What's the most expensive thing you broke as a kid and what's the story behind it?

A brand new multi thousand dollar video camera that my pops had saved up for. I disassembled it entirely, just trying to figure out how it worked. He wasn’t even mad at me. I grew up and now can fix just about any electronic down to the component level. I like to think he saw the curiosity in me and was more proud than anything.

I also put our phone in a bucket of water. My dad asked me to hold it but I was already carrying a bucket of water so I just put it in the bucket.

I set the majority of my mother's finest dresses on fire. I was very young. We had a powercut one night so we were using candles. It came back soon after, but i was still a curious boy with a candle in my hand. I wanted to go somewhere dark again so i went inside my closet and closed the door. My mom ran out of space in her room for her dresses so she put them on my closet. Only the stuff she didn't use often so it had the worst and the best. They were wrapped plastic and i was fascinated by how the plastic shrunk when the flame got close. But eventually I got too close and actually set it on fire. How did i react? Got out, shut the closet doors and went to watch tv. It's a miracle i didn't torch my whole house

My sister and I figured out that we could draw. On the windshield of our neighbours car. Using stones.

...

In grade 2 I burnt down a shed causing $2000 damage in the 1970's. (Around $10,000 in todays money)

I was playing in the shed and decided I wanted to build a fireplace... out of wood. (In my defense it was a type of laminate, so I didn't know it was wood at the time.)

I grew up in a very unorganized town that wasn't really regulated with traffic laws. I learned to drive a truck at about 12.

When I was 14 I was driving my dad's truck around town. I suddenly had the urge to see how well the brakes worked. I drove fast down a gravel road than slammed on the brakes as hard as I could. Within seconds it blew both front brake lines.

Later that same year in the winter I got the truck stuck on some ice. It wasn't bad, I just happened to stop on a very slippery patch of ice and couldn't move forward. I got the idea that as the tires spun, they were getting hot which meant it was melting the ice. If I did it long enough I would eventually get down to the gravel. I got impatient and spun the wheels faster smoking them like crazy while the engine roared. In the middle of the noise and smoke, a tire exploded and the truck jumped and deflated. I had blown out a tire.

Dad wasn't happy with me for a long while because the truck went to the shop and we had to pay a lot of money to get them fixed.

At the very least, I never made these mistakes again.

I suspect i might be the winner here. My friend had an alley behind his house along with a nice strip of open land near a busy road. Eventually a strip mall was built and then another large commercial building started to go up. Being basically behind my friends house we walked over to this new building on weekend to check out the construction site.

The building was being built with cement block and had lots of scaffolding and yet-unused block scattered around. I found a pipe-bender - a very heavy tool made out of high quality steel - and found you could just tap on of these cement blocks and it would shatter to pieces. I was fascinated, as were my friends. I have no idea how many cement blocks we destroyed over the next couple of days, but it was a huge number. Then we decided to see if we could go through a wall with the pipe bender... we could indeed, making a hole in the side of the building we could walk through. Looking around we eventually realized what we'd done was awful.... we had decimated this construction site. We finally slinked away and come Monday when the crew returned, police were called and neighbors interrogated but thankfully with privacy fences all around, none of the neighbors saw anything. 11 and 12 yr olds are stupid.

Crashed the family car on my first day driving. Into our house. Our driveway is a mini hill with a turn to get in and then loop to the side with the corner of the house being at the corner. Accelerating up the little hill meant the house jumped in front of the car! As it was my first time driving, the blame was placed. Firmly on dad, as teacher.

Luckily the damage wasn't too bad to repair, but still the two most expensive things were broken on one day.

An arcade center VR headset.

This was in the 90s or early 2000 when VR was non existent to consumers. During holidays visiting the US we ended up in this arcade center, probably in LA, where they had circled booths with an old FPS VR game that you play standing up. The headset looked like a helmet and was plugged from the top.

During my game, I turned on myself (360 no scope style) so much and always in the same direction that the cables got tangled and finally broke, probably with a little spark and some electrical sound. Game over.

As a French preteen, my English was bad and all I remember is the "shiiiiiiit" the worker said when he looked at the headset and cables.

Sorry buddy 🤷🏻‍♂️

I broke the screen on my laptop, but that was only after having it for like five or six years. And even after that, I still used it as a closet web server for years after that with SSH.

Edit: I think I was about 16 when that happened.

I'm not sure how much my brother costs, but the three of us brothers were running across the top of monkey bars and jump kicking each other. I kicked my youngest brother off and he busted his head on the ground. It's ~40 years later and he still has the scar on the back of his head.

