Although I feel like I know quite a bit about my parents and my siblings, there have to be some dark things that I was just never told for one reason or another.

I think most families probably work this way and some instances just aren’t talked about so people can be protected from awful things.

Are you ready to hear some dark secrets that parents are keeping from their kids?

Let’s see what AskReddit users had to say.

1. Adopted kids.

“Adoptive parent of three kids two of which are biological siblings and cousins. Found out a year after the adoption that the biological parents were half siblings who shared the same dad.

The bio parents found out after they had the first child and proceeded to have another. The kids are now 16 and 13 respectively and have zero clue that they are a product of incest.

Unfortunately their biological grandpa just passed away, so there very well could be a big reveal coming in the near future.”

2. They don’t know.

“I’m hiding a lot of things.

I used to be a stripper for 10 years, growing up in an abusive house, I partied hard and used to be part of NYC and Montreal club scene, that I was kidnapped and taken to another country. There’s alot of things… Now I’m just a boring accountant mom to everyone. No one has any clue what I’ve been through.

Crazy what your kids don’t know about you.”

3. Doesn’t need to know.

“My son was a product of r**e.

He just thinks I had really low standards in men at one point.”

4. Uncle Jimmy.

“The reason we don’t talk to Uncle Jimmy is because he mo***ted 8 students while he was a teacher for 20 years, went to jail, and is now treated as if he is a leper in our city.”

5. A secret.

“My wife and I each have a child from a previous marriage.

Both of our ex-spouses were abusive cheaters.

Both children still adore and idolize their other parent and we just keep smiling and nodding.

It is a secret that we will maintain for years.”

6. Poppin’ pills.

“Before I found out I was pregnant with my first child, I took a shit ton of pills.

I think it’s the closest I’ve ever come to suicide. I had always dealt with anxiety and depression. I feel like the extra hormones put me over the edge. I found out about a week later that I was pregnant (surprise). I was terrified the entire pregnancy that something would be wrong with him. Luckily, he was completely healthy and is an incredibly smart child.

I’ve never told anyone. I feel so guilty.”

7. He left you.

“My son is still very young, but I’m not planning to tell him his dad left us for meth and another woman (he’s clean now and they actually split). He’s at least involved again.

As long as his dad stays clean and wants to be involved then I don’t plan on telling him. If it does come up I would like to give his dad the chance to explain everything, and I’ll be there for any questions as well as support.

My biological dad left us for heroin when I was a kid and I always thought it that he didn’t want me; I don’t ever want my son to feel that way. I harbor no ill will towards my ex and I truly hope that he does stay clean for his own sake and the kids (he has an older daughter with someone else).”

8. Not the mother.

“My wife is not the biological mother of our twins.

We did IVF and their biological mother was an egg donor from South America. My wife carried them and gave birth to them, but has no biological connection. We’ll tell them some day when they’re older.

It’s a little bit strange, but one looks exactly like me at that age, and the other one looks very much like my brother.

Edit: I can’t believe that this blew up so big! My highest rated comment is about a family secret. Thanks to everyone for all the great advice about letting the cat out of the bag to our twins. Comments from people in this situation were especially helpful. Comments about the biological aspects were very helpful and educational.

For anyone wondering, our twins are 8.5 years old and my side of the family has known the truth from a time long before the procedure occurred. For whatever reason my wife decided to tell her family that she was the egg donor, I the sperm donor, and that we did IVF because we were older and needed medical help to get her preggers. I never understood why, but went along with it because it was what she wanted.

I will broach the subject when my wife gets back in country from a long work trip.”

9. Uh oh.

“My daughter knows that her grandparents are getting a divorce. She doesn’t know that it’s because grandpa (72) decided to knock up a 23 year old. We will talk about it once she’s older, but I don’t want to normalize that relationship for a preadolescent.

This is my father-in-law, he’s definitely not rich, in fairly impressive shape for a dude pulling social security, and I am happily ignorant as to the status of his erections. It’s a small town story with a f**ked up single mom and an old man that hasn’t experienced much emotional growth since being drafted for service in Vietnam.

These people would never end up together if they were emotionally healthy and didn’t have control issues.

I am definitely going to do my best to explain to my daughter, but she’s nine and emotionally overwhelmed by the very idea of the divorce. When she comes to me to talk about it (having processed the idea), then I will explain the situation more fully.

My husband has already told his dad that our family and his new family won’t be getting together for a barbecue anytime in the foreseeable future.”

