I've got a lot of other people who do a lot of things for me, so I've gotten to a part in my career where I'm doing a lot of talks because I want to get kids turned on. I want to see these kids, these geeky nerdy kids, go out there and do something.
There are parents with wealth who just want their kids to be wealthy, and then there are other parents with money who want to teach their kids how they got it. That's what my dad was like.
It's like the old thing: The parents stay together for the kids, but the kids know that you don't want to be together. The kids would rather you be happy - and separate - than together and miserable. I don't want my kid to grow up around two parents who just don't work.
Anybody that lives in America and has parents with a moderate amount of wealth can be spoiled. I see it every day - kids who are just running their parents over to get what they want because kids are smart, and they know they can manipulate their parents.
There’s a belief now that the problem with our schools is parents, that if we just had better parents we would have better performing kids and, therefore, we wouldn’t have a problem at all. But what’s missing in that equation is that you do have a lot of parents in this country who are very involved in their children’s education and who do want something better. They want to see better for their kids. They know that they’re in schools that aren’t performing particularly well and if you look at how we treat those parents, it is quite poorly.
I understand why parents worry about books - they're worried about their kids. They want to keep their kids safe. But parents aren't always realistic.
Parents aren't clamoring for cell-phone companies to monitor their kids. Parents don't want to see what their kids are really like, but MySpace makes that really easy.
I get a lot of parents coming up to me, telling me they are grooming their kids to be professional athletes. I'm really against that. I think it's a great life, and yeah, you can lead them in that direction. I think a lot of parents live their lives through the kids. Because they didn't make it, they want their kids to make it. It puts a lot of undue pressure on the kids.
My parents were typical Asian parents, and they do, like all parents, want their children to be successful. They really encouraged my brother and I to study math and science, and that's what we did as kids.
I want to be the best role model I can be for my family. I want my husband and I to be the ones our kids look to for guidance, to be the great role models that I had with my parents growing up, so for as hard as we work, I want our kids to see us having fun. I want our kids to know that we have to feel our bodies. And nutrition is a huge part of that.
The cliche of the nerdy kid who doesn't go outside and just plays games is completely untrue. And it's also true for the nerdy kid who studies comic books and turns into this genius, and it is also true for the nerdy kid who listens to every nerdy thing that Led Zeppelin put out. That kind of obsession in a 16-year-old is not ugly. It's beautiful.
I feel like kids are the perfect psychic investigators of their parents, and kids understand their parents' unconscious better than the parents ever do.
I think divorce is a tragedy, traumatic and horribly painful for everybody. That's why I wrote 'Smart Women.' I want kids to read that and to think what life might be like for their parents. And I want parents to think about what life is like for their kids.
These parents, they think I'm a role model for their kids, that their kids look at me as some sort of idol. But it's the parents' job to make sure their kids don't turn out that shallow.
High school wasn't so bad though because, by then, I had worked out that there were far more nerdy kids and poor kids than there were rich, popular kids, so, at the very least, we had them outnumbered.
I was a pretty nerdy kid. I was pretty nerdy. I'm still kind of nerdy. I have all of the worst qualities of being a nerd - all of the affect and none of the smarts. I'm a useless nerd! That's pretty bad.