Parents Reveal The Most Unbelievable Things They Accidentally Learned About Their Kids

There are many different kinds of parents in this world. Some are extremely overbearing and controlling, making it very difficult for kids to keep secrets in the first place (but don't think that stops the kids; the harder the parents make it, the harder the kids try to hide things).

While others may be so enthusiastic about respecting their children as autonomous individuals that they have no clue what's going on, even when it really matters. In between those two extremes exists plenty of diversity, including parents who occasionally snoop or unintentionally snoop, and that's where we come in today.

These parents shared on Reddit what they discovered about their children... and why they deeply regretted stumbling upon the information. giphy

1. The daughter of not one, but two IT parents.

That my then-14-year-old stepdaughter had a thing for anime porn.I mean, hey… do your Naruto and Pikachu thing. But dang – you’re the daughter of two IT parents. Delete your browser history!

2. Well, this was unexpectedly wholesome.

My 5-year-old daughter was riding in the back seat, autobabbling away. Eventually, she said, "Daddy, I don’t think you know this, but when I was young, I used to pick up little bits of things off the floor and put them in my mouth.""Really? What kind of things, sweetie?""Pieces of paper, fuzzies, things like that."A thoughtful look crossed her face, as if she were trying to make a really difficult decision that would determine her fate.Finally, she settled on honesty and said:"…and I definitely ate a flower once."

3. My, my, how the turns have tabled.

As a prying child looking for confiscated video games, I discovered my mom hides my Game Boy way better than she hides her strap-on. giphy

4. And I... ope.

I used to work for Nokia and Samsung doing mobile phone repairs, and some of the stuff I’ve seen has blown my mind. One of my favorites was when a dad brought in his daughter's Nokia Windows phone, and while holding it, a text preview came up from a young man saying, "God, I can’t wait to see your big boobs."The father's reaction was priceless; he just gritted his teeth, let us do what we had to do, and left. I can only imagine the bollocking she got when he got home.

5. Secret Agent Kid

So when I was a kid, my dad locked me out of most of the internet with parental controls. I got mad at him and installed a keylogger onto our computer so I could steal his password and go into account settings to change my privileges. I got his password, along with a bunch of love letters he was writing to a woman he was cheating on my mom with.

6. Beneficial in the long run to discover his feelings.

We adopted one of our kids, and he is biracial, while the rest of the family is white.Back when he was in 2nd grade, I found a writing assignment that the kids had to do. They essentially had to write three things they would wish for if they had a genie. One of the things he wrote was, "I wish I was white."That really hit me hard. I thought we had done 'enough' to incorporate his racial and cultural background. It wasn’t something we just ignored. It hurt to see that he didn’t want to be who he was and that we had something to do with that. I hated that he felt that way, and I hated that I found it.In hindsight, however, I am glad I found it. It opened up the dialogue even more, and our son revealed that he wanted to move somewhere where he wasn’t one of the only black kids. We did end up moving to a much more diverse area a few years later, and I love it here.My son is now in middle school and is pretty comfortable talking about racial identity. As much as it hurt to find the paper, I think it was beneficial to get it out in the open.

7. Mom eventually has to learn!

Not a parent, but when I was about 15 and in the process of fapping, my mom came into my room without knocking. I was so shocked and at a loss for words; all I could say in reaction was:"I’m just checking if it works!" Not sure how that could have changed the situation in any way. Needless to say, she always knocked before coming into my room after that little incident. giphy

8. Grandma was just tidying up.

My kids aren’t quite old enough to ruin my view of their innocence yet, but when I was a kid, my grandma found my rather hefty porn stash under the bathroom counter one day while cleaning (I had my own small bathroom at the time).I got really embarrassed about it until I realized that she just straightened them out into a neat stack and never said a word about it to me to this day. Hell of an old lady.

9. Some things you can't undo.

My friend's dad walked in on him watching porn, and he accidentally clicked a gay porn advertisement. His dad awkwardly closed the door and will forever think his son is secretly gay.

10. How many tech repair folks have seen junk?? Too many.

It wasn’t my child, but I used to work in a phone shop, and I was transferring this kid's photos to his new phone. It was the first of that model I sold, and little did I know it had a pre-installed app that showed a 'gallery' on the second homepage after you swiped right. I was explaining how to use it, and the default image the gallery function decided to select was a fully frontal nude photo of this poor kid’s junk.

