alone as ‘ women don’t do that.’
I was a very young child when I was told this.
That I must never, ever leave the house with so much as damp hair. This would lead to me catching a very serious cold and becoming extremely ill.

Nothing at all i think .
I'm not sure if that's a good thing , looking back i was given a tremendous amount of freedom from quite a young age, at about 8/9 i walked a fair distance to the next village where i then caught a bus into the next small town for a wander around then back home.
It was a different era but i am surprised i was allowed to do the things i did.
I was a lot more cautious with my own children.
My mom is an only one and once told me that her parents cautiousness and worry over her made her be less so with us.

As far as my mother was concerned, everything! “What will people think, what will the neighbours think?”.

Always judging others as well. She’s a complete snob, even at 83.

Getting pregnant! Well my brother got his girlfriend of two months up the duff and apparently that was all totally fine. I was told I’d be out the door and my mum said ‘I’ll break you back if you turn up pregnant!’

My DM thought if I went on a school residential I wouldn't make it back alive. There had been a couple of horror stories in the news throughout her time as a parent to be fair.

My mum - me getting pregnant. She used to count the tampons in the box and I used to get into trouble if I was late, which I often was as I had irregular cycles.

Both of them - Drinking alcopops. They always used to say if I wanted to drink alcohol I should drink beer. I hated the taste of beer and me and my friends always saw beer as a boys drink.

Men! My father inculcated in me that men were only ever after one thing and would hurt me in order to get it.

I was in my teens before I discovered that when he was much younger his 3 year old cousin had been abducted and r*ped. A couple of years later he caught another man trying to abduct his niece and beat the shit out of him thereby saving his niece - then I understood why he had such paranoia and that all men were evil (except him).

We weren't allowed to talk to other people, except at school and then only about what was happening at school, and if we were seen doing so we would get thoroughly interrogated about what had been said. Which could last for hours.

What would people think! My mum could never get it through her head that most people didn’t care what we did.
She judged everyone so assumed they all did the same.

Not a lot. Born late 50s.

This. Their main emotion when I won a big scholarship to university which was reported in the local paper was embarrassment, in case other people thought I was getting above myself.

And mine judged confident, happy women, so she assumed everyone else did, and brought up her daughters to avoid the twin dangers of confidence and visible happiness.

My dad- what other people think/appearing scummy.

My mum- similar but instead of quietly fretting about it, was and still is, more the type to accuse you of looking at her “funny” or “like she’s shit on the ground” and picking a fight with anyone and everyone.

As a result of both but especially my mother, I was an incredibly anxious child and constantly on edge. Wonder why.

That one of us - 5 sisters- would get pregnant "out of wedlock". They were both ridiculous. Took it to extreme lengths, were very unpleasant about it. Couldn't credit any of us with any intelligence.

It wasn't helped by the fact dm was so old fashioned and bigoted that she couldn't say the word "period" without checking over both shoulders first and then using a sort of stage hiss.

Appearing lower middle class.

My mum was hugely insecure about her social status: she came from an aspirational lower middle class family made good and we moved in more upper middle circles (academics).

You could see her visibly twitch when we used the words "toilet", "serviette" or "pardon" and she would have lost her shit if we'd done it in public.

She was also neurotic about us watching too much TV and would walk into the room and aggressively turn it off if we were watching it.

My mum is terrified of 'what people will think'. Her big thing is eating or drinking in public. She can't understand anyone walking along with a coffee at all, genuinely baffled. She did allow a dispensation when I was pregnant and then a small water bottle was just about appropriate. She made me laugh recently when we were sitting on a normal bench at the park and she insisted on moving across to an actual picnic bench before we started eating! Also a more valid paranoia about slushies after my dad took a big slurp in the cinema watching Jurassic Park and ended up freezing his throat and fighting for breath!