Quotes About Children

I have learned a valuable lesson from my own mother: Good nutrition starts in the home. In my home, it takes some negotiating: eat a vegetable and you may get a special treat. It seems to work for my five children.

Luckily, my children love broccoli, and although we sometimes enter into UN-like negotiations about how many 'trees' they need to eat before they can partake of ice cream, it is a vegetable that they tend to embrace.

My experience as a school nurse taught me that we need to make a concerted effort, all of us, to increase physical fitness activity among our children and to encourage all Americans to adopt a healthier diet that includes fruits and vegetables, but there is more.

Clearly this is a tough economic time, and a lot of families are hurting. So when we talk to parents, we talk about small changes for kids and things that don't cost extra money. Like adding water and eliminating sugary drinks and sodas. That's going to save money right there. Or adding a few more vegetables.

We have lots of fruit trees and vegetables - we live endlessly on courgettes. I certainly wouldn't approve of a diet of McDonald's for my children.

Growing up eating fruits and vegetables fresh from our farm added a lot to the way I taste and look at food today, and I wanted the same for my kids and other kids.

A lot of parents ask me how to get kids to eat more vegetables. The first thing I say is that it starts from the top.

I think a great way to get kids to start eating their vegetables is to get creative with them.

Sometimes kids want a hamburger, but I'll fill it up with a quinoa tikki. We eat makhana instead of popcorn; we even take it to the movie theater! I also mash up a lot of vegetables and put it in the aata, so they don't realise they are eating vegetables.

Let's take a common sense approach to school lunches, and offer our children fresh, unprocessed vegetables, fruits, and whole grains and lean protein.

Teaching children to eat foods that will enhance their health, and offering them high-quality vegetables, fruits and whole grains in school lunches, have a profound effect on our children's futures.

If it were purely up to me, my kids would probably be vegetarian Catholic Marxists.

Banning smoking in vehicles with children in them will help protect them from the misery of smoking-related diseases, from cancer to asthma and emphysema.

Picture books, while less in word count, are certainly not less important. There are unbelievably skillful authors writing in this vein. Authors like Jane O'Connor and Jon Scieszka.

What has been so great out of all of the success is that I inspired so many people to take up ventriloquism, especially little kids.

Because kids are physically smaller, there's an assumption by people who haven't read a kids' book for a long time that their ideas and themes and problems and ambitions must be commensurately smaller and less important. I would venture that sometimes the opposite is true.

I'm keeping my day job, because Poptropica is something that really energizes me. I'd love to create a TV series or write a film that's not in the 'Wimpy' universe, but I know it will be difficult to create something from scratch. But I love creating good comedy for kids, so I hope to have another successful venture in the future!

Picture books are the distillation of an idea, and you have to use just the right words. I love that, and I try to use a lot of action verbs.

To apply for a gifted program, children as young as 4 are required to sit through hour-long verbal exams.

From the earliest moments of life, children begin to learn the fundamentals of language. The most powerful influence for effective language development are the verbal interactions with caregivers.

Nearly all children have a feeling for rhythm in words, for the delicate pattern of nursery rhymes. Many adults have lost this feeling and, if they read verse at all, demand a far cruder music than that which they once appreciated.

I have always used a great variety of verse forms, especially in my poetry for children. I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children.

It was the enchantment of spoken verse that led me to write for children.

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them.