I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family.
It's so fantastic that Prince William has championed African wildlife. He's putting his back into it - and one thing the royal family is brilliant at is getting people to cough up.
You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don't have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done within the family.
With the counseling of my family doctor, my mother ended up turning to Weight Watchers and their children's program. I went to weekly meetings, got counseling and would exercise with my peers who were my size. It was the first time I saw a proper children's portion size, and it wasn't two burgers, it was one.
We look to our pastors and priests and rabbis and counselors of all kinds to testify of the enduring principles upon which our society is built: honesty, charity, integrity and family.
Instead of plotting the demise of the traditional family, as some politicians and religious leaders would have you believe, gay people mow their lawns and watch 'American Idol' and video their children's concerts and have the same hopes and dreams that their straight counterparts do.
Every day I wake up and I lay in bed counting my blessings and saying my prayers for how fortunate I am to have great fans and health and family.
There are countless studies on the negative spillover of job pressures on family life, but few on how job satisfaction enhances the quality of family life.
I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries.
I came from a middle-class family. My dad was a professor; my mom was a nurse. I didn't come from money, and I didn't come from circles of power. I didn't come from the country club; I came from the town park.
Both me and my wife's extended family all live within a 50-mile radius. Like me, a lot of them did time in London then started drifting back to the countryside and the sea. Perhaps it's a homing instinct.
When I was young, one Sunday every month or so, my mom would load my brothers and me into our station wagon and drive 80 miles north to Orange County, where we'd meet our extended family at a Persian restaurant for lunch.
Six months after I was born, we moved to Ghana. The first five years of my life were there. In 1982, when there was a coup d'etat, my family left because the government was overthrown, and my dad was involved in politics.
I continue to care for President Obama and for his family. I think that in many ways they are very courageous people, and I honor that, because I know what it means to live as a black person in a racist America.
One of the reasons I love the law is because I was raised in family - my grandfather was a lawyer, but more importantly, my grandmother was his secretary. And she taught me that lawyers were some of the most civil, most courteous - and in those days, most courtly - people that she knew.
When I was a practising lawyer in the family court, there were too many judges who, when you left their courtroom, you didn't know whether you'd won or whether you'd lost.
I always tell my family - and they laugh about it - but someday, I will write a vegetarian book. My cousin, who's a big vegetarian, tells me flat out, 'You're my favorite vegetarian chef.'
No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.
I'm always the cousin that can't make it to the family functions because I'm busy.
I think that in any family - black, white, Chinese, Spanish, whatever - family is family. You know that there's dysfunction, and that there's this cousin who doesn't like this auntie. But, at the end of the day, like I say, love brings everybody together.