10. Glad that you’re happy.

“My son was planned, but after separating from his father when my son was 8 months old and having basically nowhere to go/no way to actually take care of us on our own, many many times I thought about the possibility of dropping him off at the hospital and skipping town.

I never did, and he is eight now and we are very happy.”

11. A story from the kid.

“I’m the kid.

Until I was 12 I thought that I knew my bio dad. That man left when I was around 6 and my mom started dating the man I call and accept as dad. I just thought people left and you moved on.

On the way to cheerleading practice when I was 12 my grandma says “you know Steve isn’t your real dad?”. I said “no?” And that was it. I found out about 4 years later that my mom was having an affair with my bio dad. One night she was brutally beaten and r**ed, she called bio dad from the hospital and he said he was on his way.

She never heard from him again. I am 30. She suspects that he arranged the r**e. When I was 18 I got a message on FB that started off “You don’t know me but I know you, don’t delete this”. It honestly sounded like one of those chain letters. Turns out it was my half sister from bio dad.

She and I are now FB friends but haven’t met in person. I have no desire to meet bio. My actual dad that raised me is literally amazing. I could not have custom ordered a better father. My mom left him when I was 16 after cheating on him with a woman.

He sat me down and told me that just because he and my mom broke up doesn’t mean that him and I did. He continued to financially support me and never missed a beat.

He met his wife 10 years ago and stepped in as dad to her then 5 year old. He is so bada**.”

12. Classy!

“My daughter was conceived at work, on airport property, in the back of a f**king Ford Focus, while we were waiting for a medflight to land.

She knows nothing about this but tells me she wants to be a pilot when she grows up.”

13. From the past…

“I’m the child of a parent that hid something horrible until I was 27: One day when my parents has a domestic dispute, my dad called me just to “get back at my mom”.

He said, “do you want to know something about your whore mother? She slept with over 30 guys during our first two years of marriage!” I just sat down and started stuttering.

He said “you know how people have always said you looked different than the rest of the kids?” I said, “yeah…” “That’s because I’m not your dad. Your mom slept with my best friend and you were conceived. Another thing! Your brother (the one just younger than me—I’m the oldest) belongs to my brother!”

My mom just bawled in the background without denying it. I just laughed. And then I went into two years of therapy.”

14. Terrible.

“That she can’t have a relationship with her grandfather because he’s a pedophile and I would never trust him. The rest of my family maintains a relationship with him and leans on me hard to open up communication because “family comes first.”

They are absolutely right, my family does come first, which is why my daughter won’t ever have to have a relationship with him.

He has molested/r**ed multiple members of my family and I only found out when I was pregnant with my daughter.

Without going into too much detail, he also has a mental illness and I’ve been told that I need to let him have a relationship with my daughter because he’s sick and couldn’t help it.”

15. Not your grandpa.

“Grandpa’s not their grandpa. I didn’t find out until I was 30 that my dad adopted me and my mom was married to someone else when I was born.

My 15-year-old was looking at those DNA kits in the store. “I wonder what surprises it would find!” Oh, more than you think, sweetie.

I’ll tell them some day. Just not where what the right time is. Then again, that’s what my parents told me when i asked why they never told me about bio-dad until he reached out to me and blew their secret.”

16. Wow!

“We hit the lottery for 12.5 million dollars and nobody in our family – including our children has any idea. Besides us and the government, the only other people who know is an attorney we hired to keep our identities private as well as an accountant.

We have kept our lives pretty normal… We both work so there looks like there’s an income coming in… we both enjoy what we do and didn’t want to have anything change drastically. We just didn’t want to ruin our relationships with everyone or spoil our kids…

We have it safely invested for their futures… But not until they establish themselves on their own without any idea that there is a safety net. We support numerous charities. It’s a blessing to win but a bigger blessing not to be destroyed by money.

Obviously this isn’t my real name which would defeat the whole purpose.”

17. Don’t tell them that.

“Money is tighter than I’d like it to be.

My daughter’s Easter gift this year is a brand new expensive hair straightener that somebody else gave me as payback for doing them a favor. My son’s Easter gift this year is a Lego set from my childhood.

My mom kept most of our stuff in good shape in original boxes.”

18. IVF.

“Our daughters are both from IVF.

“Older” daughter was conceived 2 years after youngest.

“Younger” daughter frozen for a number of years as embryo making the “older” one biologically younger than the “younger” one.”

