I got a lot of support from my parents. That's the one thing I always appreciated. They didn't tell me I was being stupid; they told me I was being funny.
I hail from a small town. My parents were never apprehensive about my decision to take up acting - they've been a constant support to me.
My gardening apprenticeship was similar to the way a chimney sweep is pushed up a chimney. It was enforced by my parents, non-negotiable - it would be weeding the strawberries, mowing the grass.
'The Catcher in the Rye' was targeted by some schools as a book too risque to read and certainly not appropriate for young minds. My parents certainly would not have approved of the book, but I secretly read it when I was in 7th grade. I felt so rebellious, and my young mind loved it.
Perhaps the soundest advice for parents is: Lighten up. People have been raising children for approximately as long as there have been people.
I think it's just so important that parents actually really study the apps on the phones and figure out what's going on.
It took us a long time to find out that we had been lied to by our parents' generation. The moralities that were followed during our parents' generation were basically arbitrary. This caused a rift between the two generations, which was brought on by the beatniks.
As a kid, I was listening to Aretha Franklin, Etta James and hip-hop as well as music my parents were listening to, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.
My parents are really conservative. My dad is Muslim, and my mom is the most conservative woman you've ever met. They're very aristocratic in the most quaint suburban way.
Arizona is a national leader in school choice with both charter schools and tuition tax credits giving parents and their children more school choices than ever before.
The first trip I can remember would have to be to Marianna, Arkansas. My mother's parents are from there, and we'd go every year to visit the church where they were buried. We'd attend church service that day, put flowers around their tombstones, and visit with family and friends that still lived there.
Raffi Cavoukian was born in Cairo in 1948 and moved with his Armenian parents to Toronto when he was 10.
I would even say that my parents, and their friends in our community, thought of education as a kind of armor against racism.
My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice, an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn't steal the breath from our lungs, so that they wouldn't make a memory of this skin.
When I was 10, I asked my parents for a set of weights. I had my Charles Atlas book to go along with that. Every time we went to the grocery store, I'd rush to the magazine area and read the ones with Arnold Schwarzenegger and all those guys on the covers: 'Pumping Iron,' 'Muscle and Fitness,' 'Muscle Builder by Joe Weider.'
I hated my childhood. It was loathsome. My parents were deaf and dumb. Profoundly so. They could make noises when they were emotionally aroused, but they couldn't form it into speech.
I started playing soccer when I was 4 because my sister was doing it. It was my first organized sport, and my parents thought this was a great way to get coordinated and be part of a team. I had an array of options but eventually figured out soccer was best for me.
I always performed when I was a child. My parents got very annoyed, because my brother and I had our little bedrooms upstairs, and I would plaster the house with posters with arrows pointing upstairs.
Thus the castle of each feudal chieftain became a school of chivalry, into which any noble youth, whose parents were from poverty unable to educate him to the art of war, was readily received.
When I was three, my parents were told that I would never be able to recover from rheumatoid arthritis. Doctors from the biggest and the best of hospitals had said that the condition would never be cured. But with naturopathy and yoga, I recovered and became a wrestler, and even got the opportunity to represent my country in wrestling.