Ask just about any adult, and they’ll tell you their parents put some pretty bizarre rules in place when they were growing up.
While most “strict” parents are just doing what they believe to be best and safest for their child… some rules are a little more ‘unusual’ than others.
We fished around the Internet, and the NTL office for the most eccentric family rules around, from eating all your rice to not speaking in the car – these should make your family look pretty standard.
No talking in the car
I wasn’t allowed to talk in the car at all unless I was directly asked a question. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal at the time since it was normal for me, it’s now as an adult when my friends are weirded out by my immediate silence when I enter a vehicle that I realised it was not a regular rule.
No milk for you
My Mum wouldn’t let me open a new milk without her permission or open anything really without it.
Like, we would have an extra milk in the garage fridge and I would use the rest of the milk inside. Instead of a normal household where you could just get more I had to call her and ask. So that meant if she didn’t pick up then I would have to wait for her to call back.
The first time I realised this wasn’t normal is when a friend went to open a new milk and I became super anxious and was like, “dude you have to call your mum right now or she’ll freak out!”
She was like, “umm… My Mum will be okay if I need a glass of milk.”
It suddenly clicked that my mum was probably a control freak.
My Mum was absolutely obsessed with clean feet
My mum was absolutely obsessed with clean feet.
Every day before school, she would make sure we got in the bath and cleaned our feet. I know most of you people are like, “Yeah well when I take a shower I’m already standing in soapy water, so good enough,” but that attitude would get your face slapped off around my mum.
She’d have the bath full of scolding hot water every morning and the first thing would we do, before eating, before showering, before changing into our clothes, is dip our feet in that too hot water.
Then my mom would load our feet up with this really strong smelling soap from some specialty store or something, because I’ve never seen it anywhere else, and she would scrub every square microinch of our feet with this stiff bristled big toothbrush thing. Maybe it was for cleaning horse teeth, I don’t know.
It wasn’t until I left for college did I experience what it was like to not thoroughly clean my feet every single morning. It felt liberating.
I even walked around without socks sometimes (my mum always made us wear two pairs). I still had my feet scrubbed when I came home to visit though. Only those times it felt good, as if they needed a good cleaning.
Even now when I see my mum, she wants to clean my feet. It’s pretty great actually. Imagine going to the dentist to get your teeth cleaned, but it’s for your feet instead.
Make sure you eat all your rice…
I was told to finish all of my rice because the rice i left on my plate was how many pimples my future husband would have
Don’t eat french fries in the car
When I was old enough to drive, my younger sister and I would drive to McDonald’s, just a few minutes away.
My parents would admonish us, “whatever you do, do NOT eat french fries in the car!!!!”.
Invariably, we would get home, they would run out, open the car doors, sniff, and start screaming at us for eating french fries in the car.
We never did.
