If you play with fire, you’ll pee the bed is one of those parental warnings built less on logic than on knowing your audience. Carrie in South Central Kentucky heard it locally, then learned that a young man from Brazil knew the same idea. Folklore collections record versions in places including North Carolina and Utah, with parallels reported in Japan, Norway, and Pennsylvania Dutch. The wide scatter doesn’t require a single route of migration. The warning may have traveled in some cases and arisen independently in others, because bedwetting is immediate, imaginable, and socially mortifying to a child who may be oblivious to how their playing with fire might have even larger consequences. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Fire-and-Bedwetting Warnings Like “If You Play with Fire, You’ll Pee the Bed” Turn Up Worldwide”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Carrie from South Central Kentucky.
All right, well, welcome to the show. How can we help you?
Yeah, we are interested just because when we moved here, there are all sorts of interesting sayings and phrases that we’ve come across.
The one that we’ve had the most fun with is the phrase, if you play with fire, you’ll pee the bed.
And, you know, when we first heard this, I just couldn’t believe it. I was like, are you kidding? Isn’t getting burned bad enough?
And the response has consistently been, well, yeah, everybody knows you’ll get burned, but nobody wants to pee the bed.
So we just thought that was really funny.
A couple months ago, we had a young man from Brazil in our home, and we got talking about different sayings that they say around here, and we told him about this saying, and he said, oh, we say that all the time in Brazil.
So we really couldn’t believe that. The only place we’d heard that phrase was here, and then they also say it there.
So we were wondering how that phrase originated, and how in the world would it be in those two random places?
That’s pretty cool.
So how does this come up in conversation?
I think we were lighting a candle and just kind of playing with the match. I think it was with a church group that I was actually having the discussion with, but I don’t remember how it came up at all.
Although now my kids will laugh because, you know, somebody is messing around with a candle or whatever. You know, one of the other kids will say, well, now you’re going to pee the bed, but watch out.
That’s interesting.
Yeah.
It’s transformed a little bit because when it started, it started as kind of an adult manufactured superstition. It was a way to get children to not play with matches and not play with fire because they weren’t really afraid of the fire.
They didn’t really seem to care about burning down the house. But heaven forbid that their friends should find out that they wet the bed.
And so it was told in earnest. Which is exactly what they all say. It’s called nobody wants to wet the bed.
Well, it’s not that you don’t want to do it. You don’t want to be found out.
Well, both. Both, right? I would say both.
But the thing is, so it was said in earnest to children as a way to kind of like make them stop playing with matches because the adults can’t be there all the time to stop that from happening.
So like one of those fanciful parental warnings, like if you cross your eyes like that, somebody could hit you on the back. Don’t stay that way. Don’t swallow the watermelon seeds or whatever.
Right. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, right.
And so it starts out as a superstition. It appears in a lot of collection of folklore, some really good stuff throughout the United States and North Carolina.
It pops up in Utah, pops up in a few other places. And then you can find versions of it in Japan and Norway as well.
I think it even shows up in Pennsylvania Dutch in that kind of form of German spoken among the particular religious communities in Pennsylvania.
It’s really interesting.
But in all cases, it starts as an adult superstition that they make for the kids in order to teach them not to play with matches or fire.
And then it kind of transforms where—
Right, so there’s not necessarily a migration of people that it was brought with. It just kind of happened.
It could have been. It could have been.
But the other thing that happened to it, as you’ve so well described, is it’s turned into something magical where somehow magically, if you play with fire, then you pee the bed.
But that’s not actually really how it started out.
Yeah.
So it sounds like it just arose from a sort of universal need for parents to find a way to scare kids out of it.
Scare you out of playing with fire.
All right.
Well, that’s interesting. Thank you so much for taking the time to research it.
Thank you so much for giving us a call. We really appreciate it.
Thanks, Carrie. Take care.
Bye-bye.
Have a good day.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Bye-bye.
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