Quotes About Kids

Then people ask me if I'm worried about the effects of global warming on my kids. Well, obviously I love my kids and I want them to live to be a 100. So that's another 1.8. My kids' kids? Three point six. I'll just tell them we moved to Phoenix.

What people don't realize I have put 160 kids through school. I had a gym full of children. Some of those kids slept in the gym. Some of those kids lived in the gyms. I went to those kids schools. I think with the training, I can't make a fighter have that passion that I have, and it takes years to develop a fighter.

I have these meetings with really powerful men and they ask me all the time, 'Where are your kids? Are your kids here?' It's such a weird question. Never in a million years do I ask guys where their kids are. It would be comparable to me going to a guy, 'Do you feel like you see your kids enough?'

I realize that I'm black, but I like to be viewed as a person, and that's everybody's wish... I try to be a role model for black kids, white kids, yellow kids, green kids. This is what I felt was good about my personality.

One of the things, and the most exciting, actually definitely the most exciting thing is, having children. You know, I didn't have children before. I had been married only a year before my space station mission, so having three-year-olds is a whole new experience and that's the new adventure. It may sound funny because people have kids every day, but having your own kids, having my own kids, was as fundamentally, or maybe even more fundamentally life changing then even flying in space.

I guess some kids around me had to grow up quickly, had all those problems. But I wasn't one of those kids, or around those kids, not at all.

You don't need Little League. You don't even need nine kids. Four is plenty-a pitcher, a batter, and a couple of shaggers. You can play ball all day long. My kids used to try to get me out there, but I'd just say, "Go play with your brothers." If kids want to do something, they'll do it. They don't need adults to do it for them.

[E]verywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.

So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.

There are a lot of things going on that's causing a lot of these young kids to head in the wrong direction. I know a lot of kids that are cutting school. I try to give out a positive message, trying to get kids focused. If they don't then they're going to end up like every other hoodlum in the street.

Finding balance in life is perhaps the greatest challenge of this generation, especially for women. I've decided that I need to compartmentalize my life better. From the time my kids get home until after dinner, I put my phone away. If I pick it up, my kids call me on it, and I have to put money in the "phone jar." When the phone jar gets full, the kids can spend the money on fun family outings, like going to a movie or going to their favorite restaurant. This unplugged time has helped me to be more mindful and give them my full attention.

What was on the agenda was school and social life and those kinds of things. So I was the middle of five kids. So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that's part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.

The kids are old enough now - I just want to let them be kids. I don't want to comment on them too much. They're at an age where I just want to let them be kids.

Collecting cookbooks is still my biggest passion! Believe it or not, I actually got the biggest form of inspiration from my kids. My kids do everything online. They would have their tablets in front of them watching hours upon hours of online videos. I came to understand that these videos were actually teaching my kids lots of different forms of information.

I grew up in a family where the internalized understanding was that the kids were going to grow up into a better world. I worry, because I don't think my kids are going to have that. The world is very scary. The world would be scary without the choices the current administration made, but they just exacerbated it. And it ticks me off. I want my kids to have a good life.

I tried to talk to the graduates who haven't figured what they're going to do next. The kids who are heading in medical school or law school, they've got pretty much figured where they're headed in life. But there are so many kids out there, that are just going, they're still kids. They've always been promoted from grade to grade.

I think that actually the rhythmic nature of picture books and of young reader story books is a way to help kids fall in love with language and what you can do with it and how it sounds in your range. It sort of has a musicality but on the other hand they get the story and the ideas and the context of it. I think it's a way to get kids into it and I also think that when kids are around people who love books it rubs off on them.

Preschool kids learn best when exploring, but kids in school learn best when they do things, interacting with a master. Unfortunately, our schools don't do much of either. Also, kids do need to learn how to deal with technology, and online education and otherwise using electronic devices as learning tools facilitates that.

Parents make sure homework is returned without error, drill their kids on upcoming tests to the saturation point, and then complain if teachers do not give the grades they think their kids deserve. By that point, it's hard to tell whose grades they are.

My dad and mom were more like World War II-era parents, even though it was the 1960s, because they were both born in the '40s. They were young adults before the '60s even happened, and married, and already having kids. But by the time we were adolescents in the '70s, the whole culture was screaming at parents, "You're a good parent if you're open with your kids about sex." They attempted to be open with us about sex, and it made them want to die, and consequently, it made us want to die.

I said to one young activist who herself was the daughter of an undocumented worker, and so could speak from a very personal and legitimate perspective - I remember saying to her: I agree with you, from a moral perspective, that a child from Honduras is worth the same as my daughter. God is not a respecter of boundaries; he's not saying that American kids deserve a better life than Honduran kids. But I'm the president of the United States, and the nation-state by definition means that boundaries mean something and borders mean something.

I support charters, but the right kind of charters. I support charters that support kids who have the highest needs. A charter should be targeting students who are in serious trouble. It should serve students who didn't succeed in public schools when it can help them. Or, at least, charters should agree to accept similar proportions of the kids with the highest needs.

People like me start organizing conferences and editing journals, even become tenured professors talking about Empire of the Senseless with a bunch of wide-eyed kids from the farmland. If only one of those kids goes back home and lets her hogs out of the pen to go plum wild rolling around in their own slop while the neighboring farmers scratch their chins, then, isn't that worth it? Insert the same scenario with stockbrokers, stock-car drivers, and stock characters in the post-baccalaureate working man's sideshow, and well, that's viral reproduction.

