So you're getting squeezed at both sides. You're taking care of your mom and dad and you're still doing caregiving with your kids, which is not easy. But I think overall, there's a level of satisfaction that might be unparalleled.
There are a million moving parts to raising kids, and you can't always anticipate them all, especially when they are teenagers and their peers play such a huge role in their lives. If you offer independence, there is one kind of pitfall; if you shelter them too much, there is another. And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.
I think that after a while you realize that your husband can't be all things to you and certainly you don't want the kids to be all things to you, because that would be a terrible weight for them; and that where you really find solace a lot of the time is with your girlfriends.
Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders' cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.
Poor kids are much more likely to become sick than their richer counterparts, but much less likely to have health insurance. Talk about a double whammy.
Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.
Kids and violent TV, violent TV and violence, violence and kids. The only people missing from this discussion are the parents. Where are we? Gone. Abdicated.
You want to have fun with your kids, and no one has fun with someone who runs roughshod.
I was a kid who sometimes got in trouble because I couldn't keep my mouth shut, which turned out to be an advantage when I became an opinion columnist.
As I said, I had this fabulous college education. At college I met the man to whom I've been married for 34 years and who is the father of those three kids. I seriously considered going to another college, and my life would have been completely different in every way.
Just in the past couple of years, there's been pushback against some of that marketing, as parents have gotten really upset. Now we're seeing Coke and Pepsi kind of shape-shifting. Instead of doing these very explicit marketing deals, they are getting into schools in much more hidden ways - things like My Coke Rewards, where they encourage schools to push their student body to purchase Coke products, in exchange for points that go toward various products for the school. It's a way for these companies to get in front of kids, presented as a form of charity.
When people hear about legal restrictions on marketing and advertising, often the response is: Aren't you just being a food nanny? Isn't that government playing too much of a role in our lives? When people have that response, they're forgetting the extent to which what kids are eating and drinking is having as much of an impact on their lives as, say, if they were starting to smoke cigarettes as teenagers. Diet-related illnesses are causing nearly as many deaths as tobacco-related illnesses.
The food industry is spending almost $2 billion a year marketing directly to children and teens. We know that those ads lead to children demanding certain brands, and we know that food and drink marketing gets all of us to consume more calories. If we're going to address diet-related illnesses, talking about marketing to kids is a key step. There should be places like schools that are protected sanctuaries from commercialization and from advertising, especially when it comes to kids' health.
My parents got married late and they had kids late, so I never felt a social or cultural thing to be married or pregnant or a homeowner by a certain age.
As kids do, they're smart, and even if parents try to keep things away from them, conflict and issues and whatnot, kids pick up on what's happening.
I have to remind myself, Stop thinking about the future. Stop thinking about what happened at work today, or another choice you could have made. Just be with your kids. Just be with your friends. Enjoy your victories. Stop second-guessing things that have already happened.
Poverty makes it very difficult in an already competitive world for kids to get on a straight track where they can actually love learning.
I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.
There's a theory out there that if you're in a public profession you're fair game. I couldn't disagree with that idea more. Especially with children - half the time they don't choose to be in that profession. For people to objectify other people's lives - kids or not - I find very tedious and tiresome. People who have a craft, that's their job. Their job isn't to create fodder for other people who are bored.
A lot of movies treat kids like idiots.
Kids are truthful by nature.
I've been training fighters about 10 years. And I know I get the kids that nobody else is gonna want. I get kids who violated probation five, six, seven times. Their parents don't want 'em, the police don't want 'em - nobody wants 'em. And so I say, okay, I was like that. Nobody wanted me. Once I found out that a nobody could do what I did, I took a whole bunch of nobodies. When you take a nobody, they're open to anything, so that's what I started working with. I started working with the worst kids that nobody else wants to deal with.
The book [ One Thousand Gifts] took just over a year to write, on the fringe hours, early and late, around home educating 6 kids and farming and blogging. And I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into it when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.
My kids don't drink and don't smoke. For me, that's a great blessing.
I don't want to stand with somebody's praise. Whereas now when people come up to me, they say, "I love the bookstore" and "Kids! Come here, come here! This is the woman who owns the bookstore." That's incredible. I can say to that, "Thank you for shopping local. Thank you for coming in. What are you reading? Let's talk about books." It's about something I'm doing as opposed to somehow something I am. I feel comfortable and positive in that role. Because it's about reading. It's about books. It's about learning. It's about business and tax base.
