Parents
(page 4)
The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them.
Parents have the ability to screen their children's Internet access at home.
I would say I'm black because my parents said I'm black. I'm black because my mother's black. I'm black because I grew up in a family of all black people. I knew I was black because I grew up in an all-white neighborhood. And my parents, as part of their protective mechanisms that they were going to give to us, made it very clear what we were.
When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.
Parents are working more than ever before and unable to monitor what kids are eating at home, and schools are selling astronomical amounts of junk food in order to supplement shrinking budgets. It's a ticking time bomb, and America's children are exploding.
Parents do not have the courage to say no to certain things that their children demand. They are rather scared of their children.
My parents have always said, 'You'll be so unhappy if you're no more than your career, that it's important to get out there and do things other than just your career'.
Teenagers talk about the idea of having each other's 'full attention'. They grew up in a culture of distraction. They remember their parents were on cell phones when they were pushed on swings as toddlers. Now, their parents text at the dinner table and don't look up from their BlackBerry when they come for end-of-school day pickup.
I grew up seeing my parents perform and sing, and I just always wanted to be singing, too. Music has always been my deepest passion and what I felt most connected to.
I was a gymnast when I was younger. My parents put me in gymnastics, and I was actually only good at the floor. I was terrible at everything else, especially beam. Unfortunately, you can't be a gymnast unless you're good at all of the apparatuses, so I became a competitive cheerleader. I was just the main tumbler for my squad.
My parents are famously not part of the gestalt of the fashion industry.
I had to get over a Southern accent and go through a lot of obstacles. But I love my job, and I love what I do. If it's something that your parents are pushing you into, it's never going to be rewarding.
My favorite holiday memory was sitting at home all day in my pajamas during winter break for school watching a bunch of old Christmas movies like 'Jack Frost' and 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' with my siblings and parents.
Karaoke was my family's happy secret. In those early years in America, like many immigrants, my parents struggled with poverty and loneliness, but they also built provisional families, and inside our bubble there was joy, understanding, an intimate language I could never translate — and above all there was song.
My parents are the last of the middle class. My father worked for the government designing sea mines. My mother was a substitute teacher. Together, they worked really only until they were sixty.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
