“As a child and then teenager living with my parents, we were actively discouraged from showering or bathing every day,” said one perplexed mother.
“It was frowned upon and seen as unnecessary and probably a bit extravagant,” she revealed. “Now as an adult and a mother myself it seems so strange…”
Chiming in on the parenting forum Mumsnet was another commenter who said: “My dad used to stop whatever he was doing at 4pm on a Sunday and make a boiled egg for himself and my eldest brother.
“The rule was my sisters and I were not allowed to have one, nor my younger brother. Just my dad and eldest brother. Even if we’d all had a big Sunday lunch.”
Slightly more bizarre, “nobody” in the family ever questioned the weird egg-boiling ritual.
Another visitor to the site mentioned how her mum didn’t let her boil the kettle properly.
“I had to click it off when it was nearly done as she thought it saved energy,” Milton J noted.
“I mentioned this to her recently and she seems to have blocked out the crazy.”
Mizzo added one of her atypical rules she had to live by: “If we were having soup we weren’t allowed a drink… ‘the soup is the drink, Mizzo’,” she said, imitating her mother.
“Even now my mum bristles if I take her out for lunch and order soup and a drink, which I do frequently to make up for all the times I thought I’d die of thirst because the soup is bloody well not the drink!”
There are household rules about “no talking at the table over dinner” to “no blankets on the sofa unless you are unwell”.
For one unlucky Mumsnet user, she wasn’t even allowed to be in the living room if she felt unwell.
There was “no laying on the sofa if you were ill… you could be ill only in your own bedroom”.
Then one Mumsnet user recalled: “Don’t touch the walls!” Another wrote: “We were told not to drink orange juice while eating cereal with milk because it would turn to concrete.”
There are so many unusual household rules people have had to follow when growing up, but some bizarre rules seem to crop up in a few households.
Not being allowed to watch ITV seems to be one of them, as well as not wearing ankle bracelets as they were for “ladies of the night”.
Others include the requirement to slice up Mars bars and not allowed to have a drink with a meal, or else it would “fill you up”.
