When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.
I'm so jealous of my friends who came from these super musical households where they were learning piano at three years old. My parents didn't really play loads of music around the house. We had the radio, but they weren't teaching me about music.
I've been doing things myself in the sense that I haven't had a night nurse or anything like that, so I've spent every night with baby except for the nights that I've had to travel.
The great thing about small children is they're portable, so we take them everywhere, but when it comes to 2015, Zachary's going to school, and I want to be there to drop him off and pick him up. I don't want to just be the father who reads them a bedtime story.
Unless we work to strengthening the family, … all the rest : schools, and playgrounds, and public assistance, and private concern, will never be enough to cut completely the circle of despair and deprivation.
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
More than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock. That means absent fathers.
I think one of the things when you're casting children is you're also casting their parents.
One father is enough to govern one hundred sons, but not a hundred sons one father.
What makes me angry? The education of children. How in God's name can you expect to have a functioning society the way we teach our kids?
Parents needs to spend more time with who they're trusting their kids with. That's one of the nuggets going forward. Find out who these coaches are. Figure out their environment and what kind of problems they have, and see if you want your child involved with that.
I think people have had the understanding for many years that whatever happens with the separation of parents, that the kids automatically go to the mother. The fathers don't know their rights.
If I look back down the years, how I was treated as a kid, if it wasn't for the teachers at my school, then I wouldn't have achieved what I have. You have to look where you came from, and we do need to get more parents involved, more running clubs and more schools. They can make a difference.
When moms stayed home, it was easier just to let the kids play around the house. But as women entered the workplace and the extended family dissolved, someone else had to pick up the slack on the child-care front. Extracurricular activities fit the bill perfectly, promising not only supervision but also enrichment.
Dad was never a Mr. Mum-type of person who'd stay at home. It was a big thing when he was home - he was a circus.
I don't remember my mother ever playing with me. And she was a perfectly good mother. But she had to do the laundry and clean the house and do the grocery shopping.
I come from a home where my mother was the only emotional umbrella under which we found all the warmth and comforts and sustenance. My father would come and go, and not as often as we'd want him to.
I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.
While not impossible, it is especially challenging for teenage parents to develop bonds with their children. A high percent of them were themselves children of teenage parents and have never experienced appropriate parenting.
After my primary school education, I started gathering little children by visiting parents to ask if they wanted somebody to care for their kids by teaching them the Bible. I have never attended any seminary school or Bible college in my life.
Fatherhood didn't change me in the beginning very much.
The government has convinced parents that at some point it's no longer their responsibility. And in fact, they force them, in many respects, to turn their children over to the public education system and wrest control from them and block them out of participation of that. That has to change or education will not improve in this country.
With children Love is spelled TIME.
If a child goes the wrong way, it is not the child who is to be blamed; it is the parents who are responsible.
One of the best investments we can make is to give our kids the ingredients they need to develop in the first five years of life.
