If your child is starting a new school, walk around your block and get to know the neighborhood children.
The second child of a small farmer with six children, I come from a village in Bihar on the border of Nepal called Belwa. I was there till the age of 17 and studied in a Hindi-speaking boarding school run by Catholics in a nearby district town.
Why should I marry? One marries to have children, but I already have children! My nieces and nephews are my children.
Children between the ages of five to ten years are even more variable. They are going to vary from very high functioning, capable of doing normal school work, to nonverbal who have all kinds of neurological problems.
A good mother remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer. She remembers to make play dates, her children's clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games.
I'd probably be one of these terribly over-protective parents whose children become a neurotic wreck because they've never been exposed to real life.
I will never regret being there for my children, watching them, making sure they'll be okay. But I might regret not being there for them.
I do not think our priorities are misplaced when we are looking at creating a whole new class of children from these gay marriages who could end up completely dependent on the State, on the taxpayers - the American people.
It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.
Profound changes to how children access vast information is yielding new forms of peer-to-peer and individual-guided learning.
My grandmother had many children. She lost most. So when we came along, we were really special. I was the first grandchild that could see her spirit moving to a new generation.
Whatever I have not yet learned to tolerate in myself inevitably will appear in my children. In this way, they, like Julia, guide me to a new level of self-awareness and everyone benefits.
Something that really helps when it comes to writing songs is you start to notice how children learn and how we all had to learn in the first place, starting from the ground up. It gives you a new perspective.
The desire for self-improvement is vital. There is no point in pushing children; they need to be the ones who want to learn new skills.
I was born on 7 September 1917 at Sydney in Australia. My father was English-born and a graduate of Oxford; my mother, born Hilda Eipper, was descended from a German minister of religion who settled in New South Wales in 1832. I was the second of four children.
I always thought I'd be the quintessential Earth Mother, but when I had Harrison, I really wasn't the natural mother that I always thought I would be. I adore children, but I was never that interested in newborn babies.
I am in the bad news business. Seldom do I get to report on puppies, rainbows, or the sounds of children giggling. Well, never.
The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time in the history of civilization to be a kid.
As a newspaper reporter, I covered and was around a fair number of crime scenes involving juvenile delinquents, and few things bothered me more than listening to their parents. Crying, ranting, proclaiming how great their children were despite being kicked out of school or previous run-ins with the law.
I think the next thing I publish will be for children, but I don't really want to be held to that because I also know what my next book for adults will be, and I really like that, too, so it depends. I've always had more than one thing going.
