My parents were farmers' kids from South Dakota. My dad was an engineer. I wanted to be responsible and major in something pragmatic.
My parents are very cool and wildly supportive - maybe almost too much. I want to tell them to chill out.
My parents started a business out of the living room of our home and, 30-plus years later, it was a multimillion dollar company. So, President Obama, with all due respect, don't tell me that my parents didn't build their business.
I was raised into the Romanian Orthodox culture by my parents, and most notably my mother, who is a profoundly religious and spiritual woman.
My parents weren't religious at all. I remember the first time I heard about Jesus was at school.
My original interest in the Nazi holocaust was personal. Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.
I think high school's very difficult. You're figuring out your own power and your effect on other people. You look back and see how you spent so much energy on figuring out things with your parents or your peers.
As parents, we tend to be in Tell rather than Listen mode.
Parents are people who yell and they yell and they yell and they yell. And you already have the point... and they're still yelling.
Here's the thing: the unit of reverence in Europe is the family, which is why a child born today of unmarried parents in Sweden has a better chance of growing up in a house with both of his parents than a child born to a married couple in America. Here we revere the couple, there they revere the family.
My parents never talked to me like I was a kid. Maybe that's why I've been seen as mature.
I liked Pat Cash, and I loved Mats Wilander. I went to the Australian Open with my parents, and I used to watch Wilander being cheered on by the Swedish fans, and with his game style being like mine, I drew comparisons with him.
I actually grew up with people from all over the world. There wasn't enough of a difference to feel different from anybody else. Their grandmother hollered at me like my grandmother hollered at all the kids when anybody did anything wrong. And their parents did the same thing.
Asian people are very practical and come from a conservative world. The parents want their kids to be doctors and lawyers. There are casting calls for Asian children, but once the parents find out the children might miss school, they're opposed to it.
My parents grew up during the space race, and I think they imagined the future would be us living on moon bases and everyone has rocket shoes.
Coming from an African background, obviously the foundation of the family home is education, probably because my parents had to work a lot harder for everything that they've got in this country.
I've never had a very closely connected family. My parents split up when I was young and I was living with my mom for a little while, then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy, it was just never really a very close-knit family. So there was support in the sense that they didn't stand in my way.
I was six when my parents divorced, and that was tough for me.
One of the most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children - only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old.
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.
When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.
When I was going away to school, I had a friend who took a liking to my family just a little too much. We couldn't get her out of the house. It took me saying to my parents, 'I don't want her here. I'm feeling replaced.'
I'm demanding and critical about myself. It's something my parents passed on to me.
By pushing children and wanting quick success, parents are producing followers, not leaders.
The most important thing to me is to give something back to my parents, because they've done so much for me throughout my life.
I just like being on my own on trains, traveling. I spent all my pocket money travelling the London Underground and Southern Railway, what used to be the Western region, and in Europe as much as I could afford it. My parents used to think I was going places, but I wasn't, I was just travelling the trains.
My parents were so relaxed by the time I was growing up that I got away with a lot more.
'The Voice Kids' was a tremendous success in Holland. There was a big emotional reaction from the parents of the children taking part.
I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.
You get social pressure from your parents, who teach you to pay attention to certain things and not to others. You get it in school.
When I was younger, I played sports and went to camp. As I got older, my parents began to instill in us the importance of giving back to the community, especially those places around the world that are less fortunate than my very privileged life growing up in Los Angeles.
Being an only child and losing both my parents at an early age, I have found that the friends I have made over the years are the people who help me get through life, good times and bad.
In America we tell our parents to bring their child home and put him or her in a crib; as they get older, children sleep in they own room not in Mom and Dad's room. What are we training them for? It's independence, because that's what being empowered is all about.
My Dad is my hero. He's 85 now and he is in great health. He is handsome and strong. He has an incredible moral and ethical backbone. I couldn't have been luckier with my parents.
My kids have never seen me scream at anybody. They've never seen an argument. There's never been even a cold silence. And those are things that I grew up with because my parents did end up divorcing.
I love being the person my kids depend on to learn. Everything they learn, for the most part, comes from you - how they treat people, how they look at the world, how they process things. I love being that example for them, just like my parents were for me.
