By Marissa Streit
When California recently enacted a law to prohibit minors from using some internet platforms with “addictive features,” many focused their ire on social media companies. Several, including Google, Meta, and TikTok, are now suing to block the law before it takes effect in January 2027. But this episode raises more important questions about parenting than about social media.
I’m a mother of three. My children’s happiness is important, but something else matters more.
How often do we confront our children with questions about duty? We can ask what they did to serve someone else, whether they noticed how their family is impacted by their desires and demands, or whether they’ve thought about how their decisions could impact their family financially, mentally, or even reputationally.
Children also need to understand that their choices affect people who had no say in making them. Recklessness can bring anguish to parents and upheaval to siblings. “I wanted to have fun” does not permit asking others to live with the consequences.
These questions about duty are accompanied with expectations. A child can help clear the table without negotiating a reward. A teenager can help around the house, babysit a sibling, or acknowledge that the family budget has limits. Children can learn to notice work that needs doing, and take some of it off another’s hands.
Consider what Benjamin Franklin wrote to then-president of Yale, Ezra Stiles: “The most acceptable service we can render to Him is doing good to His other children.”
That sentence contains an entire moral education. Our lives carry obligations beyond our own satisfaction. Other people have claims on our effort, our attention, and sometimes our comfort. I worry about what happens when we raise children without that learned responsibility.
Too many of us parents become so afraid of our children’s resentment that we abandon our own judgment. A child wants to attend a party without responsible supervision or enter an online environment like social media she is not ready to navigate. We see the risk. Then comes the protest: “Everyone else is going.” “You don’t trust me.” “You never let me have fun.”
We as parents can listen, explain, and reconsider when there is good reason. We also have to withstand disappointment. I would rather my children resent a necessary boundary for a time than have our family live with the consequences of a danger I recognized but lacked the courage to confront. We as parents do not owe children a good time every weekend at any cost. Our own money, time, and peace of mind deserve consideration, too. Children should enjoy friendship and adventure. They also need to understand that belonging to a family comes with responsibilities—including care for the parents who care for them.
If raising a child is about only satisfying a child’s preferences, and therefore includes waiving responsibilities that interfere with “fun” or softening boundaries when a child complains, we can teach children to treat a child’s happiness as the deciding factor.
We cannot spend 18 years treating reasonable boundaries as something from which our children should be spared—and then turn around and expect them to be prepared for sacrifices that come with a full life. Those commitments require habits children should begin practicing at home.
Consider how easily the responsibilities of adulthood can be described as “threats” to self. Marriage might limit independence. Children might interrupt ambitions. Caring for aging parents might complicate plans. An obligation becomes something to avoid.
Many face circumstances that prevent them from marrying or having children—and many unmarried Americans lead lives of extraordinary service. The concern is this: a belief that trade-offs are, by themselves, a reason to walk away.
When a man rejects marriage because it might cost him comfort, or a woman rejects motherhood because she wants to focus entirely on herself, we should ask where that understanding of life begins. What preparation have we given children for commitments that will sometimes require them to put someone else first?
The commandment to honor our mother and father places that responsibility at the center of moral life. Honoring parents should mean something in the daily life of a household. It includes gratitude, honesty, helpfulness, and a willingness to consider how our choices affect them. Children should learn to ask how they can ease a parent’s burden.
Children should experience the satisfaction of being useful and dependable. They should know what it feels like to make someone’s day easier and to be trustworthy. Through family life, we can show why they might one day want to build a family of their own.
Growing up requires independence and reasonable risks. One of our jobs as parents is to prepare children to exercise judgment, including the ability to weigh happiness against possible harm, and consider obligations to others. That preparation is difficult when we remove any demand that might make a child unhappy.
As parents, we must examine our own motives honestly. If we surrender a firm boundary because we cannot tolerate being “resented,” we are protecting our own comfort. Courageous parenting requires accepting the work and disruption that comes with raising another human being.
The Constitution’s preamble speaks of securing liberty “to ourselves and our Posterity.” Its authors understood their work extended beyond their own lives. Preserving that inheritance requires our willingness to build families and to raise children who understand they will owe something to the people who come after them.
To that end, courageous parenting must become the norm. We should stop teaching our children to worship their own desires and start expecting them to consider how they can serve others. That lesson begins at home. When a child would rather do something else, we could have the courage to say: “Someone is counting on you.”
Ben Franklin asks all of us to serve God by doing good for His children. We should raise our own children with that obligation in mind. If we as parents teach children to love only themselves, we should not expect them to preserve a country.