A Quote by Kenya Barris

I know a lot for me, personally, the best moments have come from watching my kids have an experience I never thought about as a kid but then remembered as a parent. — © Kenya Barris
I know a lot for me, personally, the best moments have come from watching my kids have an experience I never thought about as a kid but then remembered as a parent.
Sometimes [people] say the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. In my case, I am pretty fortunate. [ My kids]'re pretty balanced, cool kids, going through pretty much the same thing all the other kids go through. There's nothing unique about me as a parent. I am a parent. My kids are kids. We do the best we can do. I don't think they know a lot about what I do, other than that I am in this crazy band, Mötley Crüe.
I think the last few weeks for me have been just a very different emotional experience. Something I never thought I would feel myself. And I find...a lot of things affect me differently now. As any new parent knows, you're only too happy to show off your new child and, you know, proclaim that he is the best looking or the best everything.
The one thing about kids is that you never really know exactly what they're thinking or how they're seeing. After writing about kids, which is a little bit like putting the experience under a magnifying glass, you realize you have no idea how you thought as a kid. I've come to the conclusion that most of the things that we remember about our childhood are lies. We all have memories that stand out from when we were kids, but they're really just snapshots. You can't remember how you reacted because your whole head is different when you stand aside.
There's nothing unique about me as a parent. I am a parent. My kids are kids. We do the best we can do.
I know what it felt like to walk into school and have kids say, 'Mr. Spangler's here!' And I thought, what if I gave that power to a parent so the kid looks at them and says, 'Dad, let's make a smoke ring launcher in the garage today.' What parent doesn't want to be a rock star?
In my experience on 'New York Undercover,' where I played a dad, I was 26 years old, and I didn't have kids then. And at that time, it would blow me away that people said they became a better parent because of watching my role on that TV show.
Me writing the book and the subsequent interactions that we had were actually the cap on that experience. We were still in this weird purgatory about it when I published the book. When I gave them the galleys and what ensued after that, then I understood a lot more about our relationships and what the experience meant to them. I'd never wanted to know what they thought about it at all.
Yeah, well that's the best thing about it, I think, is knowing kids and kids getting mental when they know you're in it. Any kid you meet and anyone I know tells the kid you're in it and they get short of breath.
The best situation is being a single parent. The best part about is that you get time off, too, because the kids are with their mom, so it's the best of both worlds. There's a lot to be said for it.
He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.
I never wanted my kids to have the experience of not knowing me or where they came from. I never want them to wonder, 'Did he love me?' I want to be there at the pivotal moments, for them to know how proud I am of who they are becoming.
A real good artist is basically a grown-up kid, who never kills the kid. What we call being an adult is basically about killing the kid. People think you have to forget about the kid to become an adult and deal with grown-up problems. But, that's bullshit. We are still kids. It's the same, you just grow up. You're a kid with more experience.
What keeps me up at night? Probably most, thinking about the future for my kids. It sounds kind of funny, but not so much what they're going to do, but how as a parent, how my wife and I as parents, how best we should prepare them for the world. And I know everybody does this, I think everybody stays up at night thinking about the best thing for their kids, and astronauts are no different.
I love kids that come to shows, little kids coming up to you with braces; like, some kid came up to me in a parking lot outside a show in Santa Cruz - he was about 14 or 15 - and he said, 'Y'know, I love 'The Basketball Diaries,' but I hope your next book of poetry isn't gonna be as academic as 'Living at the Movies' was.'
And if you're a parent who thinks you're okay because your kid doesn't have a phone or iPod yet, and/or you've used all the parent controls to filter out explicit material, you're not okay. The filters are tissue paper and your kid without a phone is on a school bus or in a locker room or at a public park with phone-equipped kids every day. And they're like all kids in exploring - by whatever means available to them - exactly what their parents are treating as too embarrassing or taboo to talk about.
I'm always conscious of the fact that a book starts, basically, with a kid in a lap, and a parent reading to them. If I'm not at least understanding that the parent's got to be there, and the kid's got to be there, together, then I don't feel like I'm doing my job. I hope that the language or the dialogue or the way characters interact entertains parents - when I'm playing with my own kids, I'm entertaining myself too, as well as them.
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