Quotes About Kids

My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, "Hi, do you have any kids?" and then, "Why not, don't you like kids?" "I like kids," I will explain. "I like kids very much." And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things.

There are just certain things you can't talk about with kids. I just totally do not believe in this sort of Bart Simpson character who infects so much of our literature and film and TV stuff nowadays, these know-it-all kids who seem to understand the hypocrisy of the adult world so thoroughly and can talk about it with such articulateness. That's bunk. Kids are kids; they're innocents, they really are. For a long time, no matter what they see, no matter what they're exposed to, they can't get it until they have developed enough.

Kids didn't have huge backpacks when I was their age. We didn't have backpacks at all. Now it seemed all the kids had them. You saw little second-graders bent over like sherpas, dragging themselves through the school doors under the weight of their packs. Some of the kids had their packs on rollers, hauling them like luggage at the airport. I didn't understand any of this. The world was becoming digital; everything was smaller and lighter. But kids at school lugged more weight than ever.

We don't play golf often [with kids] because they don't play that much anymore - because their kids don't play. It's like anything else - fathers these days end up in the parks on the weekends and they have their kids into lacrosse or soccer or whatever it might be.

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 don't know what rituals my kids will carry into adulthood, whether they'll grow up attached to homemade pizza on Friday nights, or the scent of peppers roasting over a fire, or what. I do know that flavors work their own ways under the skin, into the heart of longing. Where my kids are concerned I find myself hoping for the simplest things: that if someday they crave orchards where their kids can climb into the branches and steal apples, the world will have trees enough with arms to receive them.

I want certain things out of life. I want my grand kids, my kids' kids, being able to inherit what I've worked so hard to build.

People will ask me, "How do you approach writing books for young readers differently than for adults?" My answer is always: I don't change anything about the story itself. I'm going to tell kids the way things really were. What I don't do - and this is the only thing I do differently in writing for kids - is that I don't revel in the gory details. I allow readers to fill in the details as necessary. But I don’t force kids to have to digest something they’re not mature enough or ready for yet. If they are, they can fill in the details even better than I could, just with their imaginations.

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 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?

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.

Hopefully the new breed of kids won't have to go through that hard lesson - my kids, my grandkids, my fans' kids, hopefully they won't have to go through it.

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 think kids like chaos, in an interesting way. I think kids like to push buttons in adults. They like to antagonize and cause trouble. I think it's the kid-like spirit that kids respond to.

I've got a lot of other people who do a lot of things for me, so I've gotten to a part in my career where I'm doing a lot of talks because I want to get kids turned on. I want to see these kids, these geeky nerdy kids, go out there and do something.

I'd say that kids working on sets, even if it's Bambi, need to be allowed to be kids, even if they're working, not become little adults - that to me can be distorting to kids as an experience.

No matter how you feel about your extended family or family gatherings you will be attending. This is because now the ultimate reason for attending family gatherings is for your children to have the time of their lives with their cousins. Little kids love their cousins. I’m not being cute or exaggerating here. Cousins are like celebrities for little kids. If little kids had a People magazine, cousins would be on the cover. Cousins are the barometers of how fun a family get-together will be. “Are the cousins going to be there? Fun!

I think kids in Europe have developed a deeper knowledge of music and of black music in particular. You go to Europe, and these kids know about all this obscure funk and soul that kids over here wouldn't know. I think it's getting better in the States, though, with the age of the Internet.

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?

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.

I was very shy and I was very introverted as a kid, but whenever I set foot on stage, I kind of opened up, and I think a lot of kids need an outlet to express their creativity. And a lot of kids are scared to do that if there's not a safe environment for that.

People are being more ­experimental. I hear chords being played that really haven't been on the radio. I love that. I go to my kids' school and see kids playing in bands. It is a sign of what's to come.

I'd like to help other kids with dyslexia, because I'm dyslexic. It was very hard, and I know that what I went through, other kids are going through.

Rich countries don't need as many children. We used to need kids to work in the fields as farm hands, to crawl on their bellies into coal mines. Well, kids are more like luxury objects now.

That scene in 'The Purge' where my kids, Mary's kids, are in danger was really crazy for me, because I suddenly I have my methods as an actor, so I went to the place of 'If somebody came near my children, with bad intent?'

You're doing your kids a disservice if they do get everything they want because that's not the way life's going to go, and I think kids have to have some reality.

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.

As we mature and grow older we collect a lot of baggage, and a lot of that stuff you collect on life's journey gets in the way of acting. My kids can imagine a character and transform in the blink of an eye. It's so simple for kids, so complex for adults.

My fans saw me get engaged, saw me make that woman my wife, me having kids, me divorcing, me talking about divorce before the divorce, me talking about my kids' reaction to that divorce.

These kids are more savvy. They know what people are wearing instantly. It's brutal. We're the ones sending the dresses and we can barely keep up; these kids see it before we do. So we know they're plugged in. Now they can forget that for a few hours. Just go big with ideas! Experiment!

To me, the punk rock kids I grew up with were really, really smart, and to me, respecting those kids was a really big deal.

On the spectrum of imagination, there are people who are more imaginative than others - I guess some kids are hardcore pretenders and have imaginary friends for years and other kids play and they have fun, but it's not quite as specific like that.

My kids will grow up in a house knowing that it's perfectly normal for two men to be in love, it's perfectly normal for two women to be in love. My kids will grow up knowing it's all about love. It doesn't matter who you're with and everyone should have that experience.

The matinee audiences are different because they're mostly kids, a great percentage kids. So they respond to everything differently, but I understand what they do respond to.

My show is an adult comedy show, but it isn't offensive. Your kids could listen to it, even though I hope they wouldn't 'get' most of it. But I get a lot of fan mail from soccer moms saying 'I love having your CD because I can listen to it with my kids in the car.'

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.

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.

Kids can make fun of you for having the wrong shoelaces: that's just kids. But I don't think I had any trouble making friends.

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.

We Die Young is about gang violence. That was something that was happening in Seattle, something that kinda opened our eyes. It just seemed like things were getting out of hand. Incidents where kids were getting shot, and getting their tennis shoes ripped off their dead bodies. It just seems like these kids are dying at younger and younger ages and getting involved in gang activity.

We are probably hitting more this week than we ever have, just to see, ... We have 40 kids out there, and it is pretty competitive. So we have some kids we can put in, but they are going to have a lack of experience.

We were just a gaggle of kids, and everybody played together and had a good time. You know how kids can be completely horrible; abusive but fun. But anyway, it was a nice childhood.

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.

Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.

It seems that the Internet is setting the standard for almost everything. I can't imagine having something like punk rock happen where an entire culture is doing one thing. It's not like all the kids in England are discovering the Stooges and the Ramones at the same time. All the kids in England are discovering every band that has ever existed. I can't imagine there being one huge cultural moment like there was in the past. Everything ends up being kind of postmodern.

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.

We need to look at our nannying, mollycoddled, politically correct culture in my view, which stops kids from going out and playing competitive sport. I also think we need to look at the shear fatness of the regulations which control people who want to help kids play sport.