I grew up when people were afraid to 'come out' as gay. If you asked me how many gay kids I grew up with or went to school with, I would have said none - which of course could not have been true. The truth is I have no idea how many confused and frightened kids I grew up with. They are still out there.
The stories of kids who grew up in communities like mine weren't being written about in many books for kids.
My three children played soccer and lacrosse. I grew up as a Green Bay Packers fan. I am not against sports. We want kids to play sports, but we want them to be safe.
I grew up feeling like a weirdo like many kids do. But I was lucky to find my own home for peculiar children. I went to a school for the gifted in Florida, and it was full of kids who - we were all strange together. And that was a real blessing.
I grew up playing with kids who were the kids of people my parents grew up playing with, and they know me like nobody else. I thought everybody was that way when I was growing up, and then I left to go to college, and I realised that the world is full of strangers.
I was a ballplayer, but only for a limited time. I grew up playing in Wisconsin. It's a very sports-centric part of the country that I grew up in and I played a lot of sports, but baseball first and foremost. I played through high school. I was a middle-infielder.
God, I'm glad I grew up in a time when kids followed sports in the newspaper and on TV and knew every sport.
Trouble was almost inevitable. I grew up with so many at-risk kids. Kids had things go wrong.
I grew up in a family that nearly lost everything, but I ended up in the United States Senate because I grew up in an America that invested in kids like me and built a real future for us.
It sounds like a cliche, but it... you do sing about what you know about. And I grew up in a small town, and I grew up in a place where your whole world revolved around friends, family, school, and church, and sports.
I grew up in the church and began to recite set pieces at the age of four and five, like many of the other kids.
I consider myself as a character actor. I like the sports analogy, which I do all the time; I'm an avid sports guy. I'm a golfer, but I grew up as sort of an avid fan and participant in baseball, and I'm like a relief pitcher. My job is to come in and throw strikes.
Make your kids go out and play. Kids ought to grow up the way you and I grew up and we grew up fifty years apart or maybe more. But we did the same things. Now who's out playing in the afternoon? Nobody.
I grew up in New Jersey and played sports and rode my bike around. It was a really nice time - kids didn't have cellphones then - and you knew everyone in the town.
I grew up on the tennis court with lots of other kids. There were like 40 kids all afternoon and I was one of the youngest ones, so I always had to chase everybody to keep up.
Where I grew up, acting wasn't really accessible. I was just playing sports. But, I did watch a lot of TV. I watched a lot of Clint Eastwood movies on TV and had this fantasy of being like him when I grew up.