I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

I think I'm going to have to live vicariously through my daughter's rebellion because I certainly never did go through adolescence.

I realize that of all people, I am no expert on parenting or marriage.

Most moms and dads, they want to be good moms and dads. But it's an incredibly hard job when you are stressed out, when you are poor, when your life is in chaos. And giving them some of the tools to be better parents, to whittle away at that parenting gap, gives those kids a much better starting point in life.

You have to support your children to have a healthy relationship.

The most rewarding aspect of parenting is seeing my children be authentic. The most rewarding thing for me is to see them do anything that they're proud of.

That's my ideal day, time with my boys.

Dad was a strict disciplinarian and would give us a wallop with a wooden spoon if we were out of order. But we really respected him - he didn't try to be our best friend.

To me luxury is to be at home with my daughter, and the occasional massage doesn't hurt.

My guess is that good and bad parenting is spread fairly evenly across different social groups. But can you imagine Tony Blair lecturing the middle class on how to bring up their children? He is far more comfortable as a latter-day exponent of the Poor Law mentality.

I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'

In her second career as a minister, my mother defied a legacy of chauvinism to become a leader of our community, overseeing a church that served as a hub, offering parenting classes, a food pantry, after-school programming, and - in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - a lifeline to those ravaged by loss.

Parenting a pre-teen is quite something.

As I started parenting, I realised there is no formula to it.

If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed.

Childhood is a short season.

I'm trying to break any chain of negative parenting that I might have survived.

I'm worried about parents who aren't parenting.

Asian American success is often presented as something of a horror - robotic, unfeeling machines psychotically hellbent on excelling, products of abusive tiger parenting who care only about test scores and perfection, driven to succeed without even knowing why.

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.