Back when I was a mouthy teenager, I’d sometimes punctuate my angsty, angry diatribes with “I hate you!” to whichever parent was challenging me at the moment.
My poor mother would take such rebukes to heart, but my father’s response was usually the same – “If you don’t like me, it means I’m doing my job.” My father felt that permissive parenting might have made him popular, but he knew it would not have helped his children become better people.
Like so many other things my father told me, I find this profound wisdom worth living and conveying to my own children as I take a stand against the current cultural rot. From where I’m sitting, all I can see is a generation of young people skipping down the primrose path straight to Hell, phones in hand. (I know this makes me sound like the Church Lady, but have you seen what’s happening on TikTok lately?).
My oldest daughter just crossed the Rubicon, as it were, into the dreaded teen years a few short months ago. But it seems we’ve always struggled with what she’s allowed to wear, watch, and listen to in a culture that’s increasingly at odds with our values.
The strongest resistance stems from her desire to fit in by watching the same godawful internet content as everyone else. She believes she’s mature enough to handle the objectionable material and make good decisions anyway — and to some extent, I believe she is.
However, teenagers lack the wisdom that can only come with years of life experience to understand when they’re being groomed into accepting many of the sins the world is peddling. That means it’s my job to make sure I keep them away from as much of that content as I can.
This has made me unpopular and has become a recurring point of friction between us – but above all the whining and protesting, I frequently hear my late father’s words ringing in my ears.
And though I may not be the most liked parent on the block, I can’t say it’s been all bad either.
Since there’s not much current content I’ll let them watch, my kids instead have learned to love classic black-and-white sitcoms like “Father Knows Best” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show” that were made decades before I was born.
Our family loves watching “I Love Lucy” together and laughing at the same iconic episodes I watched with my mother while home sick from school as a child. They’ve seen Lucy stomp the grapes, Little Ricky play the bongos, and of course they know that Vitameatavegamin “tastes just like candy.”
My children also know why you should never keep an ancient Tiki amulet and share a bitter loathing for Cousin Oliver just like the rest of us did while watching “The Brady Bunch.”
We’ve also recently rediscovered “Bewitched” and, besides my middle daughter and I geeking out over the midcentury kitchen, the themes have become a source of great amusement in our family.
As the traditionalist, I identify with Samantha’s desire to be a good housewife despite her witchy ways (insert joke here), while my teenager sympathizes with mother Endora’s strong women’s lib view of the world.
People often pan the idea that television is an art form or even a worthy part of the culture, but those old shows have such heart, wit, and wisdom hidden underneath their laugh track — and now my kids are the beneficiary of that legacy too.
Are my children wildly pleased with a mostly Nick at Night lineup streaming in our house? Hardly. They still push back and occasionally get caught trying to sneak other objectionable content because they’re kids.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that even if they like the programming we have chosen for them, they still see me as a killjoy, but that doesn’t really bother me — if my kids don’t like me, it means I’m doing my job.
Besides, no matter how unpopular I may be around here, at least I’ll never be as universally despised as Cousin Oliver.