Quotes About Kids

I get a lot of parents coming up to me, telling me they are grooming their kids to be professional athletes. I'm really against that. I think it's a great life, and yeah, you can lead them in that direction. I think a lot of parents live their lives through the kids. Because they didn't make it, they want their kids to make it. It puts a lot of undue pressure on the kids.

Before we have children, we think most of the parents sitting in sacrament meeting ought to “do something about their kids.” Once we have kids, we think everyone ought to be a lot more understanding about what we’re trying to survive during the meeting. And once our kids are grown, we think, “I never let my kids get away with that.” We really all need to chill out.

Kids are probably frustrated and egos are too much involved and kids don't know how to get together and be kids and start a group and it's kind of sad because I feel like if you come out with three or four people in the beginning, you can be protected and everybody can shield each other. Before you get out there by yourself and get all these people coming at you. I just think it's not really there.

I want to invest and have my own record label and artists. I want to have a business where my kids, kids, kids will still have something going on long after I'm gone.

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.

When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school.

I'm never going to let nobody take those kids. They Michael's kids. They have no right to try to take those kids. It's going to be a big mess over that.

My ex-student, Idit Harel, who wrote a book, "Children Designs," has a documented story of a kid who was very shy, isolated and didn't talk much to other kids. She was a little overweight, and the other kids looked down on her for that reason.But then she made a discovery about how to do something on the computer. The discovery was picked up by other kids, and within a few weeks there was a total transformation. This kid was now in demand. And that changed her feeling about herself.

I would say how important it is that we stop teaching kids, from the beginning, that boys are more important than girls. It's the 21st century, you know, let's go here. We have to show kids that boys and girls share the sandbox equally and do equally interesting things. We're teaching kids something that we have to try to get rid of later on. Why not just stop filling them with unconscious gender bias?

Coming from a little suburban town, I wasn't a hip city kid. I was quite the opposite, really. Songs like 'Saturday's Kids' rang a bell for kids all over the country. That song was about the kids I grew up with.

I think old school TV shows helped in raising your kids and helped in the way things should be done. Now you just see kids disrespecting their parents, you see kids cursing and all kind of things that shouldn't be done.

I feel like the best kids shows aren't just for kids. The best kids shows have something in it for everyone. As you grow up, you're increasingly proud to be a fan of the show, rather than getting to an age where you suddenly become embarrassed that you ever liked it because it's only for seven-year-olds.

I've heard that story about kids are high naturally, but I've seen kids that aren't high, kids who've had the high taken out of them.

I really look at my life before kids and after kids and before I was more - not narcissistic - but I was definitely more selfish. I didn't have the same concerns as I do now. I've always been political, but you've gotta be engaged. You can't be apathetic anymore because what's at stake is bigger than yourself, it's your kids.

My kids haven't watched one episode of 'Growing Pains'. I'll tell you why. When our kids were little, we never wanted Mommy or Daddy to be the celebrity mom or dad to our kids.

You hear terrible stories because there'll be a story about some terrible kid, but most of the kids I work with are terrific kids. They're poor, maybe their families are broken, so they're not coming home to a mom and dad and a nice dinner every night. But these kids are capable.

I know it's impossible for you to see your peers this way, but when you're older, you start to see them--the bad kids and the good kids and all kids--as people. They're just people, who deserve to be cared for.

My priority as a father should always remain first. My kids look to me as their example. Every decision I make and everything that I do always has to come back to the question, "Does this make me a better father?" "Will my kids benefit from this?" It's no longer just about me…but about my kids. My perspective in life has changed.

I always hated those fantasy books where, at the end, all the kids had to go home. At the end of a Narnia book, you always got shown the door. Same with The Wizard Of Oz and The Phantom Tollbooth. You get kicked out of your magic land. It's like, "By the way, here's your next surprise: You get to go home!" And the kids are all like, "Yay, we get to go home!" I never bought that. Did anybody buy that?

Parents like the idea of kids, they just don't like their kids.

I entered high school she[ my mother] said, "Well, you're a teenager now, and comics are for kids, so you shouldn't read them anymore," and I went, "Oh, okay," and I gave away what, of course, would now be thousands of dollars worth of comics to the neighborhood kids.

There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I've seen, and their kids will see nothing; there's a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.

Smooth sailing is what I hope for. No, I'm okay with no big ups, no big downs, it's all right. Just go full steam ahead, all things well and good, yeah. I mean as a family man, all you want is, as a dad, pure happiness for your kids, that's a universal parent thing. Yeah, that's it, that's my dream, happy kids.

