A full accounting of adoption as an option would not underestimate its emotional challenges - the grief and loss for birth mothers, the uncertainties for adoptive parents operating under a patchwork of state laws.
My childhood was great, honestly. I have all these incredible memories of my childhood. I was an only child. I always had all my cousins around. I had my grandparents around. I had my parents around. I had my uncles around - whatever.
Kids need parents who love and support them unconditionally, full stop.
I was the little French boy who grew up hearing people talk of De Gaulle and the Resistance. France against the Nazis! Then when that boy grew up, he began to uncover things. We began to legitimately ask the question, 'What exactly did our parents do during the Occupation?' We discovered it was not the story they were telling us.
I've never been to a shrink. But my parents were very psychologically literate - my father had undergone Freudian analysis - and we often talked about other people in psychological terms, so I picked up a lot of that.
We were an underprivileged family. My parents were both tailors. We got by. But we only had a few important things in our life.
The government gets it right on Head Start. We are providing opportunities for children in underserved areas where parents may not be able to afford preschool so they can begin their schooling with a running or Head Start.
I was so unhealthy as a child, and at least three or four times my parents were told to get ready, that I would not make it.
I was embarrassed by my parents. I thought they had nothing of interest to say or contribute to anything. My real crime was not understanding that they were interesting, and I have been trying to make it up to them for being so indescribably blase, so genuinely uninterested and dismissive.
I think we forget that part of parenthood means having to face and reject or face and embrace a kind of animal capacity for unkindness. And if, when, parents do embrace that, it reveals something very ugly to oneself.
Parents, you need to watch who you let loose your girls around. If you're so desperate that you want your kids to be stars, and you're going to unleash your daughters to the world, you better watch what you get.
When I'm with my parents, that's the place I can unplug. That's the place I can shut down and not worry about work or what's going on. I go home and hang out with them. I sleep more there than any place else ever.
Trying to find ideas is the hardest part of my job. You'd think it would be the most fun. Just sitting around reading whatever I want, going to cafes and libraries. But I always feel so unproductive. I think I was raised too well by my parents.
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.
You shouldn't feel unsafe walking to school. It's where you should feel safe. Our parents should feel their children are going to be taken care of, looked after.
Reagan cut through irrational federal regulations to allow children to live with their parents, where they could receive care that would cost the taxpayer one-sixth as much as institutional care. By contrast, Obamacare has added thousands of pages of bureaucratic regulations and will cost the federal government untold billions.
I was probably unusually close to my parents, so I do what I can now to preserve the integrity of their memory. The Holocaust deserves to be remembered.
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.
My parents never referenced Ethiopia that much, largely because of the circumstances under which we left. We left during a time of political upheaval, and there was a lot of loss that came with that, so my parents were reluctant to talk about those things. So I had, by and large, an American childhood.
I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.
