There aren't a lot of ironclad rules of family life but here's one: No matter how much your parents deny it - and here's betting they deny it a lot - they have a favorite child. And if you're a parent so do you.

Playing guitar was one of my childhood hobbies and I had played a little at school and at camp. My parents would drag me out to perform for my family like all parents do but it was a hobby - nothing more.

It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks we still share genes around and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

Getting a family into work supporting strong relationships getting parents off drugs and out of debt - all this can do more for a child's well-being than any amount of money in out-of-work benefits.

By measuring the proportion of children living with the same parents from birth and whether their parents report a good quality relationship we are driving home the message that social programmes should promote family stability and avert breakdown.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible.

My family although they're very large on both my parents' sides they don't know much about their family tree. Occasionally they try to dig but they can't get very far and it's baffling. In Dublin it seems that so many public records were wiped out it's proven to be very difficult so I know very little.

Here's the thing: the unit of reverence in Europe is the family which is why a child born today of unmarried parents in Sweden has a better chance of growing up in a house with both of his parents than a child born to a married couple in America. Here we revere the couple there they revere the family.

A lot of parents never speak to their transgender kids again that's not the case in my family.

Opponents of capital punishment argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting not only on behalf of society but also on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family.