Never have more children than you have car windows.

In Bombeck’s characteristically domestic, observational humor, the line turns modern family logistics into a mock “rule of thumb.” The joke assumes the everyday reality of shuttling children in a car and the parental fantasy of maintaining control—each child “assigned” to a window, visible and containable. Beneath the quip is a wry acknowledgment of how parenting is shaped by practical constraints (space, supervision, transportation) as much as ideals. Like much of Bombeck’s work, it gently satirizes middle-class family life by translating emotional overwhelm into a concrete, absurdly measurable limit.