With teachers and relatives and at 14 she went to work in another womans house taking care of that womans children and she served as an example as a mother. She was loving and attentive and involved and caring. Cspan what about your dad . He had a different kind of upbringing both of his families had come to this country is young children. They were intent upon working hard his mother was a strongwilled woman. One of the things i learned the last several years is that my grandmother who died when i was quite young insisted always using her maiden name as well so hannah jones bottom. Rodham. Cspan what would have both of them do for a living . Im with the was a homemaker my father had a small business. He was the only. Employee but he came close to one man who was a continuing employee but my mother would help out. My brothers and i would help out. Righto you had two brothers. Guest two younger brothers. Cspan u. N. Tony . How much younger with you then you . Guest hugh was four years younger and tony was seven years younger. We got along pretty well. Seat. Cspan did your parents teach them differently than you . As though my father was harder on them. My brother. He was a mans man was into reading books unlike my mother so i think he was much harder on my brothers. He didnt know what to do with me and they were so encouraging of me telling me to do whatever i wanted. My father was throwing patterns around the entrees in iran with the boys just like everybody else in the neighborhood did but he was a much more demanding father for my brothers. Cspan how did you raise chelsea differently than you were raised . Guest a lot of ways in the same way but there were different circumstances. We have a very middleclass, normal upbringing my brothers and i. We were lucky to live in a suburb with a great school produces safe neighborhood. It was the same things that office space today. My child life is not as free and independent if i was and my husband being a governor now president makes a quite different. I struggle all the time to make as normal by my definition normal is my opinion. Cspan theres a part in the book where you say i think chelsea wanted to ride or bicycle and you broke down in tears for what reason . Guest her friend had been riding around and they came running in and they wanted to ride their bikes to the library which was 10 blocks away. I got tears in my eyes because nearly every day in the summertime i would ride my bike to the library to the pool and play with my friends and my mother would be home in time for dinner. Nobody worried about me. I have these two little girls and i didnt feel comfortable and it wasnt because her daddy was a governor. He was because they were two little girls in the downtown area of little rock. Its not as safe as it should be your used to be. That is to me very sad. Was one of those moments they gave me a great deal of her regrets that we have not taking care of our society in a way that would enable my daughter to be as free. Cspan chelsea is brought up in your book a lot and you brought up protecting her from public life. Did you have to make a decision to put in the book lacks wasnt hard to do . Guest its really hard to do. This book is a hybrid and its not a memoir by any means. Its my personal experiences as a daughter and a mother as well as my work as an advocate and experts say none tried to get their information. I didnt have to include here but i was very careful how i talked about her and i cleared everything with her. And wanted to feel that i was preaching or confidence or giving her an uncomfortable moment. Right to what was alike raising her in the white house . Guest its been a real challenge but its something we spent more time on before he moved there than anything else. I had great conversations about raising children in the public eye and talk to other people and read a lot of the press coverage of children who were in the white house and that led bill and i to make decisions about how we would prefer to hear even and how we would talk about her in public and really we said we were grateful that it was we could givers much space and privacy as we could. Cspan why do you think they did . Guest i think there are a lot of people who are around our age in the press and i believe that they know what they go through because if you are a journalist on television or who is wellknown because of what you write it gives you a taste of how children can be drawn into your own career and in a much more dramatic way. I think they had have a certain sympathy and empathy with that. Cspan you talk in the book about how you and the president when he was governor warned her about the awful things that would be said about both of you are least him at the time. Guest at just him at the time. Cspan she got upset. She got upset lately . Guest certainly she gets a little frustrated and concerned as would be natural but she was about six as i say in the book that i realized even though her dad had been in politics since she was born she had been oblivious to it. She didnt follow the news but now that she was reading and in school that it was going to be different. Should we talk about it and we thought we should prepare her peer children deserve to have as much information as they are ready to receive at the age that they are predicted and are we told her daddy was going to run for reelection as governor and in elections people say mean things about each other and we didnt want her to be surprised and sometimes they told stories about each other. She was very upset at first. But we have continued to work with her and we were always talking with her and asked her if she had questions. Its never easy and its always painful. Its not only my daughter put on my mother and other people who care about us and we do our best to reassure them and to let them know that its part of the process. Cspan you say you like to have released one meal together day. How often you get that done . Guest we get that done every day we are in town and its usually dinner. We sit around and talk about what families talk about, whats going on and where we might go if we get a few days off for whats happening with friends but we have tried so hard to do that and its something we have tried later and we will keep up as long as we can. Right or you have chapter on watching television. Why . Guest i just dont think theres any doubt that when i think about the difference in the way i was raised in the way life was back in the 50s with a lot of people the single biggest difference is the role of television in our lives. Its not only the content that disturbs me is also the process and the amount of hours that children spend and what it takes them away from doing in the act to the update and the instant gratification that provides. I say in the book when you have a tour 3yearold all of a sudden you have have a Remote Control device for never having to work and play the way we did or what with the experiences you go through with a young child it changes the way children learn. Cspan you quote from your own but can you say 80 of americans responding to the 1993 that they believe tv is harmful. Do you think thats true . Guest i think its true and i think most people believe its true. People feel helpless and i tried in the book to talk about what parents can do and what communities can do so we can take back our own homes and the Popular Culture represents . Cspan think its armful . Guest there is evidence found now thereve been a number of studies that havent got as much publicity as i would like. Summarizing what we know about the effects of politics. We know it has to sensitized children. Clearly if you come from an unstructured family with a lot of albums to start with you all be more effective than someone who comes from a more stable environment and its not just boys where there has been an increase of acting adding girls as well. We know the consumer culture and the kind of manipulation of children that is done even in their own Television Shows has had an impact. And public broadcasting in the Educational Programming and watching only commercial broadcasting. The personal program is better prepared and we know there are many ways the television impacts kids. Cspan i restricted the amount and the kind of television chelsea watches and we check up on her tv. How do you do that . Guest we dont have the same control that we had when she was smaller but from a very early age we didnt let her just plop down in front of the television set. We decided to keep her doing other things and even now we check in on what shes watching but mostly talking about what did you think about certain programs and how does she evaluate them and we talk about how important it is for parents to view with their children. We are all watching television. Bill and i watch television together but we try to talk about it and its implausible in so many respects. You dont solve human problems in 27 minutes plus commercials try to give children the capacity to separate what they see of television and from what we hope they will see in real life. Cspan think people in the business who have children have done this . Guest when you drive by an accident on the road we all watch and we all are rubbernecking. Its as though we have a thorough fare of accidents. Its something that we are compelled to look at. I dont but its time for us to say we have to exercise more responsibility as it affects children but also the programming. Lets be honest and admit that we have affected how children think of themselves and how they view society. Programmers can make more responsible decisions that the president is having a meeting with a major programmers to talk about what can be done on a voluntary basis and the Telecommunications Bill so i think we are beginning to move in the right direction and take responsibility. Cspan if a stranger came into home and begin telling your kids stories about the same kind of characters and events using the same words and pictures you would throw him out. Guest i believe that. I think we let television get away with so much more than we let real people in person get away with and we talk about the language and explicit textuality and the constant violence. I dont think we would put up with that in person. We would walk away from it or kick them out of our house. Cspan wears his picture on the back from . Disco duds in the backyard of the white house. Its a school nearby and this is the day we had a bird and sesame street and characters as well as other public broadcasting visitors. Theres a study at talk about the book that was done at the university comparing public broadcasting with commercial broadcasting. The kids were then we all had a great time. Cspan when did you first save yourself i i want to write a book where guest i thought about it for a long time but i take it seriously when the publisher came to see me and the publisher and of president of the trade division and the editor. My motherinlaws book which is a marvelous book and Betsy Salazar was the editor. They showed up and said that he thought about writing a book and i said i thought about it and we began to talk a year ago january. Cspan how did you go by that . Guest is something that i thought was going to be easier than it turned out to be. Original plan was for me to just sit down and talk and have a conversation transcribed and then to have some Research Done and editing the transcripts and basically that would be the book. I found out that did not work for me. Someone has to sit down and think hard about what i want to say and we went through many drafts. I had to do it in longhand because my computer skills were not up to the task so it took about a year to do. Cspan berry teen chapters and at the beginning of each chapter you have a quote. All the way from Lady Bird Johnson to booker t. Washington. Some of them are still alive and here today how would did you go about choosing them . Guest i started with the collection that ive had for a long time and i went through those but i found i had to expand. What am i a brick i did for hours on end looking for exactly the right quote that i wanted to give it to. Cspan whats your favorite one of all of them . Guest there were lots that were my favorites are probably if i can read it so that i dont miss quote it. The beginning of no families and ivan. Its one of most lives fragile things. Just look what you can do when you stick together. I just love that quote. The book came out in january when we were in the midst of 9096 teens seem particular apps. Cspan what about the size of the book and what you wanted to cover . I got a since when i read it that you would go ultimately between