Recently, Redditor HumanRole9407 asked the r/AskReddit community to share their “extraordinary” house rules growing up. Here are some of the weirdest ones:

1. “Don’t feed friends. We couldn’t offer them snacks or drinks if friends came over after school. My parents didn’t want them to ‘eat all our food.’ As an adult, I feed everyone and offer my kids’ friends food. I find it so weird that my parents were so stingy. We weren’t broke growing up — we were well off. I never minded feeding the kids who came over.”

2. “Everyone took an afternoon siesta. It turned out my grandma was narcoleptic, and her kids got used to napping with her.”

—Jaives

3. “We were only allowed ginger ale if sick or on an airplane. It wasn’t common, but we would occasionally get a soda. Ginger ale was special, I guess. I was in my 20s and had an epiphany one day: I’m a grown adult with money. I can go buy a ginger ale if I want to.”

4. “Not my house, but at a friend’s. I slept over once in elementary school, and no one was allowed to drink anything during dinner. The mum said that if you eat a lot of water, you will be too full to finish your meal. After everyone had finished their food (the parents said we had to eat everything), we got up and went to the fridge to get a can of Coke. I asked for a glass of water, and the mum looked at me like I was crazy.”

5. “We always had to wear socks to keep the carpet clean. “Now I can’t walk barefoot without feeling like a rebel.”

6. “Girls weren’t allowed to be around boys during that time of the month. It turned out to be a big lie.”

7. “I wasn’t allowed to get the bath mat wet. What was it even for?”

The bathroom floor has white hexagonal tiles and a folded bath mat.

8. “You can’t eat unless an adult makes the food and permits you to eat it. I didn’t get that permission often as an adult wasn’t around to ask most of the time. I mainly ate at school. We had plenty of food at home, so we weren’t starving. I remember one time my mum caught me eating shredded cheese out of the bag in the middle of the night. I was 13 then and had just hit a growth spurt.”

The first time I was at a friend’s house and saw him just make a box of macaroni cheese for us, I panicked because he hadn’t asked for or received permission to eat. He was confused, to say the least.

9. “Don’t use the decorative towels to dry your hands; use the old towels. Also, only use half a soap pump to wash your hands.”

10. “Every Thursday evening was ‘fancy dinner,’ and there were many more rules than dinner the rest of the week. For the rest of the week, the rules were just not to be messy and not to be rude. But fancy dinner meant dressing nicely, no swearing, sitting up straight, only talking about polite subjects, elbows off the table, etc. I didn’t understand why we mostly had casual dinners, but my parents insisted on fancy dinners even when we didn’t have company.”Now, as an adult, I understand their reasons. They wanted us to have upward class mobility and taught us to be well-mannered to impress important people. I was grateful for this when I sat down for an academic awards dinner with some of my college professors. I could talk easily and feel good because I recognized a fancy dinner when I saw one. Like a secret agent who just heard my code word, I knew exactly what to do.”