Family Norms Quotes

I was a first-generation college student as well as the first in our family to be born in America - my parents were born in Cuba - and we didn't yet know that families were supposed to leave pretty much right after they unloaded your stuff from the car.

Everybody's family has different values.

I thought America needed to see what a normal family was really like.

Are anybody's parents typical?

I don't think we should be a model family living in a model home.

My brother got a .22 for his 12th birthday; I got a .22. He got a hunting knife; I got a hunting knife.

People always say, 'My family is so normal,' and when you poke into them, they never are.

I remember back in the '90s, I used to feel criticized by women for not having children. Like there must be something wrong with me.

So it just wasn't in my house. Anywhere, I looked like I knew about the toilet.

Being a single mother in the late 1950s was a very shocking thing - and dreadful thing - for people.

I come from a very naked family, so that's just something that's not a big deal for me. I don't think it means anything other than that.

I grew up in a family where we weren't allowed to talk about beauty or to put any emphasis on physical appearance.

I remember feeling ashamed, for some reason. I was ashamed of my parents. I couldn't face some of my friends at school anymore, because I desperately wanted to have the classic, you know, typical family. Mother, father. I wanted that security, so I resented my parents for quite a few years because of that.

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.

Music was something that nobody in my family does.

When you are born into a family like mine, you don't really know anything else. But you quickly realise that it's more about other people and how they are dealing with it. Some can be hugely in awe or uncomfortable, but to you, your parents are just your parents.

I don't think anyone has a normal family.

In your standard-issue family, of which few remain, but on which our expectations are still based, there are parents and there are children. The way you know which are which, aside from certain size and age differences and despite any behavior similarities, is that the parents are the bossy ones.

No one should have to conform to some mythical concept of the ideal family.

Families, generally, suck. And I say that as someone who, like my husband, had parents who proved the proverbial exception to the rule.

When I was a kid people always asked why I didn't act like the rest of my family, and parents would say, "Well, she needs a childhood! We would never allow her to do that even if she wanted to". They were as involved in my life as any parents are in any person's life.

I wouldn't say that my family is normal.

I grew up walking around naked in my house. My mom was like that, and my sisters.

Physical violence was never an option for men or women in my family.

When you grow up, you don't realize that your parents are any different than anybody else's. And their behavior - you have nothing to compare it to. So that is what normal is, even if it's abnormal.