One time in seventh grade, I sought help from my school's guidance counselor.

My mom used to pick me up after school, and I waited in front of the building with a few other students. One of my peers took this opportunity daily to inform me that my mother was a "raghead." She covered her hair and wore hijab as an expression of her faith. This wasn't always well-tolerated in the suburban Houston community where I was raised.

My classmate clearly had a problem with it. I tried ignoring him, but he was persistent.

I got tired of hearing him abuse my mother, but I didn't dare tell my parents what was happening. I finally approached the counselor, Mr. Clark, and told him that Jordan kept calling my mother a raghead.

I will never forget his response.

He said, "Asha" (he could never pronounce my name correctly), "there are going to be people in this world who aren't going to like you for who you are. That's just the way it's going to be."

That was the extent of his involvement in the matter.

Jordan kept calling my mom names whenever he saw me, and I kept trying to ignore him.

I don't suppose my experience was very different from countless other students who may have been brown or black or disabled or fat or a target in any other way. And Mr. Clark spoke a lot of truth in what he told me. It was an important lesson, although I didn't need to be harassed every day after school to have learned it.

Times have changed in the intervening decades, and adults in schools today would take a dimmer view of a student using slurs to taunt someone. But in some ways, the environment seems more pernicious now than it did when my fellow parents and I were growing up, at the mercy of our peers.

School officials may have cracked down on bullying, but they've enshrined their own biases in "no-tolerance policies" and "security concerns" that disproportionately target minority and poor students.

Tia Stevens, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, said that by age 18, about 18 percent of youth have been arrested at least once.

For black youth, that goes up to more than a quarter, she said.

But is that an expression of minorities getting involved in more suspect behavior? I asked.

"If you look at official data, such as arrests and court appearances, you see disparities among races," she said. But if you look at self-reported data by youth about the frequency at which they commit certain crimes, the differences are very slight, she said.

"What that means is, there are other things happening that influence the risk of arrest and involvement in the criminal justice system," she explained. "Many schools become feeders into the criminal justice system."

Her research made me consider the case of the now-famous freshman from MacArthur High School who was arrested and suspended for bringing a homemade clock to school. Ahmed Mohamed has since withdrawn from the Irving, Texas school that suspended him. The backlash to his arrest included invitations to the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, the top engineering schools in the country and the White House.

The vast majority of the world questioned whether teachers would have treated a student of another race or religion the same way with an item they clearly deemed right away wasn't dangerous, and one they admit was never presented as anything other than a clock.

No teacher, principal or police officer who encountered Ahmed's clock was scared of it -- consider that the bomb squad was never called, nor was the school evacuated or the clock isolated. And Ahmed never tried to pass it off as a threat. So did he still need to be arrested and suspended? Without his parents ever being called?

"Sadly, I didn't find it surprising," Stevens said. "He fits a common pattern we're seeing across the country."

While the rest of the country stood with Ahmed, there was a doubling down in Irving on what was perceived as bigotry. The principal defended the teachers and himself. The police chief defended the officers. The mayor defended the school officials and police.

They defended a zero-tolerance system that criminalizes noncriminal behavior. A system that allows schools to suspend students for bringing items they never intended to use as weapons -- a butter knife, a science project.

I wonder how it would have impacted me if Mr. Clark, my guidance counselor, had listened to my concerns and said, "But why does your mother wear that scarf, anyway? Perhaps Jordan is right."

Thankfully, that's not what he did. Even his non-intervention more than 20 years ago showed more common sense and compassion than Texas school officials did with Ahmed.

Perhaps they should consider how they would have responded to their own child, wearing a NASA shirt, bringing a project to school to impress his teacher. How many teachers and principals would defend seeing their own child led away in handcuffs for the same action?

You don't need to consult a bullying policy to know the answer.

You need to consult your conscience.

A celebration at the Buddhist center lost its zen when Sean Grover's daughter had a complete meltdown.

She was 6 or 7 years old at the time, and didn't want to leave the party. Her father dragged her out as she shrieked at him, "I hate you! You're stupid!"

Grover, a psychotherapist who works with children, says he hit rock-bottom in his despair as a parent that night. The incident drove him to seek professional parenting advice himself. The message he received changed his relationship with his daughter, and shaped his views on how parents can regain a sense of control when they feel completely lost.

Grover recently published his insights in "When Kids Call the Shots: How to Seize Control From Your Darling Bully -- and Enjoy Being a Parent Again."

He has seen an epidemic of bullied parents in his own practice -- adults being pushed around by hostile, aggressive kids. The "darling bullies" badger, manipulate and name-call. How did American parents get here? It helps to understand basic child development.

Every phase of childhood comes with a test period, he explains. Nature puts parents on a collision course: Children feel a surge of independence but are not equipped to handle it, then parents step in and spoil their fun.

"As soon as kids learn to walk, they want to get rid of you," he said.

When parents don't provide leadership, structure and boundaries around children's developmental test times, there are gaps left in a child's maturity, he said. Children grow, but they don't mature. This may be why you've seen your teenaged nephew speaking to his mother the same way he did when he was 5.

"It's not unusual to see college students having temper tantrums," Grover said. They haven't been taught to manage frustration properly.

