Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.
I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.
As the first member of my immediate family to graduate from college, I understand the importance access to high quality education plays in preparing our children to learn and compete in a competitive, global workforce.
I believe all children deserve quality health care.
When women earn more, families are stronger, and children have better access to quality health care and education.
While I've spent a lot of quality time with my children, perhaps it's not been enough.
If I could do anything over, I'd have spent more time with my first set of children. I would have taken more quality time with them, for sure.
Your children can be around you all day, but if you don't spend quality time with them and you don't pay attention to them and talk to them and listen to them, it doesn't matter that they're just around you.
Parents who neglect their children, who don't know where they are, who don't know what they're doing, who don't know who they're hanging out with, you're gonna find yourselves spending some quality time with your kids, in jail, together.
As children, we have a tenuous idea of love; we often try to quantify it with how much we feel seen and heard.
Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad.
Having one's traditional role questioned is not a very comfortable experience, perhaps especially for women, who have been able to remain children, and to benefit from work they did not and could not do.
The ability to say 'I was wrong' or to own up to your mistakes is very powerful. I teach my children that admitting fault is the quickest way to stop the problem, move on and get on with whatever it is you should be doing.
My appearances are almost theatrical performances. I bring items for the children to see, such as photographs and actual piece of meteorite, a family quilt, sometimes spectacles, sometimes clothing, so that they can understand what I write about is family stories based in fact.
Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.
For so long, black conservatives have not been able to have a voice; people who have bi-racial children, people in bi-racial relationships, it has been so black and white. I blame Obama. His eight years in office did a lot of damage in terms of race relations in this country.
We keep racism alive. We pass it on to our children. I think that is very sad.
I felt like there was something I needed to do - speaking to kids and sharing my story with them and helping them understand racism has no place in the minds and hearts of children.
If kids have the oportunity to come together to get to know one another, they can judge for themselves who they want their friends to be. All children should have that choice. We, as adults, shouldn't make those choices for children. That's how racism starts.
What's just about a generation of people who rack up government debt for their own health care and retirement - while leaving their children and grandchildren to foot the bill?
