kids

When the Indians saw us whipping our children, they thought at first that we must hate our children, but then they thought, no, no one can hate his child. They decided it must be a religious rite, to make the child hate this world and long for the next. We're a strange vicious people.

Disappointment is part of parenthood, Jasper. The trick is learnin' to love your kids even when they disappoint you.

Athletes are born winners, there not born loosers, and the sooner you understand this, the faster you can take on a winning attitude and become sucessful in life.

Talking about abstract things is important. Having big, wild conversations about concepts like art, music, time travel, and dreams makes it much easier when you__l eventually need to talk about things like anger, sadness, pain, and love.

My sister is running away to get lost, but I am running away because I want to find something. And my parents love me so much that they want to help me. Yeah, Dad is a drunk and Mom is an ex-drunk, but they don't want their kids to be drunks.

I'm glad she left me the kids. I'd be lost without them. Lost and bitter. With them here, I'm only bitter.

It's not something a kid like you should've gotten ahold of.

I got a statistic for you right now. Grab your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I'll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it! Shadows running around in the air, muddying the waters you might say. If only we could figure a way to keep those darn five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there'd be no night!

It's amazing how kids can be brutalized into a mold in witch they it right back to the weaker one and never think of escaping from the whole filthy mess.

What you don't think about when you're planning for children is when you're going to teach them how not to be killed

Kids didn't have huge backpacks when I was their age. We didn't have backpacks at all. Now it seemed all the kids had them. You saw little second-graders bent over like sherpas, dragging themselves through the school doors under the weight of their packs. Some of the kids had their packs on rollers, hauling them like luggage at the airport. I didn't understand any of this. The world was becoming digital; everything was smaller and lighter. But kids at school lugged more weight than ever.

You know what would be fun,_ our school__ administration likely thought, huffing glue out of an old sock. __hat if we make our cruellest eleven-year-olds assess each other in wet spandex for an hour every day for a week in the dead of winter?

As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other's eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.

Say goodbye to your mom.__cottie pauses, then keeps going.__cottie.___ye!_ she yells.I grab her arm. I could yell at her for wanting to leave, but I don__. She pulls her arm out of my grasp. I look up to see if anyone is watching us, because I don__ think you__e supposed to aggressively hold children these days. Gone are the days of spanking, threats, and sugar. Now there are therapy, antidepressants, and Splenda.

And really, how insulting is it that to suggest that the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things? I'm betting some of those women would like to do great things of their own.

We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful _ little animals, clawing at what we needed.

My daughter asked if the boogie man was scary. I said, "Not as scary as the boogie woman.

Invalidating a woman__ life choices by saying things like, __h, but you__l regret it if you don__ have kids,_ or, __ didn__ think I wanted kids either until I had one,_ is like me going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and telling the newly sober that eventually when they grow old, they__l want to take the edge off with a little gin and tonic and that if they could only just be mature enough to control themselves, they could go on a fun wine-tasting tour in the Napa Valley.