The kids of those that came here illegally, those kids, I think, should have a pathway to become a permanent resident of the United States and military service, for instance, is one way they would have that kind of pathway to become a permanent resident.

You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that wasn't made for them by navigating a playground that was.

So often, we blame other people when, really, the problem is right down in here. I'm not happy. I don't know what's wrong. If I just had another job, I could be happy. If I just get married, I would be happy. Well if I just wasn't married, I would be happy. Well, if I just had some kids, I'll be happy. I'll be happy when these kids finally grow up and get out of here. If I had a bigger house, I would be happy. Well, I got a big house. Now if I just had a maid to clean, I'd be happy. Well, now if I just had a maid I could get along with better, I'd be happy.

I think that local school districts - not the federal government - should make the decision about how they teach science, biology, economics. I want my kids to be taught about evolution; I want my kids to be taught about other theories.

Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.

I've always said that with kids' TV that people get stuck in it from drama school but that's not fair because I know myself that when you go in creatively, kids are so much more open to ideas. You're so much freer to mess about and try things.

Don't send your kids to Baylor. And don't send your kids to [Texas] A&M... Texas A&M used to be a conservative university. It's lost all of its conservatism.... My daughter went there. You know, she had horrible experiences with coed dorms and guys who spent the weekends in the rooms with girls.

I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.

I can tell you about Hillary Clinton's heart. This is a woman, who, after law school, went down to my native South. She went down, after graduating from Yale Law School, to help poor kids, to help disabled kids.

It's hard enough to be in a marriage, and then have a kid, then kids, it changes everything. For me, I'd become more concerned with my children. Not that I ignored Britney, but my kids are always most important . . . I mean, we were having complications. I didn't give her an ultimatum, but I was trying to work stuff out with her, and she didn't even talk to me or anything and went behind my back and filed [for divorce]. [I was] completely blindsided.

I have two little kids and I enjoy watching movies with them, and I can't watch every movie with them. Sometimes it's because it's obviously not appropriate to watch The Bourne Identity with your kids, but a lot of times it's because it's torture to watch the movies that they want to watch, as a parent.

In America, I get a lot of younger kids, but there's teens and adults too, ... In Europe, for some reason, I see a lot more males in the audience. In Japan, I don't even notice any kids, partially because they're a lot more strict about fan behavior over there.

I go to correctional facilities and talk to kids there. They have little kids in there who are, like, 12 years old, stealing cars and stuff like that.

I also sing about my mom leaving me a lot - a lot of kids have their moms or dads leave them, so they relate to that. I wear my heart on my sleeve, so I think that's what the kids love.

When you watch Canadian kids [Box Lacrosse Players] score, when you see their skill level around the cage, you wonder to yourself, 'Jeez, are we teaching kids [in the U.S.] the wrong things?

My kids don't watch my movies. What I want to do is go home and hug my kids, talk to them and engage with them.

I am just an earthly sinful father & I love my kids so much it hurts. How could I not trust a heavenly, perfect Father who loves me infinitely more than I will ever love my kids?

I think we all have a certain number of "coming of age" songs, and then a writer has to expand and grow into more varied and specific themes. And the music industry is, like Jawbreaker says, "selling kids to other kids," so it makes sense that those early songs in a writer's life are often the ones that catch people's ears, and later work is more difficult and less immediate.

You hear all these great stories about kids starting their own businesses and getting involved in their communities and politics and foundations - all kinds of things. And it's so much easier for kids to get motivated and do that.

Our kids didn't do this to themselves. They don't decide the sugar content in soda or the advertising content of a television show. Kids don't choose what's served to them for lunch at school, and shouldn't be deciding what's served to them for dinner at home. And they don't decide whether there's time in the day or room in the budget to learn about healthy eating or to spend time playing outside.

All these guys picking on smart kids and calling them geeks and dweebs are going to grow up and want to know why they don't do something about the terrible state the world is in. I can tell you why. By the time they grow up, most of the kids who realy could have changed things are wrecked.

I've always said that kids should enhance your life, not hinder your life, so I just try to make the most out of being with my kids. You have to have a life for yourself somewhere in the mix of being a wife and mum.

Play with your kids. Limit their TV time. Get outdoors and chase them around. Wrestle with them. Walk the dog. Go bike riding. The reality is that your kids are not stupid, and they know when they are overweight Start walking the dog after dinner instead of watching TV. You don't want them going on the Web to find ways to lose weight. That's when you'll find them eating tissue paper because they read that a supermodel did it.

I had a lot of coaches growing up that were very hard on the kids in the name of building character, but it could have the opposite effect on kids.

If we're bringing up kids that are so stupid that they kill themselves because of a song, what good are the kids in the first place ?