When I looked further into my mother's history, I realised that her anxieties and her neuroses could be accounted for by facts from a very early age. Her parents, William Henry Jones and Sarah Emily, were desperately poor.
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.
Our parents don't always know what's right. It's a new age.
I'm one of the few lucky actors in the world. I've never waited tables. I never pumped gas. I've always earned a living. I never had to borrow from my parents. I was the first in our family to own a new car.
As a result of Title IX, and a new generation of parents who want their daughters to have the opportunities they never had, women's sports have arrived.
I was raised in a very religious home with two parents who were deeply involved in the black church. When I was young, I went to a small black AME church in New Jersey.
I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Summit, an upscale town in north Jersey. There was this tiny area of Summit where most of the black families lived. My parents and I lived in a duplex house on Williams Street.
Workers and students and part-time working parents across New Mexico are taking home too little, trying to stretch dollars as far as they'll go to pay for basic necessities.
You can rebel against everything adults say. When I want to find out what the new music is, I find out what parents hate.
I came to this country when I was 12 years old because my parents wanted to give me new opportunities to succeed. President Obama wants everyone to have the chances I had.
We hope that the elected officials will respond positively to a ground swell of letters, phone calls, e-mails and visits from parents. The law clearly states that the responsibility for giving a sound basic education to our children lies with New York State.
After Yale Law School, I was proud to try to live up to my parents' example and began my career working for The Urban Justice Center in the streets of Newark, organizing residents to fight for better housing conditions.
I didn't finish college; my parents didn't graduate college - we didn't have a pot to piss in. I'm from Newark, New Jersey. I had to work. I didn't think it would be possible for me to be an artist without having a job.
I didn't have an acting job when I moved to L.A. I was just naive enough to think that moving to L.A. was the next step after college. My parents were really supportive.
Neither one of my parents played sports at a very high level when they grew up in Nicaragua.
Sometimes a nickname is used instead of the real name. But a nickname may offend either the one named or the parents who gave the name.
I've had many nicknames over the years: V, Nessa, Nessy Poo, Nessy Bear and Van. Only my parents call me Van, though, and I hate it. I get embarrassed.
I'm very proud of my Nigerian heritage. I wasn't fortunate enough to be raised in a heavy Nigerian environment, because my parents were always working. My father was with D.C. Cabs and my mother worked in fast food and was a nurse.
My parents were extreme left so everything was against the system. I was walking barefoot in the streets of Paris when I was eight. When I started to DJ they hated it, because for them, nightclubs, and all of this life, was terrible and fake.
I'm like a middle-aged person; when my friends go on about modern bands, I don't know what they are talking about. I'm into rock n' roll, like Jimi Hendrix. Not so much because of my parents, who used to play a lot of Nina Simone and older blues, but my brother and sister.
