A Quote by Ralph Nader

People are interested in family traditions, and I think a lot of families can benefit from some of the ways that my parents dealt with the challenges of raising four kids.
There's a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of divorced families. I come from a divorced family... and you have parents meet someone and they have kids and you're with that whole having to meet new people and be your family. That's always a hard thing to do.
Because I didn't have brothers, I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family, so I became one of them - but it was not my family. I've always been attracted to temporary families. They tend to be lost characters.
Apparently, it used to be extremely common for families to have two parents. They stayed together because that’s what all the other parents did. Now there are so many options, so many different ways to be a family. So many ways to rip a family apart.
There's a lot of external issues that have a ripple effect on a family and a lot of internal, practical parenting challenges that families are trying to overcome every day. Children become the silent witnesses of such worry within their families.
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.
There has been, for some reason (or more likely an unfortunate accumulation of reasons) a trend over the past several decades for parents to do the work of parenting in the isolation of their own homes - and not only that, this trend has overlapped with the other trend of much deeper parent involvement in raising kids. That you also represent trend No. 3, more people raising kids solo, has only exacerbated a close-to-no-win situation.
I think that what kids watch now a days is different than what kids watch when I was young so I don't know. I think that it's up to the parents to decide. That's the truth. I'm not a parent. I have no idea, but I think some parents let a ten year old watch it and some parents wouldn't.
What I do for Make-A-Wish is I make children and families that are up against some pretty tough circumstances, I let them come into our WWE universe, and I do my best to make them feel good. I've seen a lot of kids and a lot of families happy, and I think people are going to watch 'American Grit' and have emotional moments.
I'm most proud of my kids, for one, and my family and my parents. Outside of that - what am I proud of? I don't know. I don't look back, I just go forward. I'm just proud of the fact that my parents were immigrants and we had nearly nothing, and all of the sudden, with the help of a lot of people and my parents as a model, I amounted to something. And I'm doing some very decent work.
I have made a lot of mistakes raising the four Jenner kids.
Some parents were awful back then and are awful still. The process of raising you didn't turn them into grown-ups. Parents who were clearly imperfect can be helpful to you. As you were trying to grow up despite their fumbling efforts, you had to develop skills and tolerances other kids missed out on. Some of the strongest people I know grew up taking care of inept, invalid, or psychotic parents--but they know the parents weren't normal, healthy, or whole.
When I was in graduate school, I became very interested in why some kids took on challenges and were able to bounce back from setbacks whereas others shy away from difficulty and really crumble when they hit failures. I became fascinated with people who had that kind of courage to take on challenges.
Idea of the generations continuing is really important. And that's interesting to me. I write about families; I'm interested in families. Even though I think a family can be just two people or two people and a dog, I really wanted children for that reason.
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.
When I'm not the Tiger Mom, I'm a professor at Yale Law School, and if one thing is clear to me from years of teaching, it's that there are many ways to produce fabulous kids. I have amazing students; some of them have strict parents, others have lenient parents, and many come from family situations that defy easy description.
Well, I think one of the big things wrong with kids these days, a lot of them don't have a family. A lot of them got one parent and there's quite a few that don't have any parents and that's where the whole problem is. There's no family life, no father to slap 'em around when they need it.
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