There used to be two options for the high school prom: Get a date or stay home.

There's long been some kind of official or unofficial after-prom party. It could be a school-sanctioned overnight event in a community center, a group sleepover at a beach house or a private sleepover in a hotel room.

The anti-prom is different. It's a rejection of prom culture -- of excess, consumer values, conformity, social hierarchies, authority and its rules and expectations.

Prom has become a rite of passage, a culmination of four years of high school work and play, friendships and feuds. And prom spending has gone through the roof. The national average topped $1,100 in 2013, according to the annual Visa report. It dipped to $978 in 2014, but both the West and East coasts exceed $1,000 per teen attending the big night. The idea of spending that much on a single night to fulfill a teenager's fantasy of starring in a glam fairy tale seems warped.

A student-led backlash was inevitable.

"We were baffled at how emotionally attached everyone got about prom. It became such a big deal for everyone at school," said Katie Miller, a senior in Bloomfield, Nebraska. "If you're not the popular kid, if you don't have a date, it can be a really difficult situation for some teens."

She and her friends felt the school's official prom catered to a very specific group of people. Plus, the music is often pop and hip-hop, and little attention is paid to those outside those conventional margins. They decided to throw their own party.

"There would be no dates, no dresses you had to spend $500 on," she said. It's a free overnight event at a community center, open to students around the area, with snacks made by Miller and her friends.

"It's very much focused on geek and nerd culture," she said. This month marked their third year throwing the party. There's a Quidditch match and Nerf war, along with games like a Lego challenge in which students have to build concepts such as "the emotion of anger" or "language of Portuguese" out of Legos in a limited amount of time. Miller and her friends even wore cardboard cutouts of the doctors from "Dr. Who" the day of the official prom to advertise their anti-prom.

In a high school of about a hundred students, it feels like a success when more than 20 people attend their anti-prom, Miller said. She collects a few donations and saves her own money to throw the party.

"We just think prom should be (welcoming) to all types of students, and we decided to make another one," she said.

It's not just the proud geeks and nerds who have turned tradition on its head.

Myra Ekram, a senior at St. Louis' Parkway North High School, was one of the main planners of the Spring Fling for the area's observant Muslim teenage girls. Some of the other organizers wanted to call it a morp (prom spelled backwards, as some anti-proms are called), but she resisted.

Ekram plans on attending her school's prom, albeit single, while most her friends will have dates.

"I'm the only one in my school who wears a scarf," she said. "I want to be involved with everything to show that we do all that stuff that everyone else does." Her prom involvement, however, will be dateless, covered, avoiding the dance floor and any alcohol.

Meanwhile, she and the other organizers rented and decorated a hotel ballroom for their own Spring Fling, kept it strictly female-only, and were able to shed their scarves, showing off their updos and fancy dresses.

Other anti-proms veer in the complete opposite direction, with free-flowing alcohol and drugs banned from the school-sponsored dance. Or there are anti-proms held in protest of discrimination against gay or lesbian couples at their schools.

For those quick to dismiss today's teen culture as more heavily narcissistic, consumerist and vapid than we remember our own, it's only fair to credit them as also being more inventive, creative and resourceful in expressing their individuality.

The anti-prom is what it means to own difference. It's this generation's celebration of diverse countercultures.

Whether you go prom or morp, a party is a party.

Never could I have imagined a Marvel comic superheroine whose mother is named Aisha.

Nor had I expected to see an Asian-American mom on prime-time network TV who is funny, smart and nuts in an endearing and relatable way.

But both these characters exist, and suddenly I feel like a part of pop culture in a different way than I ever have. And I'm not the only one.

It's one thing to watch, read and be entertained by stories that give you a window into other people's lives. It's entirely another to see parts of your own experiences reflected in those stories.

Sailaja Joshi realized the importance of that as a child of Indian immigrants, a sociologist and a soon-to-be mom. She wanted to have a library-themed baby shower when she was pregnant with her first child two years ago. She searched Amazon for baby books that reflected her Indian-American identity and came away disappointed. Nothing met her expectations of well-written, developmentally appropriate baby books about her heritage.

"I was frustrated that my daughter wasn't going to see herself, her culture and heritage, in stories," she said. So Joshi, 32, of Boston, decided to launch a company herself. Bharat Babies will produce baby, toddler and school-aged books that tell stories of India's religious and cultural heritage. Their first book, "Hanuman and the Orange Sun," tells the story of a Hindu god and is available for preorder now (bharatbabies.com).

There have always been ways for creative people to tell the stories of their own communities, but minority groups were often relegated to ethnic enclaves. That's changed dramatically as multicultural families' stories have gone mainstream.

There's the breakout buzz of ABC's "Black-ish," about an upper-middle-class African-American family, and "Fresh Off the Boat," about a Chinese-American family relocating and running a restaurant in Orlando.

Parents magazine just launched Parents Latina, an English-language magazine aimed at Latina moms raising children in a multicultural family. The magazine will feature more Hispanic models, expert sources and parents quoted in the stories.

Not only does it make business sense to target rapidly growing minority groups, but diverse stories appeal to broad audiences.

