Parents Are Sharing The Secrets They Found Out That Their Kids Had Kept From Them, And Some Of These Are Really Dark

We asked the BuzzFeed Community* to tell us secrets they’ve discovered their kids have kept from them, and some of the answers were shocking. Here’s what they had to say.

*We also sourced answers from these Reddit threads.

1. “My daughter is 15 and is already very sexually active. We took her to the hospital, and we found out she had genital herpes. She said she probably got it from dirty toilet paper from her camping trip that happened last month. I didn’t believe in that, but I told her I did. So, a few days ago, I took her phone (she was in detention for something else). … I read some of her messages between her and some friend. They were talking about body counts. I didn’t know what that meant, so I googled it. So, my daughter slept with seven scrampy boys and got HERPES from one of them.”

2. “One year, my husband and I were having a really hard time getting up in time for work for, like, two months straight. Years later, we found out our daughter was drugging us so she could sneak out. Either of us could have died, and she thinks it’s funny she used to do that. Needless to say, she no longer lives with us and will not be allowed back if ever she falls on hard times.”

3. ”[My daughter’s secret is] the absolutely atrocious way her father and stepmother treat her. Small stories come to surface, but she’s sworn to secrecy, and I can’t actually prove anything. She’s 11 and asks about very specific mental conditions she’s ‘heard of in movies.’ She overeats constantly and sleeps with all her lights on here… If you think I haven’t tried everything in my power to protect her, you underestimate how good some people are at putting the fear of God in their children when it comes to hiding the fact that they torture their children emotionally.”

“We try to be her sanctuary. We don’t judge, and she knows she’s safe here. Legally, I’m unable to restrict his access to her because I have no concrete proof, and she won’t talk to an unbiased source because she’s afraid they’ll find out. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to watch my daughter suffer, but I can only imagine what she’s actually living through.”

—u/girlsrsoldiermedics2

4. “I’m not really a parent, but I suppose the easiest classification here would be stepmom. When wandering around my boyfriend’s ex’s mom’s property to visit his daughter (she has custody and lives with her mom), we found a noose strung up in a tree back in his daughter’s play area of the forest (she was 12 at the time). About a week or two later (or before, I don’t remember), her mom (the ex) found a suicide note back there. It was written in Crayola marker and filled with I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It was absolutely heartbreaking to read. We’ve all tried to rally around her — we’re definitely not a ‘normal’ family, and it’s been hard on his daughter. She’s doing better now and has a ton of great friends, but it was about the worst thing to find.”

“Since that time, there has been a lot of talk about being open about feelings, she’s talked to school counselors, and her mom is trying to pay more attention to her. When my bf and I are able to have her with us, we play DnD with her…and she’s HOOKED on it (seriously, other than homework, she spends all her time making modules and writing character backstory). It was a chilling discovery, that day in the forest, but it could have been far worse…and now, we’re all a lot closer.”

5. ”[My son] (15) and his childhood bestie (15M) are doing drugs together. Yesterday, he asked me if bestie could come over this week and play GTA, a game in which, up to now, he’s never shown interest. I said I’d think about [it]. This morning, I picked up his phone and spied on him. Sure enough, there is a message to bestie asking if he can come over this week because son has ‘kush and pills, and my mom is working 9–6 every day.’ Haven’t confronted him yet. This isn’t our first rodeo with weed, but pills are pretty fucking concerning. Pretty stressed today and trying to figure out how to deal with this.”

6. “My son is very honest with me, so I’ve never felt the desire to snoop on him. Over the summer, I was looking for my tape measure, and remembered that I’d asked him to measure the space above his desk for shelving. I went into his room (he was away at camp for a couple of weeks) and looked high and low before spotting the tape measure under his desk. I couldn’t comfortably reach it because of how the desk was constructed, so I pulled the desk away from the wall. While doing so, I heard a soft thud. After I’d created enough of a clearance to shimmy between the wall to the back of the desk, I saw the gift box that we’d wrapped his birthday present in, splayed on the floor with what appeared to be an assortment of fabrics. Upon closer inspection, I saw what the ‘fabrics’ really were — a box of washed and unwashed women’s underwear.”

“I put the desk back, but couldn’t recreate how the box was situated before. After thinking about what to do, I decided to broach this with him when he returned. More than anything else, I wanted to be sure he wasn’t doing anything dangerous (so many thoughts ran through my mind, the strongest being that he was somehow buying them from or bartering with girls at school…).

When he came home, I told him that I needed to talk to him. He seemed nervous, and as soon as I mentioned the tape measure, he started to cry. He knew I’d found the box and was crying not because of that, but because he thought that I’d found out that he was stealing his best friend’s mother’s underwear, from his best friend’s mother. I’m not sure why he arrived at that conclusion, but such is the mind of my 13-year-old.

It turned out that over about a 20-month period, he’d taken to swiping my wife’s coworker’s (mother of his best friend) underwear from her laundry basket, hamper, and even her bedroom drawer whenever he had a chance. There was a total of eleven pairs of underwear.

It took me a few days to have a heart-to-heart with him, and it was one of the most difficult conversations I’d ever had to have with him. Maybe I stopped him from engaging in progressively more perverted behavior, maybe not. I just hope that he doesn’t go down a path like that again, and that his sexual proclivities manifest themselves in more natural and non-illicit ways.”

