Family

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you.

Father or stepfather - those are just titles to me. They don't mean anything.

How did I prepare for night shifts? When I was a small, anxious kid, I checked my mom in her sleep to make sure she was still breathing.

My mother was a medical records librarian and wonderful with us girls. She sewed a lot of our clothes - really glamorous, beautiful clothes - and I think that's part of why I was so successful when I went off to Paris; she'd made me all these wonderful clothes to take.

Every second, every day, every year, we fail to address demand for reproductive health and family planning services. Lives are lost, and girls' opportunities to thrive and contribute to their country's development shrink. These are real people.

My mom says: 'Why aren't you a doctor?' and I'm like, 'I am a doctor!' and she's all, 'No, I mean a real doctor.' She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache.

I am a product of nepotism. I don't think I would have had the profession that I'm in currently... If it wasn't for my dad.

I've been going to Bicester Village since I was young. My mum and dad really loved that place, and I always used to stock up on clothes. I love the fact that it supports great British designers.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

Universal housing programs have been successfully implemented all over the developed world. In countries that have such programs, every single family with an income below a certain level who meets basic program requirements has a right to housing assistance.

The entertainment industry isn't a line of work encouraged in the Persian culture. When I called my dad to say I wanted to quit medicine, there was about three minutes of silence. I'm not sure he knew what to do with himself!

Listen, ah don't wanna speak ill of the dead but have ah told you that mah mother was a great whopping whale of a cunt? Well she was precisely that - a great whopping whale of a hog's cunt with a dirty maggot for a brain.

You can't raise happy kids in a happy family if you aren't happy and don't know who you are. You can't pin your life on someone else's happiness.

To me, Slow parenting is about bringing balance into the home. Children need to strive and struggle and stretch themselves, but that does not mean childhood should be a race. Slow parents give their children plenty of time and space to explore the world on their own terms.

My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity - intuition and compassion and tenderness - and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.

My daughter doesn't even get my humor. She's like, 'Um, no. I don't get it, Dad. Mmm, no, not that one, Dad.'.

Oh to be only half as wonderful as my child thought I was when he was small and only half as stupid as my teenager now thinks I am.

Whose little boy are you?

If her mother had been observing this interaction, she'd tell Clementine she was wrong, that she needed to keep talking, to say everything that was on her mind, to communicate, to leave no possibility for misinterpretation.If her father were here, he'd put his finger to his lips and say, 'Shh.'Clementine settled for two words.'I'm sorry,' she said.