Making it through the teen years without a massive rebellion of children against parents would seem to many like a parenting success, one that not many dads and moms have the pleasure of achieving.

But while many parents want to avoid teenage rebellion at all costs, what they may fail to realize is that parenting itself, particularly the loving, authoritative parenting that is going extinct, can be a strain of rebellion or resistance against the woke agenda which has permeated culture in recent years.

Author Neil Postman explained the five steps to such parental rebellion as he wrapped up his book, “The Disappearance of Childhood.”

1. Stay Married

Society’s proclivity to divorce and/or single parenthood is evident in the fact that roughly 1 in 3 kids live in single-parent families. That statistic is unfortunate, because it has many trickle-down effects for kids, including higher anxiety, higher depression, and increased trouble at school, to name just a few.

Thus, “for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value,” Postman writes.

2. Engage With Extended Family

“It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one’s extended family,” Postman explains. The growth of online work, the flight to big cities, and even the increased tendency to cut off family over political or ideological views has likely only increased this trend away from extended family in the years since Postman observed this. That’s tragic, because as he explains, the daily interaction between extended family teaches “the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders,” tendencies which stand the test of time and strengthen not only family, but the community at large.

3. Teach Self-Control

Being yourself, letting go, and doing wild and crazy things is often the mantra of our age. But research suggests that those who learn delayed gratification at a young age experience better outcomes as they grow older, including better academic success, better interpersonal relationships, and a greater ability to cope with negative emotions such as stress or frustration.

Delayed gratification is particularly important when it comes to teaching modesty and manners, Postman says, encouraging parents “to insist that one’s children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in their sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style,” for doing so “is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend.”

4. Foster a Love of Reading

Never has it been easier for tired parents to “spend time” with their children by plopping everyone in front of a screen. But Postman encourages us to take the hard road instead and teach children to love reading, even though “becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive.” Why? Because kids who love reading become thinkers, and thinkers are dangerous to a society that wants everyone to toe the line of conventional wisdom.

5. Control Media Access

Postman calls this action the “most rebellious of all.” Such rebellion is two-fold, requiring parents “to limit the amount of exposure children have to media,” while also “monitor[ing] carefully what they are exposed to.” Once parents know what their children are seeing, they must “provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media’s content,” Postman explains. In essence, parents must be ready to point out the wrong attitudes and actions they see coming through the (limited) media they allow their children to view.

This further implies that parents themselves must be well-versed in good morals, able to explain why something is morally questionable or just plain wrong. Unfortunately, many adults today are completely desensitized to questionable morals, and therefore cannot fully recognize them, let alone point them out to their children and offer the good, the true, and the beautiful as alternatives. Therefore, in order for parents to successfully control their children’s media access, parents must be willing to exercise self-control themselves over what they consume on television, social media, and other venues.

Why should you take these five steps toward parental rebellion? There are many reasons, but one is that your children will be set apart from the rest of society, standing head and shoulders above the others in their generation because they are able to actually think, engage and regulate their responses to all that life throws at them. Postman says:

[T]here are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition.

So be a “rebellious” parent. Resist the spirit of the age, and you just may raise the leaders of the next generation.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

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