Erma Bombeck Quotes

That was a judicious mother who said, "I obey my children for the first year of their lives, but ever after I expect them to obey me.

If you've got a lot of children, I think you let the other children bring them up more and you just sort of step in and do stuff like every now and again.

Raising five boys is a handful, trust me.

Raising kids these days is hard. I'm the second to last child in my family. I think it's tough; I have two kids, I see them and I feel like I see things in them; they awaken the inner child in you.

I have four kids; three girls and a boy. The oldest girl is 13, and has her own social life now, so there's a bit of begrudging cooperation there. It's tough.

Discipline socialized children. They became tolerable to those who didn’t already love them.

Once you become a mother, your relationships in your own life change. Perhaps with your own mother, and perhaps with your sister. Perhaps with your baby-daddy.

I think there's different parenting styles.

Most fathers and... Mothers. Only your grandmother and Ghengis Khan know how to do it.

However global I strove to become in my thinking over the past twenty years, my sons kept me rooted to an utterly pedestrian view,intimately involved with the most inspiring and fractious passages in human development. However unconsciously by now, motherhood informs every thought I have, influencing everything I do. More than any other part of my life, being a mother taught me what it means to be human.

You try not to have a favorite when you have sons or kids. Can't have a favorite. Can't let them know know if you do. I don't. I treat my main son and the other two exactly the same way.

My brother wasn't loved by my mother in the same way that I was.

And Grandmother Hall really imagines that she can raise Eleanor and her two brothers differently than these children were raised. And if she is very strict and everything is very regimented and ordered and disciplined, that they will become the perfect children who her own children did not become.

Someone once told me that children are like heroin. You always want more. Yet first-borns are special because you'll never have your first child again.

I do want children. I study dads more. I watch what they go through. I admire my father more than I ever did and my brother and my sister.

Mother was the disciplinarian, but it was Daddy who could turn me into an angel with just one look.

Each generation has been an education for us in different ways. The first child-with-bloody-nose was rushed to the emergency room. The fifth child-with-bloody-nose was told to go to the yard immediately and stop bleeding on the carpet.

Anyone who has brought up children knows that consistency has absolutely nothing to do with discipline.

Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

We have to divide mother love with our brothers and sisters. Our parents can help us cope with the loss of our dream of absolute love. But they cannot make us believe that we haven't lost it.

A pittifull mother makes a scald head.

My mother and father have also raised five boys so they know there's only so much that can be controlled.

the experience of having brothers and sisters, born of the same parents, sleeping under the same roof, eating at the same table, is an inescapable, delightful and repelling, desired and abhorred part of each child's life.

I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I'm naked.

As marriage produces children, so children produce care and disputes; and wrangling.