The circumstances of that evening made ideal kindling for the explosion in store.

I was running late to an event, for which we couldn't find a sitter. I was exhausted near the end of a hectic weekend and already making mental lists for the week ahead.

It was in this perfect storm that my husband noticed the spilled nail polish on my daughter's bedroom floor. The very nail polish I had explicitly forbidden her from using on the new carpet.

My voice reflected how upset I felt at my tween daughter.

It was a loud and angry voice.

But rather than apologize and attempt to clean up the mess, which had happened some time earlier and been conveniently ignored, the child began crying herself, as if she was the victim in this scenario.

The more she cried, the angrier I got.

And the louder I yelled.

Any rational person could see the cycle between my yelling and her crying, but neither of us was having a rational response by this point.

It's fair to say that I lost it.

I screamed at her to stop crying and slammed my hand on her doorframe so hard that the sharp pain startled me. I had never hit something so hard out of anger. It knocked a degree of sense into me. I stopped rushing to get ready. I stopped yelling. I sat on her bed and told her to clean up her room while her father worked to get the stain out of the carpet. I talked to her about why I had gotten so angry. She apologized, and we hugged before I left.

I felt completely drained.

It's exhausting to get angry and yell. I grew up in a house with parents who yelled, one much more scarily than the other. While it's never fun to be yelled at as a child, I have learned that it feels far worse to be the enraged yeller. There's the physiological discomfort that accompanies rage: Your pulse picks up, eventually pounding; your breathing becomes shallow and jagged; you feel slightly out of control.

For those of us who relish a sense of control, this temporary sense of its loss is perhaps the most damaging piece of rage -- beyond the remorse, beyond the hurt.

As part of the generation of parents who gave up corporal punishment to discipline our children, we defaulted to yelling to get their attention and let them know that we really meant business. In the short-term, and with some children, yelling might work. But in the long-term and with many other children, it is useless.

Intellectually, I knew that getting angry never made a lasting change in my daughter's behavior. And how ironic that what would upset me most about her -- her struggle to regulate and control her emotions -- was exactly how I was responding to her.

The day after the nail polish incident, I opened a drawer of my nightclothes and found a large box with a bow tied around it. Inside were two books from my bookshelf: "Love and Anger: The Parental Dilemma" and "Loving Your Child is Not Enough: Positive Discipline That Works," both by Nancy Samalin and co-authors. I had intended to read both at some point but hadn't gotten around to it.

I asked my daughter if she had put them in my drawer. She said she had. She had read them both and said I might find them useful.

I read the slim volume on anger first. It offered a straightforward, simple message: Parents can be driven to periodic madness by our children, yet we rarely talk about it. "Love and Anger" is more than two decades old, but the advice is as practical today as when it was first written. Learning to respond in a calmer way takes some self-awareness and practice.

The book helped change my perspective. I was done giving away my own power and allowing a child to push my buttons to that extent. The bruise on my hand for the rest of the week reminded me that I was never going to let myself get that angry again.

It's been a few months since that incident. I've certainly had moments when I've felt a surge of anger at some misbehavior or disrespect.

But I am more aware of how I'm feeling when I start to get upset. I deliberately lower my voice when I want to raise it. I realize the only way to regain a measure of control in such a situation is by controlling myself. 

Recently, I asked my daughter: "Have you noticed a difference in the way I respond to you?"

"Yes," she said.

"You can do the same thing. You can reclaim your own power in how you choose to respond to us," I told her.

The purple bruise eventually faded from the side of my hand.

The lesson is still fresh.

The fundamental test of wills between parents and children hasn't changed. But the ground rules may have.

Previous generations have worried about changing social values for as long as there have been young people to socialize and judge. But our young people's lives have a murkier terrain than ours did: They consume more media in more ways than any generation prior. They are both hyperconnected and more isolated. They flourish in ways we didn't, yet struggle with skills we took for granted.

As parents, we must ask: Does all their media-laced time create an outsized influence of the most corrosive elements of pop culture? Does every new technology -- such as self-destructing instant messages that experts tell us will be used by tweens and teens primarily for sexting -- make our job even harder? Our children are growing up with a relentless barrage of messages more pervasive than the ones that blanketed us as children.

So, too often, we feel we are parenting against the worst of what we see around us. We are parenting against the bad behavior we read about and watch constantly.

It's harder to parent against culture. It takes more self-discipline and effort at a time when we are managing more work and more demands than ever.

But this is the type of parenting that gives us a chance at raising the sort of humans we want our children to become.

"Parenting against culture" should become our mantra, repeated to ourselves during the moments when it seems so much easier to give in. Because this is what it really means:

When you tell your child that her tone is unacceptable and make her apologize, you are parenting against disrespect.

When you insist your children clean up their messes, wherever they have made them, you are parenting against unaccountability.

When you teach your child how to stand up to a bully picking on another child, you are parenting against apathy.

When you talk respectfully to people with different views within earshot of your child, you are parenting against incivility.

When you admonish your child to work harder when he gets a bad grade, you are parenting against entitlement.

When you invest as much time and emotion in your child's academic achievements as in her extracurricular activities, you are parenting against a culture that undervalues intellectualism.

When you let your children fail, you are parenting against perfectionism.

When you take away their gadgets at meal times and other times when they need to focus, you are parenting against the fallacy of multitasking.

