You don’t want to be that parent – the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks – especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.
I didn’t have a good childhood because I never could get along with other kids. I was the child that sat in the corner eating lunch by herself.
At school, I was a lot more advanced compared to the other kids but I didn’t like authority and was kicked out for fighting.
My first five years on this planet were spent in Sudan and Zambia and after a short stint in London my family finally settled in Sydney. Right off the bat I knew I was different from the other kids.
The kids that are making the ghetto stuff I can’t even reach are the ones that are inspiring me to play music for the other kids in the city they don’t even know about. If I don’t get those kids making music, there won’t be an original kid DJing like me in five to 10 years.
I ended up being exposed to cinema that a lot of other kids wouldn’t have been exposed to.
I think there is a lot of loss in being a professional child actor. All of a sudden, you start to want to be an adult at the age of 8 or 9. I never did kid stuff, so to speak, so I was in many ways ostracized by the other kids. But I did get this other life, so it was a trade-off.
What I remember most vividly was the sense of always being a little behind the other kids in class – that sense of I wasn’t cut out for class or I wasn’t cut out to read.
I was angry because I see other kids with things that I wanted: they had good parents, they had clothes, they always had food and extra money, and I wasn’t one of those kids.
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.
In the fifth grade I discovered something I could do better than the other kids. One day, the teacher set up a bunch of chairs, and she had everyone run to the chairs and back while she timed us. I had the fastest time in the whole school!
I was always good at math, but I was good at everything. It sounds obnoxious, but I was just smart. In school, it’s kind of obvious when you’re learning things faster than other kids.
I taught myself to read music at a very young age, so when I started to take lessons in school, the teachers used to give me other instruments to keep me busy, because I was more advanced than the other kids.
I was always different from all the other kids, and I was doing things that nobody else did or seemed to have any interest in.
I was a lot more cultured than the other kids in my high school. Because I traveled, I understood different cultures and had a more worldly view. Most of the people I went to high school with had never been outside of California.
When I was growing up in Mississippi – it was good Southern food… but I also grew up with a Greek family; when other kids were eating fried okra, we were eating steamed artichokes. So I think it played a big part in my healthy cooking.
I would play with numbers in a way that other kids would play with their friends.
What I really want to do is, first of all, get my music out to the world. And then I would really just like to reach other kids all over the world and tell them to believe in themselves and prove to people that you can do anything you want.
I think the world sort of looks to the kids who have potential. These are the kids who are going to do something with their lives, who are going to do something for the world. I don’t think it’s malicious, but the other kids get lost from that point on.
