At 18, I got a publishing deal, so I was like, 'I can do this for real and not go to college.' When I was a teenager, my parents dragged me to a lot of songwriting conventions.
My parents have been there for me, ever since I was about 7.
Being a grownup means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and - here's the big curve - for your parents.
It wasn't a secret that I was gay. I'd come out to my parents during my junior year of high school, on the day that I also wrecked the family car.
I played a million different sports when I was growing up. I started when I was probably five or six, and we'd just go from activity to activity to activity. I think, finally, my parents just realized that we were missing something in our lives. They realized that it was time for us as a family to start going to church.
My parents, products of the Great Depression, were successful people, but lived in a state of constant fear that my sister and I, and they, would sink into the kind of economic insecurity that their generation knew so well.
My parents wanted me to be a lawyer. But I don't think I would have been very happy. I'd be in front of the jury singing.
When I was five my parents bought me a ukulele for Christmas. I quickly learned how to play it with my father's guidance. Thereafter, my father regularly taught me all the good old fashioned songs.
But I also like to shower my parents with presents. I bought them a beautiful car and a house.
I think sometimes parents and teachers fail to stretch kids. My mother had a very good sense of how to stretch me just slightly outside my comfort zone.
We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet. In my view we have nothing to show for it. We haven't invested in our roads, our bridges, our waste-water systems, our sewer systems. We haven't even maintained the assets that our parents and grandparents built for us.
I don't have any children. I just have a cat, to my parents' dismay.
When I take my kid to school, all the parents stop and stare.
Gen Y is really quite distinct from Gen X; it's really self-involved and very narcissistic - their cameras are filled with pictures of themselves; Facebook, it's about me. It's a generation that's been pampered by their parents and their schools, given prizes for just taking part.
All you care about with your parents is that they are happy, and my mother is exceptionally happy at the moment, and I've always adored my stepfather, and he's always been a kind and good and lovely man.
If I could do one thing over I'd have been nicer to my parents.
I always wanted to make sure my parents didn't have to work again for the rest of their lives.
It's always been a desire of mine to work with my parents.
I think all parents have a double life.
By giving the FDA adequate resources and authority to both prevent outbreaks and intervene once they appear, we can support the administration's efforts to reassure the parents of America that the food they feed their children is the product of the safest system in the world.
When I was young, I would make my parents breakfast in bed on Saturday mornings.
My parents were ignorant peasants from the Old World.
At the end of the day, I'd love to see children stop begging their parents to go to the circus. That's what would make me most happy.
Because when I go places and I talk to kids and I talk to parents and I talk to athletes all over, and they look at my story and they see a person, African-American or not, they see something that they can relate to.
My dad was born in Chicago in 1908... his parents came from Russia. They settled in Chicago, where they lived in a little tiny grocery store with eight or nine children - in the backroom all together - and my grandmother got the idea to go into the movie business.
I sometimes found myself more comfortable around my TV family than I did with my own parents and sister.
My parents were laborers so we lived on South Park, which was a low-income region of Seattle. You had a choice - you either joined or formed a gang or you let others bully you.
Wrinkles are hereditary. Parents get them from their children.
My son is an integral part of my life; the fact of life is that parents and children need you; wife doesn't really need you.
If at first you don't succeed, blame your parents.
My mother was the favorite child of her parents. My father was the favorite child of his parents. The result of these two favorite children was me. And I am an only child. So I was convinced that I was the center of the universe.
My dad? He died when I was 19, which is a bad time for your dad to die, because there's an awful lot of things you have to resolve with your parents past your teens if you've been a difficult teenager.
It was weird - my parents would let me have some Green Day albums but not all Green Day albums.
All that chatter you hear from yuppie parents at the playground about how expensive it is to 'do' bathrooms? It's all true. Every word, and worse.
My family lived in Thousand Oaks. In 2002, when I was 17, I begged my parents to let me move out. I had money, a real job, and wanted to get my own place.
At the end of the day, the most overwhelming key to a child's success is the positive involvement of parents.
