Peace is an ongoing process. It begins with the first step and it does not end. We, all of us alive today, are the gatekeepers of the future. The world we bequeath to our children and grandchildren will depend upon our success in building a more peaceful and decent world.
I don't think we would be specifically remaking "Child's Play 2" and "Child's Play 3". I imagine we'd be dreaming up whole new stories.
When people criticize our work, whether that work is a spreadsheet, a coffee, or our children, we take it very personally as if they were attacking us. This response shows how instead of taking criticism in ways that help us in our work, we become easily defensive and negative.
We are facing a flood tide of factors into our daily lives and the lives of our children that conspire against weight control, and for that matter, health, any single policy or program we use to turn the tide is like a single sandbag. You put down the sandbag on the banks of the river. You could ask the question: Have we held back the flood? A sandbag isn't designed to hold back the flood. A sandbag is designed to be part of a levy to hold back the flood. It doesn't matter if it's a good sandbag, maybe a perfectly good sandbag. By itself it can't fix the problem.
My view of chronic disease prevention of fighting epidemic obesity and diabetes, of turning the tide, is that it is the job of professionals to pave the way and to cultivate the will; to stir people up so that they understand the stakes, so that they recognize that adult onset diabetes stalking children is a clear and omnipresent danger. The wolves are at the door. You must defend hearth and home. And here are the means to do it: we must provide programs, policies, tools and resources so that everybody can do the job.
We have a society that monumentally conspires against the pursuit of health. We have wave after wave of labor-saving technology that says don't ever use your muscles for anything, along with messages that you should be more physically active. We have, every year, the introduction of hundreds, if not thousands, of new highly processed foods, the majority of which glow in the dark. At the same time we're telling people: eat foods closer to nature. We have schools where we teach children to sit still all day long so they can become adults we can't get off couches with crowbars.
As I recall, my life as a child was so all-consuming that I barely had time to consider the future.
Elementary school children are very impressionable
Talking to Lee Child and discovering, from his chapter in The Chopin Manuscript, that he's even more of an audio geek than I am (as his chapter in Chopin proves).
A nation's not a child, for God's sake. ... It's like a wild horse you tame by breaking it. Or a fiery woman you slap till she sees sense and warms your bed.
Originally the structure was . . . a modern narrator who would appear intermittently and talk about his memories of his grandmother, which would then be juxtaposed against scenes from the past. But the stories from the past were always more interesting that the things in the present. I find this almost endemic to modern plays that veer between past and present. . . . So as we've gone on developing GOLDEN CHILD, the scenes from the past have become more dominant, and all that remains of the present are these two little bookends that frame the action.
How could they say that they truly loved each other? They had simply grown up together, been children together, and the proximity of it, the closeness of it, had produced in them love s illusion. And yet - on the other hand - what was love if it wasn't this instinct she felt.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a whole agency to make a successful campaign.
I have been looking after the children. My wife has taken time off.
I don't live my life on the road. I'm getting on a bit and there's a lot of other things in my life. Our lovely children and their lives. It's more of a part-time business these days.
I've sort of remarried a few years ago and have had a couple more children in the last couple of years. And so home life is taking up a lot of my time.
In principle the first thing on the stream would be my birth certificate, a little electronic version of that, my parents would put my school records, health records, whatever of their child onto the stream. And the stream continues to flow forward through time.
I think the single most important question is how do you maximize the number of children who grow up in stable two-parent households. We know in all kinds of ways it makes a huge difference to how kids come out and we are hardening into a caste society where some kids do better in all kinds of ways because they have two parents and others don't.
I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point.
I was never the sort of child who believed in "monsters under the bed" or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father...once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called "antiparanoia," in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.
It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with you. I "heard voices" all the time as a small child.
If you've never wept and want to, have a child.
Every child is different. Every child responds in a different way.
Preschoolers sound much brighter and more knowledgeable than they really are, which is why so many parents and grandparents are sosure their progeny are gifted and super-bright. Because children's questions sound so mature and sophisticated, we are tempted to answer them at a level of abstraction far beyond the child's level of comprehension. That is a temptation we should resist.
Honesty remains the best policy. If parents use alcohol in moderation in front of young children, that provides the right model. Drug use is more complex because even moderate use can have unforeseen consequences.