11. It's not what you think!

I was once really hungry, so I ate a banana in the shower and threw the banana peel on the shower floor.Dad found it later and asked me, quite angrily, what debauchery I was up to with a banana in the shower.He probably thought I was shoving it up my butt. tenor

12. Is mom alright??

My mother "accidentally" found my brother’s dope plants in a house he and I shared when she "popped round for a visit" while we were out. Her line was that she went to put something away, and – lo and behold – it just happened to be the cupboard my brother had stashed his plants in.When I said it couldn’t have been an accident, as I’d placed a small piece of tape on all the cupboard doors in the house and every single one had been opened, she flew into a rage, carping on about how she couldn’t trust my brother and that’s why she had to check every cupboard. But more to the point, that my trick with the cupboards was a low and despicable act and I should be ashamed of myself.So when I then explained that I’d lied, that I hadn’t put tape anywhere, but I appreciated her new honesty regarding snooping through the flat, things strangely didn’t get any better after that.

13. The horror!

Actually found this out from a neighbor who frequented Omegle (I believe that’s what it’s called, when you webcam chat with strangers) and apparently stumbled onto my daughter and her friendstumbling onto my daughter and her friend putting on a show… skin and all. I had no idea what to do…

14. OH NO

Golden shower videos on Pornhub in my 12-year-old’s browser history.

15. Boys Peeing

Not really the prying type… but I grabbed my 9-year-old daughter’s tablet to show her how to get to her Gmail inbox using her web browser. Her email client was misbehaving.There were like 7 open tabs of porn, and her web search history had a "boys peeing" search…It shocked me and my wife; she’s 9. That was when we decided it was time for a bit of anatomical and reproductive information…Which, of course, fell to me. My wife was thoroughly incapable.

16. So awkward.

I was trying to take a picture on my nephew’s phone and discovered he had a taste for intense hentai. giphy

17. Teach your kids anatomy from a young age, y'all.

Not a prying parent, but a prying kid. My father had a porno on the DVR and thought I was too young to know how to work it. Surprise, surprise, I found it and had a major moment when I discovered what a vagina looked like. I always thought women had penises too and gave birth through their butts. Shocking, to say the least.My younger brother found it later on and had a panic attack so bad he fainted.

18. The future includes teaching everyone about incognito mode.

I’m not a prying parent, but I am a prying child. I discovered the kind of porn my mom is into by seeing what windows she had open in her phone’s browser. She now knows what incognito mode is.

19. Oh the ye old days of cybering. *Shudder*

My mum went into my MSN chat logs when I went to live with my dad (I was not a savvy rebel; I forgot to check ‘don’t save’) and found all my cybering. I was like 14. She said it was way worse than the ‘I hate my parents’ type of stuff.

20. Whoops!

While I never pried, I was placing clean laundry into my son’s dresser drawers when I spied several hot lesbian porn magazines. The problem was, they were mine. And I wasn’t yet out of the closet. And I was still married to his dad. Yeah. whicdn

21. I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.

I found out they don’t know how to use private browsing on the iPhone; all history saved. This disappointed me more than the actual history.

22. The family that downloads porn together...

I used to torrent porn because that was all I knew to do. One day, I opened my torrent client and saw it was already downloading several kinky videos. I assumed it was just the client being spammy and gross, so I deleted the files and proceeded on to my vanilla multi-gig downloads.The next day, my dad sat me down and said I should watch out for the upstairs computer because it "has been acting up" or something. He said he was aware it had downloaded some gross stuff, but he immediately said he knew it wasn’t me. His confidence that it wasn’t me surprised me, and that’s when I realized it was his. I guess he saw that somebody deleted the files and panicked, thinking that I was judging him, so he had to come up with a story about how the computer does that stuff on its own so I would know it wasn’t him.If he hadn’t said anything, that’s what I would have assumed.

23. Really wish that didn't happen!

Well, this is from my perspective, not my parents', but I know it still probably was awkward. I have a habit of being so tired that I fall asleep while enjoying some porn. Mom came in to wake me up and found me butt naked, face down, with porn playing on my phone. pinterest

24. Low blow, mom.

My very conservative mother opened my follow-up letter from the abortion clinic. Rather than ask me about it, she showed my boyfriend in private in an attempt to break us up.

25. Printer Betrayal

My brother was trying to print out some porn pictures once, and the printer wasn’t working.When my dad turned the computer on the next day, the picture immediately printed.

26. Parents can be kinky, too!

This is about parents:One time in high school, I came home on a night when I had said I would be staying at a friend's. I walked into the living room to see a porno on the 50" TV screen. But they weren’t even watching; they were just chilling and playing cards on the coffee table while a girl blew some guy in the background. I make ridiculous amounts of noise when I come in nowadays.

27. Oh, ma!

My mum did find a letter I wrote to my boyfriend (before the days of internet and texting) where I described how I was going to give him a blow job. I couldn’t look her in the eye for weeks; I even tried to pass it off as English homework! I was fourteen at the time. Two decades later, I still cringe when I remember it. pinterest