The orphan in children's literature allows the child protagonist to move the story forward themselves. I think that, however happy a family, every intelligent child thinks: 'How did I come to be born to these parents?' - it is about finding your place in the world.
Intellectually, I am already an old man. But in the sensory area, I am still such a child! I shuffle on my bottom between the two.
I had been a real problem child, but once I got into acting, my parents never had any more trouble with me because all of that energy was directed in a positive way.
As a child, I lived through and survived the segregated South. I sat at the back of the bus at a time when America wasn't yet as great as it could be. As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future.
When I retired, I was at an in-between age. I wasn't a child anymore, I wasn't really a woman yet, and they weren't really writing scripts for that age.
Second, we will give our fellow citizens the skills they need for the jobs of today and the careers of tomorrow. When it comes to the school your child will attend, every parent should have a choice, and every child should have a chance.
The pinafore of the child will be more than a match for the frock of the bishop and the surplice of the priest.
I think that for me, personally, a lot of my choices have been to do with my own issues of not feeling safe as a child and feeling a sense of stability.
My mom Marina and I were poor and hungry. We could sometimes not afford to eat - seriously. We lived together in a small town, called Berdyansk, in Ukraine. I was an only child. I don't think we would have survived if there had been more kids.
There are so many kids in this world, and in this country, that need homes. And so we're perfectly content to look into adoption one day, if for some reason we aren't able to have a biological child.
I know people talk about poverty and other factors, but there is very little I can do to ensure that a child has a stable two-parent home. But what if we can give them a shot in the classroom with a stable, high-standards environment?
If your child has something creative they really want to do, it's up to you, their parent, to help make that happen.
From a child, I knew I didn't have the face I wanted to have. My mother was a baroness. She was from Berlin; she was a silent movie actress and friends with Marlene Dietrich. So she knew all about film make-up and prosthetics and stuff like that and what they used to do in those days. And she taught me all that as a child.
All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records, but if you were a kid, you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn't always say - you wouldn't dare say it was beautiful.
I think Sacajawea was caught in a series of tragic situations - her kidnapping as a child, her being passed from tribe to tribe, being sold into marriage. However, I never thought of her as a tragic figure. I do not think she was a victim in the way we think of tragic figures.
A child's first teacher is its mother.
It's interesting how Rod Stewart can father a child at 65, and a straight, single footballer named Cristiano Ronaldo can arrange to have a surrogate have a baby, and neither of them receives any criticism.
I was not a child star. I was more like a young auditioner.
I think a lot of people have a problem with the fact that I've adopted an African child, a child who has a different color skin than I do.
I was 13 - 14 when I first tasted stardom. In the summer holidays, my dad made me act in these films that went on to become superhits. I became a child star.
The proper care and rearing of a child is integral to their development. It breaks my heart to know that some children's futures are being destroyed within their own homes.
The Cold War's end pushed disarmament down most leaders' agendas. It's a sophisticated issue, which I think is one reason why it is not so hands-on to many people. It's not visceral. It's not like a starving child.
The child in me wanted to try out new things and do something different.
It was quite a thespian - 'thespy' - sort of household. My mum had a dance school, and my dad now works in a theatre, so I spent a lot of time going to see dance as a young child - it was just a part of who we were.
The most convincing argument against early parenthood is that you are in a relationship that is likely to fall apart before that child grows up.
When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.
Every role I've played, that could've happened. It's nice, it happens, but it is rather disconcerting when a young child comes up to at the airport and starts doing your lines, it happens.
Being in a band turns you into a child and keeps you there.
One of the many interesting and surprising experiences of the beginner in child analysis is to find in even very young children a capacity for insight which is often far greater than that of adults.
A parent can seem very kind and gentle, but as any child knows, as soon as that parent gets stressed, they can suddenly turn and get a bit angry.
It takes a village to raise a child; that's how I basically balance it. It's twenty four hours in a day.
When I go back to Texas, I travel the state, and I see people all the time who come up to me, men and women across Texas, and they grab me by the shoulder, and they're afraid. They say, 'Ted, you know, I just lost my health insurance. I got a child with diabetes. I'm scared. Please stop this from happening.'
What the Chinese parent is conveying to the child is not that 'you've got to get A's or else I won't like you.' On the contrary, it's, 'I believe in you so much, I know that you can be excellent.'
I was the youngest child. I got to be myself and ask stupid questions because I was the youngest. It is so important to listen to the questions children have and reward them for the wondrous questions they ask.
I believe in less government interference in people's personal lives, including whom to marry, when and whether to bear a child and how to raise kind and compassionate children.
You never see a child die from education on TV. But make no mistake about it: children die from lack of education all the time. Children without an education are more likely to grow up to have HIV/AIDS. They're more likely to die in infancy or before the age of five.