Children have the right to grow up in a family with a father and mother capable of creating a suitable environment for the child's development and emotional maturity. Today marriage and the family are in crisis. We now live in a culture of the temporary, in which more and more people are simply giving up on marriage as a public commitment.

I am not here, of course, as one pretending to any expertness on questions of youth and children - except in the sense that, within their own families, all grandfathers are experts on these matters.

My father really was not the dominant person who raised the family, it was my mother who raised the family.

I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother's father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.

Let us make one point, that we meet each other with a smile, when it is difficult to smile. Smile at each other, make time for each other in your family.

As a single withered tree, if set aflame, causes a whole forest to burn, so does a rascal son destroy a whole family.