On the off chance that you have children, don't clean up at all. As children, my brother and sister and I loved waking up early and playing cocktail party with the leftover debris
Whatever the joke is has to be funny, and not coming from a mean-spirited place. I think some things are totally off limits. If someone's spouse died, or one of their children, I would never joke about that in a Roast situation. I don't have any aspirations towards writing any cancer jokes, and there's some stuff that I think is definitely taboo.
Telling my children was the toughest part. But that's when you get strong, because you have to be strong for other people.
I also love being able to do something that kids and families can enjoy because I have two children of my own and I want them to grow up watching all the fabulous animated movies and cartoons that I loved to watch as a kid.
Shame makes people abandon their children and drink themselves to death. It also keeps us from true happiness. An apology is a glorious release.
A garden is a human creation. It has to be thought of first, wished into being, planned for like a child.
To criminally prosecute a child not old enough to go to the school prom makes no sense, you get much more cooperation from a victim if you give them a safe harbor, a place to live, job training, an education.
Families fighting childhood cancer should not have to worry about where they're going to get the next dose of the drug they need to save their child's life.
Some of us are taught to ask for help. Some of us don't feel comfortable asking for help. Some of us will get into trouble because we don't want to share things with adults - maybe because we're used to getting in trouble. I have two daughters, and they're very different from each other. One will tell me everything. The other barely tells me anything at all. Who do I worry about the most? I worry about the quiet one. But it's something I wish I had had when I was a child, that feeling of having someone I could ask for help.
Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought stay.
The world my children are growing up in is so much more sophisticated and exposed - emotionally, intellectually, sexually.
Needy and boring parents tend to have needy and bored children.
Questioning authority is, I think, a great thing to instill in children. I just didn't have enough of that when I was little.
A lot of parents today are terrified that something they say to their children might make them 'feel bad.' But, hey, if they've done something wrong, they should feel bad. Kids with a sense of responsibility, not entitlement, who know when to experience gratitude and humility, will be better at navigating the social shoals of college.
I think the biggest difference is that I've noticed Western parents seem much more concerned about their children's psyches, their self-esteem, whereas tough immigrant parents assume strength rather than fragility in their children and therefore behave completely differently.
There's something suspicious about saying, 'I'm just going to leave my child alone and let her pursue her passions.' You know what? I think most 13-year-olds' passion is sitting in front of the TV, or doing Facebook, or surfing the Internet for hours.
I've been so lucky to have my mum and dad because they've worked to give my brother and I everything. We're not spoilt children.
I have a small child, so the idea of getting up at 3 a.m. to train before a day of shooting... I just don't have it in me, although I have so much respect for people who do.
Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion. In some cases, family stories told by grandparents to little grandchildren. When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. Everybody comes from somewhere.
A state, a community, caring first for all its children, providing amply for their spiritual as for their temporal well-being, has organized the primitive Eden.
Children are illuminated text-books, breviaries of doctrine, living bodies of divinity, open always and inviting their elders to peruse the characters inscribed on the lovely leaves.
With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in Spanish,' or, 'I want my child to shake hands firmly,' or, 'I want my child to study statistics and accounting, not calculus.
There's something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents' faith, if he knows them.
The donning of the ear buds marks the beginning of teen life, when children set off on their own for the passage through adolescence.
As a child, I remember asking my parents when I was five years old, "How come if you are not Zionists, you came to the country?" I was surprised at myself that I asked this question. It means that it was always in the air. Then years later I understood it was because of the Holocaust, because they were refugees. They did not come as immigrants and, because of the illusions of the '50s and the late '40s, my mother said, "The world must be better." She could not imagine that it wouldn't be different.