BetteBack: Press Release – On Raising Children

Bette Midler talks about how she would raise her children.
Article from:PR Newswire Article date:February 11, 1986

/ADVANCE/ NEW YORK, Feb. 11 /PRNewswire/ — Bette Midler, 40, who has been married for just over a year to Martin von Haselberg, reveals, “We’d really like to have some children, and I think I would raise them in a very Victorian way.”

Midler states in the current (March) issue of McCall’s, “I would give them an everyone-around-the-piano kind of life. I wouldn’t let my kids watch television eight hours a day, and I would be careful about what they watched. I’d teach them to paint and be creative. You can be lonely, you can be all on your own, but, if you can make something out of nothing, you can be happy. I’ve learned that.”

Midler, despite her accomplishments, insists that she’s internally, eternally a 13-year-old. “I think that everyone feels 13; everyone is surprised when the skin starts to get weird and the hair starts to fall out. I never feel like a grown-up.

“When I met my husband, I thought he was a grown-up; that was one of the things that attracted me to him. And then I discovered that we’re both pretty much the same. I think most human beings are. The outside is grown up, but the inside is still looking for Mom. It’s nothing to be ashamed of; it’s just the human condition,” Midler states in McCall’s. “I used to think you were grown up when you had a rug in the bathroom.”