r/ChildhoodMemories

We often think valuable skills take months or even years to master. But sometimes, the simplest skills can have the biggest impact on everyday life. Maybe it’s knowing how to negotiate, remember people’s names, cook one amazing meal, speak confidently, fix a small problem, or simply communicate better.

What’s one underrated skill you learned surprisingly quickly that has continued to benefit you over the years? And how did you first discover it?

i mean we had no electrical devices, hardly have network but i definitely miss my childhood games, from hide and seek to jumping ropes hahahah the duck duck goose, the paper football.........wow them good old days

Once my dad took me to a river to teach me how to skip stones. A cop car drove by and he suddenly told me to get down and hide until the car drove by. He said he didn’t want us to get arrested. Skipping stones was illegal. He said it was because every time a stone skipped, it was because it bounced off the head of a fish.

I believed this for so many years. I don’t want to admit how old I was before I figured out that my dad made it up.

I was a kid in the early 2000s and the easy bake oven had a resurgence and I wanted one so bad. Asked every birthday and Christmas for it and never got it. My parents said it would make a mess.

Another was the Nintendo Wii. Parents excuse was that I rarely played my GameCube, so why buy me the Wii. My rebuttal was the GameCube obviously became obsolete with a new generation console. My dad felt bad because my brothers had the new Xbox 360. So he got a me rent a center Wii that I had to keep secret from my mom. Only game I had was Wii sports. Eventually got bored without playing any other games and stopped playing it all together. Dad got mad and returned it.