My parents got me a $25 Kent steel-string acoustic guitar when I was around 12. The following Christmas, my parents bought me a Conora electric guitar. It looked almost like a Gretsch. It cost $59, and my mom still has it.
I got a toy guitar at a fundraiser and was trying to write songs with it that were ridiculous. After a week, my parents bought me a real acoustic guitar, and I started taking guitar lessons.
Young parents in America are holy and not to be messed with. If they say something is correct, we all acquiesce. And is there any man, woman or canine who doesn't leap out of the way when one of those giant, all-terrain Bugaboo strollers comes barreling down the sidewalk?
Much that is great in literature is an acquired taste, and you have to acquire it in the first place. Our job as parents is essentially to pass on the enthusiasm we had for the things we loved. That's how we'll get them to fall in love with reading in the first place and, hopefully, to stay in love with it.
My parents say that even as a very, very little kid, the way that I acted was dramatically different from other little kids.
I never took acting classes, but I knew I could do it based on the skill with which I lied to my parents on a regular basis!
I have an action figure, and so do my parents, so it's odd that we all have these dolls of ourselves. It's a little bit surreal but kind of fun. You can play with the whole family.
I certainly did not know what the word 'socialism' meant growing up, because I was brought up in a very nonpolitical family. My brother was somewhat active, but my parents were not.
Both of my parents graduated from high school, both attended college, both have government jobs now. They've always been very adamant about me finishing high school and finishing college.
I talk to my kids about my mother's energy and how she would have loved them. I talk about how kind and polite my father was. So that they have some kind of remembrance that even though my parents died from their addictions and so that they know they were genuine in how they were.
Clearly this is a tough economic time, and a lot of families are hurting. So when we talk to parents, we talk about small changes for kids and things that don't cost extra money. Like adding water and eliminating sugary drinks and sodas. That's going to save money right there. Or adding a few more vegetables.
The American Federation of Teachers has a long track record of working with administrators, parents, and communities to provide real help to struggling students and low-performing schools. We've learned that intensive interventions, proven programs, and adequate resources can transform students' lives and their schools.
We lived, until I was 12 or so, in communal apartment with five different families and the same kitchen, in two little - my brother and me and my parents. It was hell, but it was a common thing. My father was not general or admiral, but he was colonel. He was teaching in military academy military topography.
I've come to admire our military kids more than you all will know, because you guys are heroes. And the only way your parents are able to serve is because you guys hold it down, and you do it with maturity beyond your years.
My parents were admirers of President Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their parents and most of our relatives and neighbors were Republicans, so they were self-conscious in their liberalism and took it as emblematic of their ability to think for themselves.
'Conservative' is a term that resonates differently with people. For us, Tae and I take that as being modest. The easiest way to put it is, if there's a little girl in the audience, and she's looking at us, I want her parents to feel comfortable with her admiring us and looking up to us.
Having children truly ends adolescence. We are all either parents or children: responsibility-takers or those who demand from others.
I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with.
I have often been struck by the fact that most parents who are experiencing positive and rewarding relationships with their pre-adolescent children are, nevertheless, waiting apprehensively and bracing themselves for the stormy adolescent period.
Teenagers blithely skip off to uncertain futures, while their parents sit weeping curbside in the Volvo, because the adolescent brain isn't yet formed enough to recognize and evaluate risk.