Television thus illustrates the mixed blessings of technological change in American society. It is a new medium, promising extraordinary benefits: great educational potential, a broadening of experience, enrichment of daily life, entertainment for all. But it teaches children the uses of violence, offers material consumption as the answer to life's problems, sells harmful products, habituates viewers to constant stimulation, and undermines family interaction and other forms of learning such as play and reading.
There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?
Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.
If you could read some of the stories that we had before us of parents of children dying of, let's say, bone cancer. Or people who dealt with family members drowning in their own bodies, in the end, suffering without any hope of modern medical science easing their pain or offering any comfort. With the absolute knowledge that they were going to die anyway. I can't quite comprehend how we could want those people to continue to suffer that extreme agony on the understanding that it is the will of a creator or some other philosophical concept.
Sometimes it is like juggling with broken glass because both things are very sensitive and have to be handled with care. I can't let the career be neglected and I can't let my family and children be neglected either.
I think that people think I'm crazy, like really mentally crazy. People think I'm uncouth and trashy, but I'm not. I don't think that I'm any of the stuff people say that I am and I know that I'm not. This whole mentally crazy thing, if I was mentally crazy I wouldn't be allowed to have all these children and take care of all these children without it being an issue.
I started to make a joke that I had an imaginary friend underneath the let-out couch named Binky. I would never talk to him; I would only use him as entertainment for other people. I knew they thought that children had imaginary friends, so I was like, "I don't really believe in imaginary friends, but I want to feel like I do." I used to make a joke, "My imaginary friend Binky says this," because I knew it would get a laugh out of them.
If you hand an adult a lump of clay, they're likely to respond by fashioning something representative out of the raw material. For the most part, they'll simply forge an object that signifies something "real" in the world, even if that something is as abstract as an emotion or an energy. A child, on the other hand, will just as often produce something totally without semiotic meaning, a shape or a mass that represents nothing that exists outside of their imagination. Or else, they'll eat it or throw it or ignore it, wholesale.
Some people in this life think they're worth something, or that they have a right to things. I never thought I had a right to anything 'cause of the way I was broken as a child. And therefore I was sort of floating around and would get sucked into things.
I believe fully in making fun of children. I believe very strongly that you should never make fun of an embryo or your ovaries. I am a big believer on breaking those rules. It's a case-by-case basis. But the thing is, there's so many ways to make a joke about something that is sort of maybe verboten or something.
As a child I became a confirmed believer in the ancient gods simply because as between the reality of fact and the reality f myth, I chose myth...Myth is the truth of fact, not fact the truth of myth.
Children are unaccountable little creatures.
A nursery rhyme shapes your bones and nerves, and it shapes your mind. They are powerful, nursery rhymes, and immensely old, and not toys, even though they are for children." "But they make no sense!" Summer protested "Ah, well," said Ben. "Sometimes sense hides behind walls. You must find a window and stick your head right in before you can see it.
I was always restless, always a roving spirit. When I was a little child I was always running away. I never got very far, but they were always having to come and fetch me. Once when I was about six, my father came to get me somewhere I'd gone, and he told me later he'd asked me, "Why are you so restless? Why can't you stay here with us?" and I said to him, "I want to go and see the world. I want to know the world like the palm of my hand.
I remember as a child going around with "Votes For Women" balloons. I learnt early what it is to be snubbed for a good cause.
Children need boundaries, so they can know how far they have to go to get beyond them.
I loved Married With Children. That was the job that against all odds - you know, when I first read the script, I thought, "No one will ever watch this, but I think this is so fun." So I was really happy to be involved in it. And we laughed every single day. It was the funniest 11 years. We really, really enjoyed it.
I think the biggest change has been realizing I now have three children.
My thing about having another child was, time's-a-wasting!
Teaching my kids to give back is an essential part of parenting. It's not something that's optional. Compassion is one of the basic values that I want my children to have: that if they see a need, whether it's around the corner or thousands of miles of away, they should feel motivated to do whatever they can to help.
There are certain narrow, umimaginative, and autocratic old people who seem to call out the most mischievous and sometimes the worst traits in children.
The world is always a new plaything to children, while to the old it seems falling to pieces from sheer dryness. Everything loses its value with time, but it is not the fault of the fruit, but of the mouth and the tongue.
Reading might not be the way that the child engages with the world, but it should be something that they all learn how to do, and that they get to have for themselves, as opposed to somebody telling them what to do and how to do it.
I think that that's part of how people have responded to The Tiger Rising. It's what I call my dark child. It's gotten sandwiched in between two overachieving, tap-dance-performing kids - Winn-Dixie and Despereaux.
I would give up my life for my children, but not myself.
