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I've always been interested in exploring the concept of child prodigies. When I was younger, I wrote a story about Mozart as a child, and I just always loved this idea of young people who are able to take control of their lives and bring a whole lot of change at such a young age.

Having kids has proven to be this amazing - for me, this amazing source of ideas of anecdotes, of examples, I can test my own kids without human subject permission, so they pilot - I pilot my ideas on them. And so it is a tremendous advantage to have kids if you're going to be a developmental psychologist.

I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships.

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

I was raised by a single psychologist mother and we spent every evening sitting at the kitchen table and dissecting our emotions and speculating about the inner life of everyone we knew.

I think that we are all much closer to our childhood selves than we often think, so when we read about childhood, it can surprise us how immediate or moving it is, when perhaps those feelings are just there, waiting to be accessed all the time.

I find the subject of childhood fascinating. I explored this subject in Speak to me of love and I am curious about portraying the often painful transition into the adult world.

Children in their young teens are just moving into the moment when they are most receptive to philosophy and psychology. You can explore these things in stories and, in doing so, give them power and control.

I had always shown childhood as something difficult, something you want to get the hell out of, but now I wanted to do a story that was the opposite, about that moment in time when you're in that world of discovery, doing what you want to do. That fleeting moment when you're in your zone.