I grew up in Long Island City. When I was growing up, my parents owned a women's clothing store in Queens. It was for older women. I got my bras there, until I realized I didn't want those huge, taupe bras. Everything was beige, with massive amounts of hooks.
I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.
I had a mental breakdown while doing my Ph.D. at Cambridge, soon after I cut off contact with my parents, and I started seeing the university counsellor, one of the best decisions I ever made. There's something very nourishing in setting aside an hour a week to talk.
Conservatives highlight the primacy of family and argue that family breakdown exacerbates poverty, and they're right. Children raised by single parents are three times as likely to live in poverty as kids in two-parent homes.
Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.
I was born in a little town called Lund in British Columbia. It's like a fishing village. My parents were hippies. They tried to live off the land, so I grew up in a log cabin, and we didn't get running water until I was 4. The next year, we got electricity. Then we moved to the city, Victoria, British Columbia, so I could go to school.
I grew up loving Broadway musicals. I'd put on my parents' cast albums and stand on the stool and sing in the mirror.
If I refused to get married, my parents would be brokenhearted and confused. Like any child close to her parents, I could not watch them suffer.
When I was young, my parents had a library in our living room. I was always free to browse and read.
When a child is bruised physically or emotionally, parents often reward him with a treat.
At the end of the day, we get to be parents, greeting our lovely, crazy children and talking about their day, making sure they brush their teeth, so all the tension from our day is tabled... until the next.
I had very little going for me as a kid except for the fact that I had demanding parents and was very good at filling out bubbles on standardized tests. I went to the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University because I did well on the SAT. I went to Exeter because I did well on the SAT.
When I got the 'Blue Album,' I was 11 years old, 10 years old, and then I convinced my parents to go and get my first drum kit, which was, like, 600 bucks.
I was born in Budapest, Hungary, and moved to the United States in 1956. It was during the Hungarian Revolution when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest, and my family - me, my brother, and my parents - escaped over the border to Austria. We just took whatever we could carry. It was perilous, but we made it across.
I'm convinced that what kids need today are parents - not buddies. They need someone who will exercise mature judgment.
I think what shaped me was I had two parents who were scientists, and especially, they were great readers. They had both grown up in sort of rural parts of the South and were oddballs where they grew up. They were budding intellectuals.
As parents, we need to send our kids back to 'old-fashioned' outdoor summer camps, which have been on the decline as the demand for sports and academics-based camps has risen. We need to fight budget cuts to public parks programs and resist closures of public swimming pools and playgrounds.
I didn't really start doing stuff until I was 8 or so, but I was an extra in a bunch of different movies, and I just really took to it and really enjoyed it. I kind of bugged my parents to give L.A. a shot, and they were just super-supportive.
My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know.
My parents are actually very famous singers in Bulgaria. My dad was in a rock band, and my mom was in a pop group. They met, fell in love, and actually formed a group together to escape the country because it was Communist, and they couldn't leave. They didn't know any English but eventually found their way to America.