I pushed the largest TV off a window ledge at an electricals store because I wanted to watch the TV, so I put myself between the TV and the window. Obviously I’d never lifted a TV before and had no idea about their centre of balance. Because it wasn’t tied down properly the store was reprimanded and my poor mother didn’t have to fork out. I think I was around 4 or 5

Was going through some semi-justified teenage angst stuff back in the day and my laptop was having some small issue, so I smashed my laptop.

I'm not normally prone to anger - then or now, so that was particularly out of character for me. I also wasn't able to replace it for a long while, since I wasn't like, rich or anything like that.

Honestly though, I've never regretted it. Given the circumstances (tl;dr: poor upbringing, loneliness), I can totally see why someone would lash out like that eventually.

My grandparents had a lot of antiques, some probably which they inherited. My grandfather was particular proud of his clockwork wind-up clock (which was an antique even back then). I disassembled it to find out how it worked, but couldn't figure out how to reassemble it (and my granddad couldn't either).

When I was around 12, I was learning about overclocking, and accidentally killed my dad's graphic card, an Nvidia FX 5900.

I vividly remember launching The Sims 2 to test my overclock, when suddenly the screen started turning on and off (the video driver was probably crashing and restarting), and after I reset the PC, there were 2 green lines on the screen and XP was stuck in 640x480 16 colors because not even the basic display driver was able to load.

My dad was mad obviously because it was an expensive card, the damage wasn't covered by the warranty, and he was into gaming too at the time. I was stuck with integrated graphics for about a month while we waited for the geforce 6000 series to come out.

I was so scared of overclocking after this happened, I didn't try it again until a few years later years later when I had my own computer (and killed another card, a 9800GX2).

Sigh...

When I was in the 3rd grade, our class had to do reports on countries around the world and we were all assigned a country. I got Egypt. Coincidentally, some friends of my parents had recently gotten back from a trip to Egypt. My parents asked their friends if there was anything I could bring in to use for my presentation. They let me borrow this little statue they got. It was an eagle with a hat, I think it was a depiction of Horus. It was carved out of some really nice white stone, maybe marble or something? I brought it into school, put it on my desk, and waited patiently to stand up and do my report. When I stood up, I bumped my desk, and the statue fell to the ground and broke in half.

Now monetarily this may not have been the most "expensive" thing, but it was the souvineer that this family brought back from Egypt that they had on their mantle to always remember the trip. It was priceless.

Why the fuck would you let a 7 year old bring your breakable souvineer to school for a class project?

Anyway, those people stopped being friends with my parents after that, so I have a feeling it was either expensive or meant a lot.

This hurts me to think about. Why did you have to ask this question?

the garage. I was 6 or 7, my mom was undergoing a major health situation and the medication wasn't doing her mental processes any favors. One morning she was running late and so asked me to start her car. I'd never started a car in my life, I had no idea what to do and I couldn't reach the pedals so I asked my younger sibling to help out. I stayed on the floor and operated the pedals, my sibling was in charge of the key.

mind you, this was a stickshift and it was parked in the driveway, facing the garage door.

I have no idea what we actually did, I only remember the crashes as we went through the garage door and through the back wall. The front of the car now blocking the alley, we yanked the key ran to hide because we had just taken down a fucking building ruined mom's new car, and thought we were going to be killed. Of course she instantly realized what happened and knew that she was at fault so when she found us we were of course in no trouble; but man, what a ride that was...

I'm not sure about "expensive", but it was priceless.

My mom had a really gorgeous piece of petrified wood about the size of a cup coaster and as a young kid I was obsessed with it. So one day I broke into her jewelry box where she kept it and stole it to bring to school for show and tell. Everything was fine until I was getting on the bus to go home and I tripped with it in my hand. It shattered like glass and so did my poor little heart.

I remember crying all the way home where I tearfully confessed to my thievery and apologized up and down to my mom. She honestly wasn't very angry, and was a lot more understanding than I thought she might be. I don't remember what happened to the wood afterwards but I don't remember seeing it ever again so I wonder if she trashed it? It was so beautiful, so that would be a total shame.

Kitchen window. About 2x3 metres if I remember right.

We had a trampoline in our backyard, outside the kitchen so mum could watch us while cooking or whatever. There was a huge hill (our house was in a bit of a mountainous area), and we decided to throw some rocks down the hill and bounce them off the trampoline… but we were uncoordinated 10 year olds so we missed every time. And it was just a bunch of little stones gathering in our backyard.

Then I found one rock. Pretty big, had to lift it with two hands and shot-put it down the hill. That was the one that we finally landed on the trampoline. And it bounced right through the kitchen window.

My grandparent's desktop computer. I didn't break the hardware, but i set the default font size in windows 98 to some ludicrously high value. That made it so large the OS became unusable and the dialog to change it back was also unusable. Probably a quick terminal command would have fixed it within a couple seconds but I wasn't old enough to understand that and my parents weren't very tech-savvy.

