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The problem is that restaurants have assumed that kids don't want to eat anything other than chicken nuggets or fast-food burgers, but they do. They want to eat things that taste good.

Kids are no fools: they're very sophisticated, they don't miss a lot; they don't miss nuance.

Popular kids don't necessarily know who they are because they're so busy trying to conform. It's the outcasts who are more attuned to who they are. They're more self-aware, more real.

All over the world, children facing the challenges of poverty attend schools that aren't designed to meet their extra needs; across country lines, the lives of marginalized kids look far more similar than they do different.

We live in a youth-obsessed, aesthetically obsessed culture. That is no more evident than in the film industry.

All of youth culture is packaged and sold back to us at this furious rate these days. I think it's part and parcel to this corporate encroachment on our lives in general.

Teachers shape so much of what a kid's upbringing can be.

I think it's important for kids to express themselves with bad fashion. I struggle a little bit now because I have a daughter and I feel with fashion, like they're sexualizing the kids so young. Little kids in high heels and that kind of thing is really difficult for me to wrap my head around.

In Los Angeles there's, like, this awful image because the girls are so skinny. I don't think it's attractive whatsoever, and I also think that it gives a bad image to kids that are in their early teens. It's not healthy.

Kids see cooking as a creative outlet now, like soccer and ballet. It gives me hope that things like fast food, childhood obesity and the horrible state of school lunches can be addressed by kids and their parents.