Our most basic institution of family desperately needs help and support from the extended family and the public institutions that surround us. Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins can make a powerful difference in the lives of children. Remember that the expression of love and encouragement from an extended family member will often provide the right influence and help a child at a critical time.
Parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles are made more powerful guides and rescuers by the bonds of love that are the very nature of a family.
We live in a world where we have friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, people we journey with for years who are gay. And we need to love, affirm and all of us together work on the real problems that we have in the world.
No one ever said, 'Be a doctor.' But because so many members of my extended family - aunts, uncles - were doctors, there was this expectation that I'd probably be a physician.
What makes me the happiest are the times I get together with my family, those times when I am with my children, grandchildren, my brothers and sisters and my very close friends, as well as when I am with my extended family in each one of my lectures and power journeys. My greatest joy is just to be alive!
Mum and Dad used to do a lot of entertaining. We had quite a nice house, so everybody descended on us at Christmas - aunts and uncles, who weren't even aunts and uncles.
It was my mom and I against the world. We lived in New York in this bohemian lifestyle where an extended group of artists and photographers were like my aunts and uncles.
I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore that the city always pulls me.
Culture is already there and the church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from two thousand years ago as their best defense. When you have in front of you flesh and blood people who are your brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, co-workers and neighbors and they love each other and they just want to go through life with someone.
I don't have a creepy uncle, but I certainly have many, many uncles. My mom has twelve brothers and sisters, and my dad has two sisters and three brothers. Their maturity level is still hovering around fifteen when they all get together, but they're not necessarily creepy.
I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?
I think that the kinds of stereotypes that people have about Haitians or about HIV sufferers exist because we don't realize that these are our brothers, our sisters, our aunts and uncles, our neighbors. They are us. And I don't mean that in some metaphorical sense. They are literally us.
My father and his brothers and sisters were childhood Irish jig champions in the Bronx. At our family celebrations, they all get out and do the jig. And of course, the younger generation, me and my cousins and my brothers, we have our own Americanized renditions of the Irish jig, which is a bit more like 'Lord of the Dance.'
I did grow up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, around a lot of my mom's family. I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me, and my sisters and my brother. Probably the most formative part of it was that we grew up on the edge of a forest. It wasn't a big forest, but it was enough. When you're a kid, it feels gigantic.
My aunts told wonderful stories. Not to me, but to each other. We had a very strong family. My mother's sisters loved each other intensely. The uncles loved each other intensely.
I was swimming in art day and night. There were always parties being thrown, with artists from every medium (my extended aunts and uncles), living as boldly as they want to be.