31 Wild Rules People Dutifully Followed That Are Weird in Retrospect

When you’re a kid, you’ve got a whole lot of world to learn about. You’re trying to take in millennia of rules and traditions, while puberty wreaks havoc on your whole body. With all that, it’s not surprising that some things might not seem immediately weird, since a quarter of the stuff you’re being told only makes half-sense anyways.

This especially applies to the rules laid out by our parents in our own households, which are issued from on high. You simply stamp them onto your brain and keep things moving. It’s only later, sometimes much later, that you realize those rules were far from universal. 

Redditors have shared some of the weirdest rules from their childhoods that they only realized were unusual once they got a view of how the larger world was living, including a bath-towel mandate that will send a chill up your spine.