Erma Bombeck Quotes

It was just this interesting, my first, the first time you hear your child in any way criticise you. It's the worst review of your life and it's really relieving to find out that they don't know what they're saying.

Well, I actually tell my son that I don't have any hair because he asked me the same question that I gave it to him when he was born, so he actually still believes that. He's five years old.

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

We all ought to understand we're on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn't do kids any harm for a few years but it isn't smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins.

The moment when you are most repelled by a child's behavior, that is your warning light to draw the very closest to that child.

Contemporary American children, if they are old enough to grasp the concept of Santa Claus by Thanksgiving, are able to see through it by December 15th.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

My child, it will be better for you if you accept my decisions without complaint. Do not ask me to defend my actions or to explain why one person is favored and another seems slighted. The answers to these questions go far beyond your comprehension.

What we forgot as children is that our parents are children, also. The child in them has not been satisfied or met or loved, often.

Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?

I hope everyone can examine what is the most important relationship in life - the relationship between parent and child.

It's a little known fact, but parents are like superheroes. With just a few magic words they can make you feel ten feet tall and bulletproof, they can slay the dragons of doubt and worry, they can make your problems disappear. But of course they can only do this as long as you're a child. When you've become an adult, become the master of your own universe, they're not as powerful as they once were. Maybe that's why so many of us take our time growing up.

But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.

You don't play a game or color a picture with a child to show your superiority. Rather, you choose to limit yourself so as to facilitate and honor that relationship.

A creature undefiled by the taint of the world, unvexed by its injustice, unwearied by its hollow pleasures; a being fresh from the source of light, with something of its universal lustre in it. If childhood be this, how holy the duty to see that in its onward growth it shall be no other!

When you love a child, you forgive her before she can even ask. Basically you've already forgiven her for things she hasn't even done yet.

It's very difficult for you to speak out against your child, someone that's in your family. You can have an argument with them, but you can't condemn them. You can't cast them out, because God has not done that to us. We cannot do that to anybody else.

Parenting is a profoundly reciprocal process: we, the shapers of our children's lives, are also being shaped. As we struggle to beparents, we are forced to encounter ourselves; and if we are willing to look at what is happening between us and our children, we may learn how we came to be who we are.

~I've never met a 2-year-old who is terrible. I'm so cool with every stage my daughter goes through. I just think she's amazing. I hope she's not looking at me thinking, Mom, are the terrible 30s coming on with you?~

The parents always insisted on telling their child that their secret friends didn't exist - perhaps because they had forgotten that they too had spoken to their angel at one time. Or, who knows, perhaps they thought they lived in a world where there was no longer any place for angels.