I'm thankful my parents obliged me to live with the unvarnished truth: I might not have been a looker, but I was a better speller than the prettiest girl in my class, and I was funnier, too.
But wasn't there some sort of rule that said parents had to be smarter than their kids? It didn't seem fair.
Nobody is weirder than your own family, and I think teenagers feel that particularly acutely; the fact that you can walk five steps ahead of your parents and still be in the same family, but refuse to acknowledge it.
I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.
I come from the kind of family where work is work; my parents always taught me that it's better to be doing something than sitting around doing nothing.
When I think of my work, I'm aware that I'm American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents.
My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent... I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience.
When fast food is not a treat but a dietary staple, the children surf the internet all day in dark corners of the room and are bombarded with latest gadgets. Things replace parental standards.
My parents always wanted me to know why eating healthfully was important to overall performance, probably to drown out my whining for junk food.
Preparing food is one of life's great joys, but a lot of times, parents ask their kids if they want to cook with them and then tell them to go peel a bag of potatoes. That's not cooking - that's working!
Heads know that failing to invest in good, nutritious food is a false economy and parents won't tolerate reconstituted turkey being put back on the menu.
I lost in the second round of the French Open and had 10 days off. I went to the Hard Rock Cafe. It was exciting to be away from my parents, to stay in a hotel. Hotels at 17 meant freedom.
My parents came to the United States in the early years of this century as part of a wave of Russian Jewish immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity in the New World.
The vision of a nation formed from many different peoples bound together by a common love of freedom was staked out long before our lifetimes or even our parents' or grandparents' lifetimes.
The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.
I feel very, very lucky to have come from the family I did. We have our dysfunctions and our problems, just like any family. But my parents are extremely loving people.
I'm from a big family; I have four younger siblings. My parents are still happily married together. I grew up moving around a lot, and my family was certainly not affluent.
We're African-American and we work together as a family, so people assume we're like the Jacksons. But I didn't have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.
Every successful artist comes from a family - parents or siblings or both - who, although equally gifted, chose not to pursue the treacherous and difficult path of the artist.
It never occurred to me that I wouldn't go to college and have a career - as well as a family - of my own. Both my parents, but especially my mother, encouraged me and led me to believe that it was possible.
As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.
