It never occurred to me that I wouldn't go to college and have a career - as well as a family - of my own. Both my parents, but especially my mother, encouraged me and led me to believe that it was possible.
My parents were hardworking. They made every penny stretch as far as possible. That was probably the major reason everything they gave me was always two or three sizes too large.
You either become like your parents or you become the opposite of your parents. And I like to think that I'm the opposite of my parents.
In California, where you're allowed to drive at 16, you get so much freedom with that. It's a freedom to get outside of your parents' house and to do bad things.
I'm interested in youth culture - when your parents are running your life, but you think you're the big man - but I'm not trying to make a statement.
My parents were incredibly strict, almost military style.
I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.
Naturally, it was easier for me to envision becoming a novelist than it is for most people. I had two great in-house teachers; I had parents who considered a career in the arts a real possibility rather than a dreamy arrow shot into the sky.
When I was a little kid, I used to really embarrass my parents.
Unfortunately, inner feelings and potential are often stunted by our parents, relatives or peers.
My parents taught us it's important to give back.
I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs.
I think when your parents die, it is kind of like a moving sidewalk: you're not just on the sideline and watching them go by. You know, you're going to the same place they are.
We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.
Both my parents died on the young side. My father was 45, and my mother was 61, so cancer's affected me in a big way.
And there's a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents - I mean, it's gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.
My parents were always pretty free with me. They were of the school of thought that if you really cramp down on someone and tell them not to do all these things, it's gonna become like forbidden fruit.
Parents should not smoke in order to discourage their kids from smoking. A child is more likely to smoke when they have been raised in the environment of a smoker.
Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.
As a teenager, I ached to grow up even more than I dreaded to. I craved escape from my parents' impositions on what I believed.
My parents couldn't afford a full time drama school, but I basically just did every class I could do, and followed every drama interest I could. When I was 15 or 16 I did drama courses.
It is very important for both the parents to spend quality time with their children, at least till they are eight years old, whatever be our social status, or even if grandparents are available to take care of them, and that is the message we try to drive home in 'Pasanga 2.'
It is a lonely existence to be a child with a disability which no-one can see or understand, you exasperate your teachers, you disappoint your parents, and worst of all you know that you are not just stupid.
My parents both work in publishing, and I was a bright, academic kind of kid, and I read a lot of books, and when you read a lot, I guess the muscle that gets exercised is where you can hear the voices in your head. You can turn words into pictures and into sounds and into colours and smells.
I think it's always natural for children to rebel against their parents and establish their own identity. And also, I think parents get invested in, you know, doing the right thing? And so their anxiety about being good parents might, in a way, affect a relationship negatively.
In third grade, I was taking tap-dance lessons, and about six weeks before the recital I wanted to quit. My mom said, 'No, you're going to stay with it.' Well, I did it, and I was bad, too! But my parents never let their kids walk away from something because it was too hard.
It was good for us, I suppose. Those kinds of times produce qualities in us that make us better for having had them. My parents were not getting along. My mother was quite intolerant of friendships that were being developed.
My parents have been my biggest support. Had it not been for them, I would have not been able to be the confident and fearless person that I am today.
Our parents taught us to work hard and never forget our family roots, where we came from, and how much effort it took to get to where we are today.
I started using vinyl because I stole all my parents' records when I was 10. I didn't think about sound quality then, but I always loved how they sounded.
My parents would always tell you that I was the crazy princess growing up. I was a drama queen.
As for Hollywood children, their social life can get a little overboard, just like their parents can. Living in town, you attend so many functions.
The people I admire unreservedly are my parents. They are the real pioneers of Africa in many ways. They were born and raised in rural Africa during the colonial period. They are the ones who came to the U.S. long before I did.
In 1966, I bought my parents a carriage clock for their silver wedding anniversary. It was last wound 30 years later, in December 1996, the month my father died.
On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.
I think a lot of people are with the one they're meant to be with. I see it watching my parents because they've been together for so long and are still very much in love. I'm just sort of in awe of that.
