MICHELLE OBAMA!

I urge young people who are thinking about having kids to think about why you're having kids. Because, in my view, we're not supposed to have kids to fulfill something in us that we're missing ... We are here as parents to raise individuals, and we have to be thinking along those lines. If you have a baby because you need a friend, well, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

I tell young people that all the time. Your job as a 15-year-old, a 16-year-old, 18-year-old is not to fix the economy or to fix racism; your job is to graduate.

My father lived that way; and as a result, he was one of the happiest people that I knew, because he valued what he had. He didn't look at what the other guy had and worry. He didn't measure himself against somebody else's values. I think that's a gift, and it's a gift that I try to mirror.

Kids aren't supposed to be your friends, because the job is too big to worry about whether they like you or not. And no matter what you do, they will find a reason not to like you. That's their job—to push against us.

We cannot control the world, nor should we. So, all we can do is control our own selves, protect our own light. But if no one is showing us the value of our light, it's hard to do it.

A good teacher can have as great, if not a greater, impact on the world than the president of the United States.

If you were to lay out someone in these times who should bemoan their life and their fate, it would be somebody like my father; but he lived just the opposite. He was the kind of person who lived by the motto 'you count your blessings.'

If I were to track the hardest years of our marriage, the times when I was most resentful was the time when the kids were little because they suck the oxygen out of all living things.

I will fight to the death for my kids. But they have to live in the world, and they have to fight their own battles, and they have to know that they can.

That's what I would urge all parents to think about. We can hold on and try to fix the world for our kids, but dag, if we do that, we're going to be doing that for the rest of our lives.

That's one of the reasons why I fell in love with my husband. At his core, he reminded me of my father.