So many of my relatives didn't get a chance to go to school, and my own Daddy couldn't read or write.
Throughout my childhood, I watched my parents try to become legal but to no avail. They lost their money to people they believed to be attorneys but who ultimately never helped. That meant my childhood was haunted by the fear that they would be deported.
Raising George Walker was not easy.
It's hard for a black man to raise a family.
In August of 1989, we arrived in Los Angeles where we had family. With their help, along with that of Jewish resettlement organizations like HIAS, my parents were set up with jobs.
Mum came to Crawley from Sri Lanka at 19 after marrying my dad. Later, Dad had financial problems and they split for a while.
Mama's in the factory, she ain't got no shoes. Daddy's in the alley, he's looking for food.
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that's not so bad; but New York City?
Children, when they are little, they make parents fools; when great, mad.
I can't say 'I'm proud to say' - because it's not a choice for many Americans - but I can say I'm fortunate enough to not be raising my kids on McDonald's.
Here in Los Angeles, school's out for summer. For thousands of school kids, this is the first week of summer vacation. And for thousands of parents, it's the first week of hell.
Things are very rudimentary as far as women's rights really go here, and it seems fine, but once you start scraping the surface, you start to see the ripple effect of how not having equal rights is so detrimental and how many mothers are single parents trying to raise their families.
Our kids now face pressures that didn’t exist when I was growing up…. As parents, it’s very hard to help our children because their experiences are so different to anything we had.
'The Big Girls' has always seemed to me to be a story about different kinds of families - a divorced mother with a child; a father with his child and his girlfriend; a mother of three children, suffering from postpartum depression; and the rigid artificial families maintained by women in prison - all potentially perilous.
My parents are both average size. For them to have a child who was very, very different and very, very small must have been incredibly hard.
I learned at a very young age that my parents were undocumented.
Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable
Once again, her parents' problems had run through her life like a piece of heavy equipment, smashing everything in their way.
My dad was in the Navy; he was in Vietnam. My mom was trying to sell real estate on the side. We didn't have a lot of money.
The female attention I have to struggle hardest with is from my two-year-old daughter.
My mom used to get arrested for being with my dad. She would get fined. She would spend weekends in jail.
Any parent who says parenting came easily to them is not being honest with themselves. Parenting is hard.
Yes, and when I had Aaron, he left me, and I didn't know how to raise a child. And I wasn't close to my parents, and because I was too proud to go to my parents for help, I mistreated that little baby. I didn't want a baby.
The fact is that child rearing is a long, hard job, the rewards are not always immediately obvious, the work is undervalued, and parents are just as human and almost as vulnerable as their children.