children and politics. Guest is filled with a lot of my views about how children because i do think all of us in whatever role we are in have a responsibility to children id dont just mean politics with a small p at how we are caeser sultan neighborhoods and communities and businesses and schools. It was suggested by the publisher and i really liked it because its a handy size to carry around. I learned a lot about the number of pages in the book meant that if i added one more page i would have had to add 16 more pages because its the way the books are put together. The size was perfect. Cspan what did you not get in that you wanted in . Guest i had so many more examples that i wanted in an more stories than i had impaired my editor was wonderful in helping me get it down to manageable size. It could have been hundreds of more pages long if i had it my way. Bright so why no index . Guest partly because it was not meant as a textbook. It was meant more of a meditation about my work in the last 25 years with children and it would have been held up even longer because i was month over the deadline that i originally set and that was something i didnt have time for. Cspan a as you know you for it many times criticism of not giving credit to the person you help to you if there was someone. They are so numerous i will not attempt to acknowledge them for fear that i might leave someone out. What do you think of the criticism and does one human being deserve credit for have done a lot of work on that . Guest that was my problem. I had so much help. I have friends who. Every word who critiqued it and i would literally would make a list for they had 60 names and i was nowhere near done. I said i cant do this because i was afraid i would leave somebody out. It was the indirect people. There are so many people in the book or talk to me on the telephone that i have yet to reach and others ive known for 20 years but i thought it was the fairest way to basically thank everybody who helped me. Cspan what do you think of the criticism of one person that was paid by Simon Schuster to spend time with you . Guest i thanked her for what she did for me. She worked for me for a number of months and i was grateful. Cspan in the book on page 148 you have a rhyme. As i was standing in the street is quiet as could be a great dig ugly man came up and tied his horse to me. Then you go on with this couple of sentences. I thought often of that rhyme in her first year of the white house. My motherinlaw lost her battle against prescott cancer and my husband and i were attacked daily from all directions. As i was standing in the street is quiet as could be a big ugly man came up and tied his horse to me. Where did you get that . Guest that was in one of chelseas nursery rhyme books that i would read it to her every night. We have this wonderful book of nonsense rhymes and that was the prominent one on the cover. We read that 100,000 times and it explains to a child and later to myself how things happen in life and you cant always predict whats going to happen. What should have been the most wonderful year of my life with my husband be inaugurated as president had a lot of personal grief and sorrow attached to it and its not predictable. Cspan what was the impact of your father stepped . Guest was rather dramatic. I think we were certainly exhausted from the campaigning and that took time off and we went through the presence preparations for the transition and the ni girl. All of a sudden my father was struck by a fatal stroke. We were with him in the hospital for two weeks or so before he died. When i look back on it now and they think of the entire time during the campaign and in that first year of 93 a lot had happened. In that year the wonder of the inauguration in a few months later my fathers death was very difficult. Cspan what did you do on the impact with chelsea . Did you feel that directly . Guest sure. We took her out of school and my brothers were there most of the time as well. Certainly my mother was there every hour. I thought that was important for her to be with us as a family and to be with her grandfather who never resumed consciousness adequately enough to recognize any of us. After the first day day at one think he even knew we were there but we were there together and i thought that was important. Cspan you say in the 16 chapter my father instructed big business and big government. That sounds like someone running for president today. Guest i think thats a very common thing in American Life and thats how my father felt in the way he talked about government in this mess. There are restraints on both which is what i believed that i think whether government or business you cant have much control or authority are left unchecked. I think there is a constant struggle in american history. Cspan du jour mother and father think alike . Guest no, i dont believe so. My father was a republican very strongly so in my mother was eyes more democratic leaning. My father was very concerned for the fact that my husband was a democrat from the south. My father also became confused as he got older and began to moderate in some way as well and embrace my husband wholeheartedly. Cspan you remember the First Political time in your life . Guest my father was so interested around the dinner table he talked about politics and whats going on and we followed the news and he would get the newspaper. So it goes way way back. Probably the first thing that i did on a National Level was when i was at goldwater girl in 1954 and my father was a staunch republican. He supported Barry Goldwater and admired his beliefs so i participated for the first time at that level. Cspan who was next . Guest the first was the president ial election in 1960 between nixon and kennedy. My father was a staunch nixon supporter. Cspan what was your mom . Guest my mother didnt ever say that she had voted for president kennedy but i then she may well have great she didnt tell my father that. During the early 1960s were we were constantly talking about politics and my family. And i was going to college and becoming involved in politics but i started off as a young republican a member of getting republicans and then i began to. More and study more and decided i had to spend time thinking about my own political beliefs. Cspan was there a moment reset i just dont belong