When I was 6 I microwaved a metal measuring cup full of water, which ended up arcing and burning out the transformer. Apparently it fucked up my parents' finances for a while at the time

I know it's not as expensive as some others here, but a basement window. I was a latchkey kid, and one afternoon I'd come home from school and taken the dog out for a walk. When we got home, some neighborhood kids showed up and we were playing in the backyard with the dog, and I didn't get around to unlocking the house. And then somehow I lost my keys. I knew my folks would be furious with me for goofing off and losing my keys rather than doing my homework, so I was laser focused on getting inside the house. I took a pipe and broke a basement window, planning to climb inside, let the dog in, and then find a way to fix the window without my parents knowing. (I don't remember what I was planning to do about the lost keys.) And of course, the minute I broke the window, they pulled into the driveway and saw what was going on, and I was grounded for like an eon after that. I'm in my 40s and they still bring it up now and then. My dad replaced the windowpane himself but he was too grumpy to show me how, lol.

Overall, it's a pretty stupid story!

An antique crystal vase my parents received as a wedding gift.
I was maybe in my tweens and bought flowers for some occasion (a birthday or anniversary maybe) and the florist said I should use boiling water to keep them fresh (yes, it is a thing), but obviously I misunderstood, and not knowing any better I added the boiling water directly in to the vase (which I chose because it was my favourite) and of course it exploded in my hand. Lucky I wasn't hurt, and I did manage to glue some of it back together, but I was not getting away with it. My mother was furious.

I broke my dad's laptop by dropping it on the ground. I was pretending to work, with my parents right there.

But honestly, all the other little stuff that I broke combined probably cost more than that laptop. Recently I changed the battery of the clock and it immediately stopped working. It's like I have the hands of destruction.

Our barnstable. I burned it accidentally. About half a million damage. Though the new barnstable was an upgrade.

VHS player when I was a toddler. Was in the daycare and saw a cord, so naturally I pulled it. It was on top of the TV, which was bolted to the wall high up. Shattered on impact. Nearly fell on my head too.

Me : Kicked a football into our neighbour's dining room. Said sorry . Dad fixed it for them. A week later , again kicked it into their dining room. Got an earful . Never took penalties from that spot again.

My bro : Climbed on top of our TV at home like King Kong and the table broke. Him, the TV and the table all came down. My dad was as mad as godzilla.

I noticed that the computer was magnetic and played with magnets around it. The hard drive was totally wiped. Now my parents could have reinstalled the operating system but they just got a new computer instead.

When I was a teenager my dad got a beautiful marble chess board. It was leaning on a wall, and when I picked it up it broke into two halves.

My dad was really sad and angry at me, that board meant quite a deal to him. He always thought I mishandled it, regardless how I said I was careful.

He died last November.

I got sent a few boxes with his belongings, and when I opened one of them I found that chessboard. It is glued with epoxy.

It sits in my apartment now, and I still don't know if I want to keep it or get rid of it. One one hand it meant a lot to him, on the other hand it is one of the very rare things where I felt treated unfairly.

They used to make these things called "Shrinky-Dinks", which were sheets of thick plastic that you would color with pencils, then cut them out and stick them in the oven and they would shrink down to a smaller size.

Well one day when I was 3, I decided I could do this by myself, except that I put them in the toaster oven on the grate on like 400 degrees. Of course that shit melted through the grate and onto the heating element inside the toaster oven. Thankfully my parents noticed the smell before a fire started. Not sure how much a toaster oven cost in the '80s, but they had to get a new one one.

Dec 20, 1985

My dad drive into our driveway with his brand new 1986 Porsche 944 Turbo. After showing me and my little brother, his brand new car, he then broke the news that our Christmas would be a “little light this year.” I put an entire bag of sugar in his gas tank that night.

His Christmas was a little light that year, the fuck.

Edit: Oh, hell yes, I absolutely told him I did it. On Christmas morning.

Edit 2: as an adult, I still think it’s one of the most awesome cars I’ve ever known (my fav car is still the BMW 2002, tho). He got a new one - the fuck - and I later learned how to drive stick in that car. He has still never forgiven me, although I have still never forgiven him for what he did then or in the decades following. We haven’t spoken in years.

As the years go by, I only grow more proud of my 6 year-old self for punishing that selfish fuck for putting himself before his kids/family. And I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Also, my mom laughed about it at the time and always has since.

"The Electric Company" came on TV, so of course we were dancing around the TV in excitement ... and knocked it over. Crash!

An electric keyboard imported from outside of soviet block. I was too young and stupid to understand the power brick and conected it directly to mains. A shower of sparks tought me an important lesson about electricity and voltage.

My dumbass was shooting marbles out of my paintball gun. Worked great, but I nailed a few windows on our neighbor's car!

