Kids need authority in their lives. Families need authority in order to function. But when parents abdicate their authority, a vacuum results. Nature abhors a vacuum.

teaching social skills to their child. The end result, as I have already

A good parent-child relationship is robust and unconditional.

Today the assumption which pervades American culture is the belief that your child’s personal fulfillment is roughly equivalent to the fulfillment of your child’s desires. A child presumably knows her own desires better than her parents possibly can. If the key to human fulfillment is the satisfaction of immediate and uneducated desire, then the

We now live in a culture in which kids value the opinion of same-age peers more than they value the opinion of their parents, a culture in which the authority of parents has declined not only in the eyes of children but also in the eyes of parents themselves.

As New York Times columnist David Brooks recently observed, American culture today is based on the premise “that career and economic success can lead to fulfillment,” an assumption that Brooks calls “the central illusion of our time.”5

When it comes to teaching virtue, identity seems to work better than behavior. You are a very kind person works better than That was a very kind thing you did.

Part of the task of the parent is, and always has been, educating desire: teaching your child to desire and enjoy things that are higher and better than cotton candy. Video games, Instagram, and text messages are the cotton candy of American popular culture today.

You teach virtue by requiring children to behave virtuously. In other words, you ask them to pretend that they are virtuous before they really are. As psychologist Adam Grant observes, “People often believe that character causes action, but when it comes to producing moral children, we need to remember that action also shapes character.”34