The anti-Darwin movement has racked up one astounding achievement. It has made a significant proportion of American parents care about what their children are taught in school.
I grew up in Georgia where my parents, little brother Zurab and I shared a flat with my paternal grandparents and two uncles in the capital, Tbilisi. Times were hard and the country was racked by civil war.
My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsively.
I feel like I've got really good rapport with parents. They always say I'm a YouTuber they can feel safe just letting their kids watch.
The whole 'R' rating depends on a strange sort of fantasy land where all adults are responsible people, and children only ever go to the cinema with their parents.
When I was younger, I was a rave kid trapped inside a singer/songwriter's body. But I kind of figured my way out because I started making these really terrible beats on this Yamaha keyboard that my parents got me for my 10th birthday.
My parents are professors; they're intellectual. I spent a lot of time reading books. To me, everyone always looks like they do in your imagination. And in my imagination, the characters always looked like me.
You could have names like Hatred; you could have names that mean something like Suffering or Poverty. So names are not just names: names have real meaning, and they tend to tell the world about the circumstances of your parents at the time that you were born.
My real story is this: I am the citizen daughter of immigrant parents who were deported when I was 14. My older brother was also deported.
Spanking and verbal criticism have become, to many parents, more important tools of child rearing than approval.
I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.
I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.
I never rebelled against my parents - I worked hard, I was responsible, and I didn't go to high-school parties.
I signed schoolboy forms for Watford when I was 12, but then my parents got divorced, and I never kicked a ball for three years. I rebelled, I left home, but getting back into football sorted me out. It was the second chance I needed.
I have done everything I can to make sure my daughter knows her father because you form your own identity by rebelling against your parents - but first you have to know them.
I was the product of very young parents, and they had wild ways. My mother was in a punk band. Rebelling would have been learning to play piano.
Certainly, by providing individuals coming out of institutions with ways to become productive citizens, we reduce recidivism. What that means is we reduce crime. There are fewer victims when individuals have options - when they have job skills, when they have life skills, we break the cycle of children following their parents into institutions.
In third grade, I was taking tap-dance lessons, and about six weeks before the recital I wanted to quit. My mom said, 'No, you're going to stay with it.' Well, I did it, and I was bad, too! But my parents never let their kids walk away from something because it was too hard.
Empowering girls is extremely important to me because, growing up, I needed those empowering women to show me the way. When my parents divorced when I was 11, my mom was a force to be reckoned with. She showed me how to be self-sufficient and independent.
As much as my parents are part of Hollywood, I have no recollection of them giving me advice about it.