Even in the 1960's, look at the minority percent of those kids being raised without a father. It was around 20 percent. America is at 80% today. I think the government is to blame for that. I think the media is to blame for that. I think you have to look at television shows and sitcoms. How do they portray fathers? They are dopey. They are dumb. They are fat. The mom is hot and the kids make fun of dad, and mom makes fun of dad. We have just relegated his role to be sort of the dumpy loser guy. And we need to get that back.

Kids are born curious about the world. What adults primarily do in the presence of kids is unwittingly thwart the curiosity of children.

The Stooges used to be ubiquitous, back in the '60s and '70s. They were on TV all the time, but they're not on so much anymore. Kids aren't getting the chance to watch them, not to mention the fact that kids don't really necessarily relate to black-and-white stuff.

Queen Latifah used to help me out with my kids, because while we were all out on tour - Public Enemy, Naughty By Nature, Queen Latifah, Heavy D - when Public Enemy went onstage, I didn't have anybody solid to watch my kids. So, Latifah would help me out.

I grew up on the tennis court with lots of other kids. There were like 40 kids all afternoon and I was one of the youngest ones, so I always had to chase everybody to keep up.

Hillary Clinton has that, a passion to empower families and kids, and a desire to measure health of society by how families and kids are doing. You can see this from her service as a lawyer, first lady of Arkansas, and United States senator, and secretary of state.

I hadn't learned to read by third grade, which wasn't unusual for some kids. I knew something was wrong because I couldn't see or understand the words the way the other kids did. I wasn't the least bit bothered - until I was sent back to the second-grade classroom for reading help after school.

People worry that if they buy an annuity and then die before the policy starts to pay off, their heirs will lose out. I tell them, "What you should be more worried about is if you outlive your money, you will have to move in with your kids. Ask your kids which of these outcomes they are more worried about."

I started out doing improvised voices when I started working in a program where I read for kids in schools. I had some kids and they asked me if I would mind doing it. I was very happy to do it. Thats where I got my training before I went to the public. I did that for several years. It was actually the best vocal training I could have had.

I worry about kids and all they are exposed to. Kids get so bombarded with hard, commercial sounds. They don't even have a chance to develop the softer part of themselves without fear of being ridiculed.

Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around.

People are always saying that Hollywood messes up kids. I'm like, 'No, families mess up kids!' I grew up in Hollywood, and I'm perfectly fine. If my children want to go into the entertainment business, I won't stop them, as long as they're passionate about it.

The biggest challenge in my life is getting all these kids raised. I've helped with nieces, stepchildren and my own son, so the biggest challenge is making sure the kids are raised and finding enough quality time with them.

I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I'm home for dinner with my kids at 6, and interestingly, I've been doing that since I had kids. I did that when I was at Google, I did that here, and I would say it's not until the last year, two years, that I'm brave enough to talk about it publicly. Now I certainly wouldn't lie, but I wasn't running around giving speeches on it." "...there's no such thing as work-life balance. There's work, and there's life, and there's no balance.

We kind of know that food is necessary to survive. But our ways of connecting with food have been, in many ways, taken over by capitalism - certainly taken over by the influence large corporations have on the way that we eat and the way that we think about food. That's why kids these days are more prepared to take nutritional advice from Ronald McDonald than they are from their parents or their teachers or from scientists. And particularly in urban areas, you'll see kids who honestly believe tomatoes come from the supermarket rather than from a plant.

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.

Recently, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talked about the ways the lives of human beings will be changed in the next century. At least half of them I didn't understand at all, though I'm sure that kids today would know exactly what he meant. I'm somewhere in the past. I do think, however, that our brains have been damaged by technology. I meet kids who don't seem to be capable of reading a long sentence, much less a long book.

Italy is hard to beat. It's a family-friendly experience, they like to see kids in restaurants, and at dinner you see all the adults at the table and all the kids at the other end of the table. Maybe they run off and go play.

The single largest variable that predicts SAT scores is family income. If you want higher SAT scores, you need to get your kids born into wealthier families. You know, it's great to tell kids to pull themselves up by their own boot straps, but you better put boots on them first.

Our kids were God's kids first... We tend to forget this fact, regarding our children as "our" children, as though we have the final say in their health and welfare. We don't. All people are God's people, including the small people who sit at our tables.

Amphibians are dying out like crazy, and frogs and salamanders may be largely extinct by the end of the twenty-first century. Imagine an animal that begins its life in the water, but ends it on land - already, that's pretty weird. But, also, a lot of them are incredibly tiny and look wildly improbable. They have funny little toes, they stretch their throats into weird bubble shapes when they croak, and some of them are poisonous to the touch. I think kids from the twenty-second century might mythologize amphibians the way kids today mythologize dinosaurs.

Reading a story should be a fabulous, wonderful thing. The most important thing that parents can do for kids is to read with them and to let their kids see them reading books for their own pleasure.

I think hip-hop has changed. When I first came out, hip-hop was more of a kind of way to learn about new places, new things. What are kids doing on the East coast, what are kids doing here. Then it left that and is like a party mode. I think it's going back to people wanting to get messages and wanting to learn things from the music.

It's great that there are so many different kinds of books for kids and adults to choose from. I think an eclectic reader is the best kind of reader to be, which would be why I was always so satisfied to hear that kids read the Baby-Sitters Club books and then went on and discovered other authors and other genres.

When I went to acting school, the kids that got the best grades were the kids that could cry on cue. But it didn't really translate into careers for any of them, because the external is the easy part.