My mother's parents died when I was quite young, so I would like to be able to go back and know those people as an adult.
We're parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.
My parenting philosophy pretty much boils down to this: I love my kids; I tolerate yours. Mine just make common, age-appropriate mistakes - phases, let's call them - while your kids are completely undisciplined and probably need counseling.
A misperception about anorexia is that you don't eat. Not true. Maybe you eat just 500 calories a day. It would be easy for me to say, 'Why didn't my parents notice?' But I didn't want them to. I made sure to eat half a sandwich around my parents.
For my book, 'Age of Ambition,' I spent time documenting, among other things, the trials of young Chinese strivers who are bombarded by pressures unlike those that their parents faced.
Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people's children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it.
Most parents have long understood that kids don't have the judgment, the maturity, the impulse control and insight necessary to make complicated lifelong decisions.
I try to be careful because technology changes so much over the years. But some things don't change. Kids and parents have disagreements, kids try to manipulate, parents try to sit down with rules and regs. That part never changes.
In my own business, I took on the insurance companies and built my own self-insured plan for my employees that was cost effective and included no caps on coverage, coverage for pre-existing conditions, and allowed kids to stay on their parents' plan until they turned 26.
All possible means were used by the infatuated parents to conclude the bargain; and deception put an end to these usual artifices.
As a child I had dealt with a lot of loss and grief. I was constantly losing my parents, losing my home, constantly moving around, living with this stranger, that stepfather, or whatever.
My parents led this double life. They were in the underground movement to bring down the Nazis. My father was hanged for being a traitor.
I grew up in South Jamaica, Queens, in New York. My parents were very religious churchgoing people. They were very strict. I was never really allowed to indulge in anything vain. Modesty always. I have three brothers and two sisters, so everything was on a budget.
My parents are from the South - they were both born in Birmingham - so my dad saw R.E.M. really early on when they were playing college stuff in Athens. He had a bunch of their cassettes from the '80s, and when I was 8, 9, or 10, those were the sort of things that were around the cassette player in the living room.