I think children of divorced parents do grow up quicker. You just do.
By the grace of God, my parents were fantastic. We were a very normal family, and we have had a very middle-class Indian upbringing. We were never made to realise who we were or that my father and mother were huge stars - it was a very normal house, and I'd like my daughter to have the same thing.
My parents called me their wise little baby. I was mature when I was 4 or 5. My brother and sister were older, so I was raised by four adults.
If I see a now-28-year-old woman coming up to me, she's probably thinking of 'Juno' because she watched it with her parents when she was 18 years old.
The voting public is not very good at attributing credit and blame to presidents. They get too much credit when things go well and too much blame when things go badly. The same applies to coaches, C.E.O.'s, parents, and anyone else in charge.
I grew up in South Jamaica, Queens, in New York. My parents were very religious churchgoing people. They were very strict. I was never really allowed to indulge in anything vain. Modesty always. I have three brothers and two sisters, so everything was on a budget.
Coming from a broken home, I wanted to be as sure as I could be that my kids would have two parents who will stay together and bring them up.
I love my parents, and I want my mother to be president.
I'm from Boston, and I get easily overwhelmed in New York, so I go to Boston and stay with my parents for a few months at a time to write, or edit, or just to cry.
I grew up in a Christian home with amazing parents.
My mom was a working woman. She made more money than my dad. Both my parents worked. And this was in the '60s.
We didn't have everything we wanted when we were younger, but there was never a moment we didn't feel our parents weren't doing everything they could.
Jesus was a perfect example of following authority. He was subject to His earthly parents; he subjected himself to the laws of the land, and as God, he had the power not to do any of it.
Playing guitar was one of my childhood hobbies, and I had played a little at school and at camp. My parents would drag me out to perform for my family, like all parents do, but it was a hobby - nothing more.
Now that it's officially summer, here's my advice to parents who want to continue teaching their kids during the next two months and learn something themselves: visit Civil War battlefields.
My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
Always, as a child, I would go around the house, and if I found a word that I didn't know the meaning of, I would write it down and ask my parents to define it and try to memorise it.
The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering.
Dad always encouraged my singing, so when 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart' was a hit in the States, I flew my parents to New York first-class to see me, put them up at the Waldorf Astoria, then they sailed home on the QE2.
A lot of my stories about the old days, they're delicious and funny. But every time I recall the early days, it's painful. With every anecdote, it's painful because you're summoning up the terribly, terribly difficult life of my parents. And it's painful because I didn't realize at the time how hard it was for them.
It's amazing how coke encompasses everything in your life. Addicts cannot confront life because they only think of their next hit. I ruined life for my parents, my sister and all my friends.
It was a unique childhood, to say the least. My father was born in Patiala to refugee parents and was a part of the Indian Air Force. The talented few amongst the Air Force pilots are made test pilots. Test pilots are best suited to look at the space programme as they are trained to expect the unexpected.
While having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good.
Every single unfortunate thing that happens, including, for instance, the murder of my parents, I am responsible for. I am responsible for being the son of two people who got murdered. I didn't cause their murder. But if I'm suffering because of it, it's my karma that I have manifested in this lifetime in this particular set of circumstances.
We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which they should be freeing up for their children. Twentysomethings who can't afford to leave home and can't get jobs are attacked as aimless and immature.
I don't think I ever heard music playing when I was younger, other than the radio. My parents got me a Walkman and stuff like that, but I was always way more into listening to music than they were.
Although the precariat does not consist simply of victims, since many in it challenge their parents' labouring ethic, its growth has been accelerated by the neoliberalism of globalisation, which put faith in labour market flexibility, the commodification of everything, and the restructuring of social protection.
My parents paid me small amounts for cleaning my room or cleaning the dishes and stuff, but I never really had a real job before I started on my professional tennis career.
I was lucky enough that my parents knew about World Cup skiing, so since I was really little, we were watching World Cup winning runs.
Everyone loved my father. He was so nice that people took advantage of him. We were lower middle class. I slept in the hallway on a cot that rolled away during the day, and my younger brother and sister slept in my parents' room. My goal as a kid was to someday have my own room and to own a car - and I wanted to be able to take care of my parents.
My parents were very active in the Civil Rights Movement. My father was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker; my mother was a secretary with the Panthers.
I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews - as well as Blacks and Catholics - were unwelcome on many blocks. I suffered the spiritual equivalent of whiplash.
People who were gay were pitied and ridiculed by my parents - they had no modern sense of people being allowed to be who they were.
My parents always made me dress up for church. I really didn't want to.
My parents have been married 50-some years, and I've never heard them fight. I got the chance to attend great universities and medical school.
In 1900, the typical American was a boy, not yet a teenager, named John. He lived with his parents and his sisters, Mary and Helen, on a farm in New York or Pennsylvania.