7. “I found drug paraphernalia in my 16-year-old’s bedroom yesterday while making her bed. My heart is broken, and I’m not sure how to approach situation. … I’m pretty sure it’s meth. We’ve had this issue throughout my family history.”

8. “My wife was emptying the trash in the downstairs bathroom the other day and noticed that it smelled a little off. So, I cleaned out the can and sprayed it down with a lovely citrusy disinfectant. The next week, I noticed the same smell the moment I entered the bathroom. However, when I turned the can over to empty the contents, there was a generous amount of foul smelling amber liquid in addition to the usual tissues and empty toilet paper rolls.”

“It didn’t take long to identify this mystery liquid. It was old urine. The only suspect was my son, as the wife and I both use the bathroom in the master bedroom exclusively. We set up a sting operation. We both sat quietly in the living room pretending to watch the TV when the boy arrived home after school. After the usual greeting, he slipped past us as he usually does and went straight to the scene of the crime. Since we were listening this time, we could hear him locking the door as carefully as he could. That was the moment we both knew for sure that our son was up to something…odd.

The bathroom door is easily unlocked with a toothpick. In one quick motion, I picked the lock, turned the knob, and swung open the door to reveal the boy responsible for carrying on my family name, my one and only child, and the fruit of my loins, with his ass fully exposed and his pants around his ankles, pissing right into the trash can.

My wife took one look and left the room. I stood there with a blank expression as he turned around in shock and scrambled to pull up his pants. He sat on the toilet and put his head in his hand, refusing to acknowledge my existence.

‘Son,’ was all I could say.

It wouldn’t be until the next day that he finally spoke to me. He said that it made him feel good for some reason he couldn’t explain. … I told him that he could piss outside all he wanted, but that he wasn’t allowed to piss on anything inside the house besides the toilet.”

9. “My 13-year-old son is depressed. … We recently replaced his phone, and the old one was still logged in to his accounts. Some messages popped up on the lock screen, and it concerned me, so I looked closer. He talks to his ex-girlfriend a lot (he’s never admitted to having a girlfriend) about how he’s been depressed for over a year. Now, I open the old phone once in a while to keep an eye on his mental state. I don’t care about the porn or the weed references or anything else; I just want to make sure he’s okay.”

10. “In March, my 15-year-old daughter started to act weird. She would overeat and wear big sweatshirts all the time until one day, I took her to the doctor for a daily checkup…and then, the doctors told me she was six months pregnant. My jaw dropped…my daughter continued to look guilty the whole ride home.”

11. “My son (35) lives at home and hid an opiate addiction for 15 years, fueled by my junkie mom. It was far more extensive than I could’ve imagined. I got wind of this when he admitted it, wanted treatment, and is now two-plus years clean and is still attending meetings. I am so proud of him, but Jesus, [kids] can be incredibly sneaky.”

12. “We had to move our kid out of a bad living situation. She wasn’t in any condition to help. So, wife and I go in and just start grabbing her stuff. We come across her adult baby fetish gear. Like, two duffel bags of it, giant onesies, binkies, diapers, etc. Wife looked at me, I looked at her, we shut each bag, and have never spoken of it again.”

13. “One weekend, wife and I are chilling out in bed watching whatever garbage is on TV, when our youngest son (11) comes in and says oldest brother (13) is looking at porn on his tablet. So, we call for oldest son, he denies and denies, of course, so we tell him to bring me his tablet. He hasn’t learned the art of incognito browsing or clearing history completely. Going through his history, well I’ll be damned, he is looking at porn. Not just any porn, though. Some anime stuff, some adult raunchy stuff. But the real kicker was the Scooby-Doo porn.”

“Fred fucking Velma, Shaggy fucking Daphne, Velma doing Daphne, etc…so, mom leaves the room to let dad and his son talk about this…starts with the usual, don’t lie, you can’t hide this shit from me if I go through your browsing history, it’s okay to masturbate (in private of course), you’re growing up, yada yada yada. Finish the conversation, give him his tablet back, but as he’s walking out the door, I can’t but help do my best/worst Scooby impression: ‘But Shaggy’ followed by ‘Zoinks,’ ‘Jinkies,’ and ‘Ruh Roh, found your porn!’ His face got so red, and I just lost it, I was in tears. Now, every so often, when he starts to cop an attitude with us, I just go ‘Zoinks’ to him.

Kicker of it all, youngest son comes into the room with, ‘I was only joking, I didn’t know he really was.’”

14. “My daughter was about 12 when she started exploring her body as most pubescent girls do. She was using various items in her bedroom — e.g. markers, etc. One night, she came to me sheepishly and said we couldn’t play chess for our regular Friday night game night. She said the bishop was missing. When I asked where it was, she said she didn’t know. So, we played Monopoly. The next day, she said she wanted to go to the doctor. Turns out the bishop was stuck…and not on the chessboard. Poor girl had it wedged in there somehow and had to undergo general anesthesia with the gyn retrieving it.”

“After it was removed, the nurse came out to say she was okay and what did we want done with the chess piece? Of course, my husband said, ‘We need it back, how else are we going to play chess again?!’ Needless to say, we never did play chess with that board or pieces again.”

Now, it’s your turn — what’s a secret you kept from your parents? Let us know in the comments or via this anonymous form.