We sat down and told stories that happened to us in our childhood, to our children. They were all basically based on the truth. These stories were funny and poignant to us. They just took off. These are all stories from my life.
I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. When you're 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood; the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life. Your innocent understanding of the world moves towards something messier and more complicated, and once it does you can never go back.
I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. When you're 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood; the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life.
My relationship with 'Pollyanna' is a very personal one, because Pollyanna got me through my childhood.
If the childhood obesity epidemic remains unchecked, it will condemn many of our kids to shorter lives, as well as the emotional and financial burdens of poor health.
My mom loves music and it poured into my childhood.
We all have incredible relationships to what we eat, to what we don't eat, to what we've eaten since childhood and what we were fed, to what food means to us. And so I find it a really powerful tool in storytelling and in opening people's hearts and their minds.
From childhood, I have been more of a musician than a singer. People close to me know how much effort I put into practising. Even when I am travelling, I have my tanpura on my iPhone.
As cities get bigger, our best defence will be to prevent outbreaks in the first place by building better public health systems, improving childhood immunisation through better routine immunisation and pre-emptive vaccination campaigns.
Throughout my childhood, I did a form of Irish dancing that was kind of the precursor to 'Riverdance.' It was a mixture of ballet and Irish dancing that my teacher, Patricia Mulholland, had invented, essentially. It was Irish ballet, and she would create performances based around the myths and legends of Ireland.
Sometimes I get ideas from childhood. In 'The Hat', Hedgie starts getting teased about his hat, and he just pretends that everything is okay. That's the advice that my mother gave me - not to get mad and pretend that everything is okay. And it worked.
My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.
My heart goes out to the Lindsay Lohans and Britneys who have really had childhood taken from them and probably missed important developmental steps. They have become sort of 'public domain' and something to be made money on. There's no sense of self there, I'm sure of it.
We have lots of evidence that putting investments in early childhood education, even evidence from very hard-nosed economists, is one of the very best investments that the society can possibly make. And yet we still don't have public support for things like preschools.
The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me.
The swashbuckling independence of my childhood was not all good, and as a father, I'm puzzling out how to be part of my children's lives rather than shoehorning them into mine. But there's a risk that I'll overcompensate, of course.
Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.
I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.
My childhood bedroom had wallpaper that was printed with clouds and rainbows.
'The Little Rascals' was set against the background of the Great Depression: the characters were living in poverty. It's just that it wasn't focused on it. It was focused on what makes childhood universal. We're all laughing at kids because we see ourselves in them; we remember our childhood.
