Childhood Facts

When he was only 13, Johnny Depp lost his virginity to a girl slightly older than him.

As a child, Jim Carrey wore tap shoes to bed just in case his parents needed cheering up in the middle of the night.

The average American child will eat 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by the time they graduate from high school.

At age 12, Simon Cowell was arrested for hijacking a bus with a toy gun.

Actor Val Kilmer grew up on Roy Rogers' ranch.

Fred Rogers wore a hand-knitted cardigan in nearly every episode of his show. His mother, Nancy, knitted every single one by hand - each in a different color. She made him a new sweater every Christmas until she died in 1981. Rogers donated his cherry-red cardigan to the Smithsonian in 1984. It is still there.

Highlights for Children magazine nearly died by 1950, four years after two Pennsylvania educators started it. Their 28-year-old son took a leave from engineering to seed copies into doctors' and dentists' waiting rooms nationwide. Subscriptions exploded. Eighty years on, the print magazine has never run an ad, and every letter a kid mails still gets a reply.

Rupert Grint became an ice cream man after Harry Potter — not for publicity, but because it had been his childhood dream all along.

Those giant wooden castle playgrounds from the 1980s and 90s were designed by kids. Architect Bob Leathers visited local schools, collected children's drawings, and turned them into blueprints. Then the town's own parents and volunteers built it by hand, usually in about five days. He did this in more than 2,000 communities.

Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama has turned kids into pretend astronauts since 1982. Christina Koch went three or four summers as a kid and begged to go back every time. On April 6, 2026 she flew around the far side of the Moon on NASA's Artemis II, the first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo 17 and farther than any woman had ever flown. One of Space Camp's own kids made it to the Moon.