If there's anything worse than being 16, it's having parents visibly reliving their own teenage years in your anguished presence.
My favorite anime of all time is 'Yu Yu Hakusho.' And this is because when I was living with my parents before I moved to Florida for NXT - which was FCW at the time - I just had a ton of anime that I was watching, and one of them was 'Yu Yu Hakusho.' So, I had seen it as a kid, but I never watched it all the way through.
I have parents and family who will never allow me not to be grounded. If I thought for a second that I could possibly lift off the ground, I have a thousand people who will grab my ankles.
A misperception about anorexia is that you don't eat. Not true. Maybe you eat just 500 calories a day. It would be easy for me to say, 'Why didn't my parents notice?' But I didn't want them to. I made sure to eat half a sandwich around my parents.
Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us.
I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores - its anti-Semitism for example.
My parents met when they were 16 and bonded over the antiwar movement.
I grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, where my parents raised German shepherds - we had about 30 dogs at any given time.
My parents are refugees from Vietnam, so they didn't grow up with 'Star Wars.' I don't think they know what's going on in the movie at any given time.
My heroes are and were my parents. I can't see having anyone else as my heroes.
My parents must have done a great job. Anytime I wanted to pursue something that they weren't familiar with, that was not part of their lifestyle, they let me go ahead and do it.
Gen Y is depicted as self-centred and apathetic when it comes to politics, but it doesn't help that we are largely overlooked. There have been policies to woo parents, pensioners and the sick, but the young do not appear to rank high on any political agenda.
My parents are apolitical - no bumper stickers, no yard signs. They don't talk about politics.
I was emancipated at 15 and off to Japan on a contract working. I felt for my parents. I apologized profusely years later, but I was just very strong-willed and strong-minded and had my own idea - thought outside of the box.
I talk about beepers going off in the middle of a concert and people being late and not apologizing, and people not RSVP-ing, and adult children going back to live with their parents, which we didn't have in the '60s and '70s.
I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.
Both my parents were educators, so interviews and college applications and shaking hands and looking people in the eye and feeling confident and knowing what you can bring to any project or audition - I've known about these things my entire life.
I asked my parents for permission to study in America and they were so sure that I wouldn't get in and get a scholarship that they encouraged me to try. So I applied to Yale and got an excellent scholarship. I then worked for the Boston Consulting Group for six and half years.
Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it's all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well.
Osama bin Laden characterized his terrorist activities as 'defensive jihad,' provoked by 'debauched infidels' bent on enslaving the Muslim world. The lead industry blamed 'ignorant parents' for applying lead paint to juvenile furniture.