U.S. Hispanic millennial moms are one of the fastest-growing consumer segments in the marketplace. Within 15 years, 1 out of 3 children born in the U.S. will be of Hispanic heritage, according to U.S. Census predictions. And as early as 2044, America will become a "majority-minority" nation, where no one racial group will account for over half of the population, according to a recent report from the U.S. Census Bureau.

"We've tried to strike a balance between covering issues that are of interest to all moms while honing in on issues that are of special interest to our Parents Latina audience," said Dana Points, content director for Meredith Parents Network. "For example, a significant number of second-generation Hispanic women are marrying partners who are not Hispanic." The magazine has stories to address these specific issues.

They're not the only ones to notice a growing demand among parents.

Ylonda Caviness, a parenting journalist for more than a decade, has written a newly released memoir, "Child, Please: How Mama's Old-School Lessons Helped Me Check Myself Before I Wrecked Myself."

"I hope that a young black person, a woman who never sees herself, her experiences" in mainstream culture, reads it and feels less alone, Caviness said. But her experience of being raised by a strong woman with common sense and hard-earned wisdom will connect to more than just African-American parents.

Parenting can be a lonely endeavor. And the more voices that add to the American tapestry, the richer and more vivid it becomes.

I had that same startling sense of recognition with Jessica Huang, the mother on "Fresh Off the Boat," when she wanted to institute a Chinese Learning Center in her home for her sons. I want one for my kids, too! (I'm just too tired most days to make it happen.)

In the case of Kamala Khan, who headlines the Ms. Marvel comic book series, I had a disquieting thought when I borrowed my daughter's copy to read. My daughter had gushed that it was the "most realistic portrayal" of a Muslim, Pakistani-American girl she'd ever seen in the media.

Aisha, the superhero's mom, has the same surname as my husband. Her daughter is a conflicted Pakistani-American Muslim teenager living in New Jersey with superhuman powers.

The heroine is strong, brave and beautiful. Her mother seems kind of overprotective, strict and uncool.

Too close to home, Marvel. Too close.

As a child, summertime meant freedom.

I was free to walk half a mile to the pool with my cousins. We also walked to the grocery store for snacks and headed to a park, the blistering Houston heat melting the tar on the roads. We rode bikes or just wandered around the neighborhood, making up games with whichever other children turned up outside.

Our parents worried about plenty of things, but they didn't worry that we would be abducted off our suburban streets in broad daylight. They never imagined that they might end up jailed for letting us roam the neighborhood during the day.

An idea that seemed ludicrous 30 years ago has become a parenting reality.

In December, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv in Silver Springs, Maryland let their 10- and 6-year-old children walk a mile home from the park. They then faced a child services investigation, which found them responsible for "unsubstantiated child neglect" last month.

Last summer, a South Carolina mother who worked at McDonald's while her 9-year-old played in a nearby park was arrested for child neglect.

Shortly prior, Kim Brooks published a haunting story about the time she left her 4-year-old son in the car for a few minutes while she ran into the store, then found herself fighting charges of endangering her child.

"Parents used to worry that every unsupervised moment will lead to kidnapping. Now, parents worry that every unsupervised moment will lead to their arrest. Everyone is afraid of being arrested," said Lenore Skenazy, author, creator of the Free Range Kids project, and outspoken advocate for giving kids the freedom to develop critical life skills.

"No one in the history of the world was expected to spend every single second of their lives with their child. Why do we think that today?" she asked.

While crime rates are lower now than the '70s and '80s, the news and stories about crimes against children are broadcast to such an extent that we have internalized these irrational fears.

Perhaps that explains last year's Reason-Rupe national poll, in which 68 percent of Americans believe the law should require children 9 years old and younger to be supervised while playing in public parks. Astonishingly, 43 percent say that even 12-year-olds should be required, by law, to be supervised in public parks. The age at which children should be allowed to stay at home? In this survey, it was 13. The age at which children should walk to school unsupervised or wait alone in the car for five minutes on a cool day? Twelve.

I asked a few 9- and 10-year-olds what ages they thought they should be left home alone. Their answers mimicked the answers most people gave in this poll: 13 or 14. Children tend to believe what their parents believe about them and the risks around them.

Of course, no law can accurately determine when a child is mature enough to stay home alone, sit in a car unattended or walk home from school. About half the states have either laws or guidelines about the age at which a child can stay home alone or be in a car unsupervised. The wide range of acceptable ages shows just how arbitrary and subjective this is.

In Missouri, there is no law dictating how old a child must be to stay home alone. In its neighboring state to the west, the Kansas Department for Children and Families suggests children 6 to 9 years should be left for only short periods, depending on their level of maturity, while children 10 and older probably can be left for somewhat longer periods.

Missouri's eastern border state, however, would take a dim view of the lax parenting standards in Kansas. In Illinois, it's a crime for "any minor under the age of 14 whose parents or other person responsible for the minor's welfare leaves the minor without supervision for an unreasonable period of time without regard for the mental or physical health, safety or welfare of that minor."

It's determined on a case-by-case basis what is considered "unreasonable."

Skenazy describes the law in Illinois as "cruel and insulting to 14-year-olds."

It's also insulting to parents.

Parents who love and want to protect their children will not leave them alone if they haven't taught them how to handle emergencies and know that they are capable of handling situations that may come up.

There are plenty of cases of child abuse that should be investigated before criminalizing a parent who wants to teach their child a little independence.