19. Poverty.

“We are so poor. They’re little so they don’t notice. But we struggle a lot to pay the rent and buy groceries.

We had our kids kind of young. We were both in grad school. So we’re in a weird spot because we both have fancy sounding degrees that your average person would assume turned into a well paying job.

I am now a postdoc, and we are notoriously underpaid. Sometimes I think “wow, I have a PhD, you’d think I’d be smart enough to work out how to get more money…” but I moved the family internationally for this job, which is another thing that would make you think we had everything sorted out.”

20. Hoping for a quick recovery.

“My bad health. She is two and she just wants mommy to play.

How do you explain cancer to a two year old?”

21. Divorced.

“That we’re divorced.

Years before they came along, spouse and I decided it wasn’t working out and got divorced. Years later, things still weren’t working out fantastically for both of us, so we got back together.

Never did get around to getting remarried though.”

22. Awful.

“That my dad k**led himself and I found the body.

They have an amazing life and I don’t want them to dwell on the fact that something so dark could happen to someone so close to them. They’re 8 and 11, and I have no plans to tell them until maybe their 20’s. When they ask, I just say he was very sick.

When they press for details, which they have, I come right out and say “I’d rather not talk about it. Maybe when you’re older.””

23. That’s really sad.

“Not ours but some friends of ours.

The husband d**d late last year of kidney failure. The mother told her 4 year old son that his father went overseas to work until he is 18. There is no outcome that is good for this kid.”

24. Not my child.

“That my 8 year old daughter is not mine.

I met her mother, my wife, when she was 3 months pregnant. Neither of us knew until about a month or two into dating. What I did know was that this girl was the one. When she found out she told me and gave me a free pass to leave.

She did not just want me sticking around just for the benefits of dating a pregnant chick then skipping out.

I made the choice to take the leap. Best decision i ever made and never looked back.

Now we have my daughter and a 3 year old son. I don’t plan on ever volunteering the information to her but will tell her if she asks when she is older.

The father skipped out to CO and cut off ties when he found out. Fine by me though. As far as everyone, including the government knows, I am her father. On the birth certificate and everything.

But the way i see it, i am. I was there the entire pregnancy, the birth, and every day since. I was 22 at the time.”

25. An accident.

“I don’t want my son to know that he was an unwanted accident. Even during my pregnancy, I didn’t want a child. I was still so young and had my whole career ahead of me. I wanted to travel the world, finish school, and advance myself in life to the fullest.

After he was born, I had a hard time adjusting and it took me a long time to fall in love with motherhood. I didn’t feel a connection to my son and felt like the worst mother in the world.

Now, I can’t stop looking at him or hugging him or crying over him. I’m finishing school and I got promoted at my job. I can have my life and still be a mother too. I only regret my feeling of not wanting my son, because he means so much to me and there are no words to describe the deep love that I feel for him.”

26. Bad people.

“Wife’s parents are really abusive, awful people.

She was emancipated from them at age 11, and they try to butt their way into our lives once in a while. Most recently, MIL was telling people we were in a horrible car accident- we weren’t.

Our kids think they are d**d.”

27. Hopefully, they don’t go snooping around.

“The sheer volume of BDSM related toys hidden in our bedroom.

There’s also a 50/50 chance our eldest was conceived in a fetish club.’

28. Abusive.

“Just how abusive their biological father was to me and how neglectful he was of our eldest yet dependent on her emotionally. Also, that he never wanted a son and that he never had any interest in anything to do with our second born.

My biggest fear is them seeing exactly what he did to me though…they don’t notice the way my heart wants to leap out of my chest when there’s a knock on the door. They think I won’t let them play alone in the front yard because of cars going past, not because I’m scared their bio father may find them and snatch them.

Same as how they believe I just hate big crowds and rude people pushing and shoving, not because I’m constantly on edge looking for that one face. They’ll never know I broke down to their school principal about our past after seeing one of the exs Facebook posts. They’ll never know the carefree person I used to be though and that sucks.

My eldest (just shy of 8 now) has started asking questions and being that one of her earliest memories is of coming home to me in a police car because, “daddy was too sick to take car of me so the police brought me home.” I’m going to have to explain a little more soon enough. Its been 3.5 years since my kids have had any contact with him.

Explaining the past terrifies me.”

What about you?

Do you know of some deep, dark secrets that some people in your family don’t know about?

If so, share them with us in the comments if you’re comfortable.