Adults forget that kids are their own best censors.
Laborers want their kids to be merchants or business people. Business people want their kids to be professionals. Professionals want their kids to be academics, professors. Academics want their kids to be artists. And artists don't care if their kids are laborers or not. They can be anything.
In a weird Snookers world, like me and Snookers would make the best, like, little guidos and guidettes, little poofs and blow-outs on our little kids.
I really think kids should understand that music is like learning the alphabet. You put small letters together to make words, and then you use these words to create a story, but with music. And they really need to know how to mix and match those letters and how to come up with something that is really interesting, or speak in metaphors as poets do to show us something maybe we didn't think about.
I just want my kids to love who they are, have happy lives and find something they want to do and make peace with that. Your job as a parent is to give your kids not only the instincts and talents to survive, but help them enjoy their lives.
This is the period from ages 60 to 90 in which many people have a new sense of freedom, kids grown up, retired from formal work etc. , about their possibilities. They can either crown a career, start something new, or launch themselves into a meaningful social enterprise. A phase of life that was once seen as an end can now more accurately be enjoyed as a beginning.
My family has always had Cape Verdean pride but I don't think it was something the kids in the family necessarily understood. However, I was very conscious of the fact that both sides of my family were drastically different and my aunts, cousins, and uncles varied in different shades of brown.
Naturally as a kid, I was inspired by Sting. I remember seeing him with the blonde hair, the neon tights, and the painted face.
The percentage of Indian kids doing some sort of artistic work is much higher than in the general population - painting, drawing, dancing, singing. The creation of art is still an everyday part of Indian culture, unlike the dominant culture, where art is sort of peripheral.
I was just a seventeen-year-old kid, going to Times Square to participate in this left-wing demonstration. The signs were for peace and justice and so on. But then I was attacked by police mounted on horseback and on foot. Before I knew it, I was clubbed and knocked unconscious. So it gave me a radical view of the United States, a critical view of the role of the state and of the instruments of the state - the police, the Army, and so on - as not being neutral at all in political battles, but being generally against workers and against striking people, against dissenters of all kinds.
When I was a little kid back in Moscow, Russia, I've always thought I would become an artist or a folk dancer or an astronomer. In fact, if you'd asked me then about a life of solitary writing I would have said, "Oh how boring! Imagine, to sit at a desk all day and just write. "
When I was a kid, I wanted to make my parents happy. I'd always say to them, "What do you want me to do? Do sports? Be rich? Be funny?" My mother would say, "Whatever we want from you, you already gave us - we wanted you to be alive, and you made it. "
I always hated those classic kid movies like Old Yeller or The Yearling where the beloved pet dies. What would be so wrong with having those damn kids learn their lessons about mortality from watching Grandpa kick? Then at least the dog would be around to comfort them.
When I was a kid I got no respect. My mother breast fed me through a straw.
My children - in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.
As far as kids go, at an early age they have to develop a sense of individuality. It's just something that everyone goes through. But I think the older I get, the more I appreciate the fact that we really are just so connected.
My argument is not that we must never intervene in nature. My argument is that there is a moral difference between intervention for the sake of health, to cure or prevent disease, and intervention for the sake of achieving a competitive edge for our kids in a consumer society.
A status symbol is a book. A very easy book to read is The Catcher in the Rye. Walk around with that under your arm, kids. That is status.
I want to be healthy, to be there for my husband and my kids.
Just meeting kids on the street, the best is when they actually believe I'm Spider-Man, and they ask me how the webs work, and I have to say, oh I don't have the suit on and blah blah blah. That for me is one of the best things about being Spider-Man is convincing little kids that I can actually do all that stuff.
