As kids we just believe what our parents said and some of them they said just to scare us of a certain thing or to make us believe things their way.
Btw the Chinese ballet story is frightening, but I have read that a couple of centuries back, Chinese females from childhood would squeeze their feet up so hard that to an extent that their feet were deformed and they would stop growing. In those days the man were fascinated with women who had very small feet, they believed it to be beauty. This is true, there was a documentary also on this, showing how they did it. Was gruesome and one can only wonder how much women have been tortured by men in different ways across all the cultures.