My kid stuck a big ol donut magnet on our TV and ruined the screen.

I really, really liked disassembling stuff, and then not knowing how to reassemble. The most regrettable thing I disassembled was probably the Wii U. It would be nice to still have one, but I also really don't feel like buying one, so, yeah.

I broke a microwave when I was little because I didn't know I had to remove my fork from my plate of broccoli, then proceeded to accidentally break the garbage disposal trying to dispose of the broccoli because I didn't know broccoli couldn't go down the disposal.

Jesus maybe? At church during the Christmas service. Accidentally dropped it. No clue how much it was worth, but I don't remember breaking particularly expensive things.

As a 10 year old I drove our car into a tree. It didn't quite break though

Xmas ornament my parents got of QVC or something. I fell into(onto?) the mantelpiece because I'm clumsy and I was much younger at the time and I knocked it off. It was actually my favourite ornament too.

Not looking for Reddit answers like “My parent’s marriage

You know, I figured someone would say it

I was probably 9 or 10 at the time, visiting at a (wealthy) friends house, and my friend was showing me a bunch of his dads cool stuff, among which was a legitimate whip, like straight up indiana jones style. Naturally, I had to try it out…indoors…underneath the crystal chandelier hanging in their entryway…I wasn’t allowed over anymore after that.

As a kid, I kinda had anger issues and would get frustrated easily. I broke the screen of my GBA SP by throwing it against a wall after not being able to solve a room in Mario vs. Donkey Kong. Similarly, I threw my iPod Touch on the floor after losing in a game called Bad Apples which broke the glass but the iPod itself still worked afterwards.

I really wish I still had that SP, as replacing the screen isn't that hard. It even was a limited edition one as well...

Nothing big tbh.

A car window, or a record player would be it, I'm just not sure which cost more.

They were both accidents, though the car window was ab accident due to stupidity rather than a completely innocent act that went wrong.

The record player, I was just trying to play one of my 45s, and the arm snapped off. I don't really remember applying much pressure, and I was about 5 or 6, so it wasn't like I was a powerhouse. My dad didn't get it repaired, so no clue what monetary cost would have applied. He ended up buying a better one second hand from my uncle, which was about 150 back in the eighties, so not cheap but not crazy either.

The car window was my dumb kid ass chucking rocks with my sister. Now, the dumb part was throwing them in the direction of the cars at all, but me and my sister were both pretty damn young, and I had no idea I could throw a small rock that far. Maybe the size of a dime. Wouldn't have thrown that direction if I had thought I could hit anything.

Again, not sure what the actual cost was because my dad never said. But it was enough that he couldn't make a trip to go to a wedding up north, so there's that as a rough idea.

Other than that, I was not a destructive kid, nor a reckless one. Anything else I ever broke was genuinely something where it would have broken for anyone, or was just a result of a kid not having perfect balance and control. You drop shit when you're a kid, but it was always minor stuff.

You guys could've fixed that! You'd just have to open it up to reset or replace the button and hit the Degauss in the settings (assuming it had the option)!

ITT: kids with wayyyy too much time on their hands

• Latchkey kid

Nothing extremely expensive. Just a DS. That, or an old Asus laptop I had that ran horrible windows 8. With the laptop, Best Buy geek squad had said how the best course of action would have been just buying a new computer rather than fixing it. Don't remember all the damage, but it wouldn't even boot if I remember correctly.

Not so much breaking something but when I was maybe 5, my mom had me in summer daycamp at the Y. I got talked into pulling the fire alarm in the pool by some kids. I still remember the look on my mom's face when she came to get me. I think this was the last straw and I was uninvited from further participation. I had earlier gotten in trouble for swimming in a creek on a day trip.

I once broke my neighbor's sliding glass doors with rocks.

A neighbor kid and I were really stupid when we were 9-10 years old, and my next door neighbor's house had been empty for a while because they rented it out. So we thought it would be a good of fun idea to go through the broken fence between our yards, and chuck the decorative rocks (pretty big ones, not pebbles) at the glass and make it shatter. We broke one open, and then another, then went inside to check out the empty place. We started to go at the third one when my brother came outside and heard the loud smashing.

Cops were called, in the end both of us were very apologetic and told them everything.

My dad's truck, I thought it would be a great Idea to clean his motor. Got into the electrical system. He never told me how much it was, but, as an adult I could only imagine.

My jaw.

Our very expensive fridge. My dad beat the living shit out of me. I still remember the beating 35 years later.

Some kind of fancy antique vase, a friend taught me to make a how to fold a really good paper dart and was throwing it all around the house and it hit it and knocked it over 😂

I broke my own spirit. The story is basically my mother was herself broken and found my energy threatening, so I broke myself to make her comfortable.