When you limit their involvement with social media, you are parenting against the notion that privacy has no value.

When you show them how to save money, you are parenting against instant gratification.

When you encourage them to do their own homework and manage their own time, you are parenting against dependency.

When you resist the urge to buy much of what they want, you are parenting against rampant consumerism.

When you purchase age-appropriate clothing, you are parenting against the hypersexualization of their childhoods.

When you instruct your sons on how to treat girls fairly and with respect, you are parenting against a culture of sexism.

When you foster your child's sense of empathy and compassion toward others, you are parenting against violence.

When you enforce rules and consequences that make you unpopular, you are parenting against irresponsibility.

When you praise your child's effort and acts of kindness, when you hold them when they are hurt, when you listen with your undivided attention, you are parenting against a culture of distraction and disconnectedness.

It's important to remember that you are not alone. Most parents reject much of what pop culture glorifies.

Most of us hope we are passing on values from the culture we create in our homes rather than the one projected into our homes. But no one raises children in a bubble, and there are peer parental pressures just as mighty as the ones our children face.

But when enough of us decide to parent against culture, that's precisely when we begin to change it.

Dusty Carr stood bewildered in the fluoroscan imaging room with the pediatric neurosurgeon, struggling to grasp the news about his 8-year-old daughter, Taylor.

"I was wrong," the brain surgeon said.

Two months earlier, Dusty's wife, Mary Jo Carr, had been driving Taylor home from school. She was a minute away from pulling into their driveway at the end of a rural, gravel road.

The vehicles on the road kicked up clouds of dust around them. She was following a neighbor's truck and an oncoming car had pulled over to allow the truck to pass. Neither Mary Jo nor the other driver saw each other through the dust and collided head-on.

She didn't feel her own broken bones when she pulled Taylor from their Nissan Altima. Her daughter didn't have a mark on her, but her eyes had rolled back in her head and her body was turning blue.

"I saw she was starting to die," Mary Jo said.

She put her daughter in the neighbor's truck and headed toward the EMTs who would put Taylor on the helicopter that life-flighted her from Mexico, Mo. to Columbia Medical Center.

Taylor had two fractured vertebrae in her upper spine. Her brain was bleeding in nine places. Her liver was lacerated. She had no feeling or movement from her neck down.

The doctors put Taylor on a ventilator to breathe and induced her into a coma for 15 days.

They tried to prepare her parents.

"Did you know what Christopher Reeve was like?" they asked.

Mary Jo refused to accept this fate for her daughter. She refused to meet with other parents of children with severe brain and spinal cord injuries. She Googled for hours, looking for a success story from a child with injuries like her daughter's who walked out of a hospital.

She found none.

"Taylor will be the exception to the rule," she told the nurses and doctors.

Her bright and active second-grader was not going to get cheated out of the life she had.

All they could do was wait for the swelling in her brain to go down and face the long odds of recovery.

Taylor woke up with a halo: a metal ring around her head, attached with metal pins, to hold her neck and head in place. She also had a tracheostomy to help her breathe.

She opened her eyes and smiled at her parents.

That was a hopeful sign.

Her parents didn't tell her the extent of her injuries. She started to regain feeling on one side. Eventually, she picked up her left arm with her right, let it go and watched it drop on the bed.

Taylor looked at her parents: What was going on?

She was going to get better, they told her. She was going to work hard to get better. After a month in the hospital, she transferred to Ranken Jordan, a pediatric rehab facility.

Her physiatrist, Dr. Eugene Evra, greeted Taylor in Russian in the mornings when he checked on her. She decided she wanted to learn his native language, so he taught her a new word every day. He wrote it down, stuck it next to her bed and repeated the word with her.

Preevyet! (Hi!), Taylor would say.

Kak dela? (How are you?), Dr. Evra asked.

Khorosho. (Fine.)

Poka! (Bye!)

He was hopeful about her recovery from the moment she arrived at Ranken Jordan. Her motivation to get better was so strong. Her family never left her side.

She started her three hours of therapy each day with gut-wrenching and often explicit Eminem lyrics. She knows the entire new album. Before tackling the pain of learning to move again, she plays the Eminem song that pushes her: "Not Afraid."

Since the accident, Taylor has cried once. It was when she asked about Halloween, and her parents told her she had missed it.

Mary Jo is haunted by what-ifs. But then she watched her daughter take her first steps with a walker. These were tears of joy, of unrelenting faith.

The Carrs wanted nothing more than to bring their girl home for Christmas. Before there was a chance of that, Taylor faced another major surgery: She would have to get the stretched ligaments in her spinal column fused and a metal plate inserted in her neck. They had been told by Dr. Jeff Leonard, associate professor in pediatric neurology and neurocritical care at St. Louis Children's Hospital, that the surgery was in her best long-term interest.

So Dusty was trying to understand Dr. Leonard's change of heart when he saw Taylor's latest scans, right before the surgery was to be scheduled.

"She's made a remarkable recovery," Dr. Leonard said. "She just keeps beating all these odds." Instead of prepping her for a spinal cord fusion, doctors removed her halo and trach. She spent 24 hours back at Ranken to see how she fared.

She was ready to go home.

The first night home, she slept with her parents, her little brother and their dog together on the sectional in the family room.

"Being home and having our Christmas tree up ... There's snow outside. It's an overwhelming feeling," Dusty said.

"I call that a miracle."