This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

Adolescence is a tough time for parent and child alike. It is a time between: between childhood and maturity, between parental protection and personal responsibility, between life stage- managed by grown-ups and life privately held.

Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.

We are awash in the revealed world.

Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.