Nearly all children will argue or try to negotiate their way out of a situation at some point. The severity and frequency determine whether their behavior has crossed into bullying. You know your child has become a bully when the scales of power in the parent-child relationship have shifted.

Grover's book begins the repair process by focusing the parent inward, having him or her take inventory of the parenting they received as a child. His book guides readers to consider the "light" and "dark" aspects of how they were parented. The next step is for parents to examine their own parenting behavior -- to figure out how they are responding, in interactions with their kids, to those lessons and emotions from their own childhoods.

Parenting awakens dormant feelings from our youth.

Adults who had authoritarian parents tend to overcompensate in the other direction by being too permissive, Grover said. They don't want to be the strict overlords they grew up under. Parents who are bullied were often raised by very strict parents, he said.

The balancing act involves remaining compassionate, listening to what your child is trying to say and hearing him, while also remaining firm in your authority as a parent. Remaining calm when your child is (over)reacting emotionally, pushing all your buttons and provoking you to respond takes incredible self-control and hard work.

"I did a lot of work on myself," Grover said. "Not losing my temper. Not becoming reactive."

"You can't be a good parent without making unpopular executive decisions," he said.

That bears repeating: You can't be a good parent without making unpopular executive decisions.

But those decisions should not be made in anger or as responses to our triggers.

The advice Grover received from the parenting guru he sought out?

Take your daughter to breakfast three times a week. Don't try to preach to her, share life lessons or tell stories about yourself during this time. Just listen.

He gave his daughter a chance to share her thoughts in a relaxed setting. In the midst of conflict at home, he maintained his own calm. Grover began to see how his own upbringing was influencing his reactions, and he worked on changing himself.

Within time, all the bullying in his home vanished.

Ultimately, parenting is a chance to heal ourselves.

The newspaper editor seated next to me at a trendy Lahore restaurant spoke soberly about the pressures faced by the Pakistani media.

Despite the fact that Pakistan remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, it has a vibrant press, explained Kamal Siddiqi. He is the editor-in-chief of the Express Tribune, one of the country's largest English-language dailies.

But his demeanor changed when we discovered we both have daughters roughly the same age. In that perplexed way that middle-aged parents talk about their children's musical tastes, he mentioned that his 13-year-old is a fan of Fall Out Boy, an American pop-punk band.

My daughter loves Fall Out Boy, I informed him.

His girl also follows British YouTube stars Dan and Phil, he said, unsure of who exactly they were.

Mine is similarly obsessed. (Neither Siddiqi nor I have watched an episode yet, although we agreed that we fully intend to monitor what has our children so enraptured.)

It wasn't just the girls' shared pop cultural interests that amused us. It was their boundary-testing attitudes; their verbal sparring with siblings and parents; their common language of Tumblr and Instagram posts.

"I thought this was somewhat unique to American kids," I said to him.

"No, this is what she and all her friends talk about," he said.

The West has long exported its culture to the rest of the world. But the proliferation of social media has given rise to a more fluid exchange that goes beyond singing the same song lyrics and watching the same movies. The hyper-connected, post-millennial generation is part of a pan-digital culture. Of course, a secular American teen might have little in common with one being educated in a Pakistani madrassa. But one of Lahore's most conservative madrassas broadcasts its lessons via YouTube and fields "Ask an imam" questions online. Their audience is global.

Meanwhile, a teen punk in Pakistan is no less emo than her American counterpart.

I rattled off the names of a few other bands that Siddiqi's daughter might appreciate, having been educated on several occasions by my own 12-year-old. He texted his daughter in Karachi about his new musical finds, and she began quizzing him about songs, suspicious in the way teenagers are when their parents profess to liking anything cool. She stopped texting after a short exchange.

I empathized. I had been away from home on a journalism seminar for more than two weeks at this point, and I had sent my daughter lengthy texts to which I received short replies, if they were acknowledged at all.

One of my traveling companions, a young Huffington Post reporter, nodded sympathetically when I showed her the one-sided text conversations.

"It's like you're in a relationship with a bad boyfriend," she said.

It did feel like trying a bit too hard to get someone's attention. I shared the analogy with Siddiqi, who agreed that it was apt.

I wondered why I felt so giddy at the thought of parents across the globe suffering the same teenager-related angst. The American culture of modern parenting lays so much blame at the feet of parents: We are too permissive; we are too hovering; we are overly involved; we are too self-involved.

Mostly, we are guilt-ridden and time-starved.

Every aspect of parenting is picked apart and diagnosed as a symptom of any number of societal ills, from consumerism to narcissism to attention deficits.

No wonder it was such a relief to hear a Pakistani parent describe an adolescent who sounded so familiar.

Siddiqi's daughter called me to ask if I had really taken my daughter to a Fall Out Boy concert this summer. Yes, I told her, it's true.

"She's so lucky!" she shrieked.

I could not resist texting my daughter afterwards and sharing that tidbit.

"I know I have cool parents," she texted back, adding a sly smiley face emoji.

She must be missing me after all, I thought.

Siddiqi and I pledged to keep in touch after our meeting, which was ostensibly about the ways in which our professional worlds overlapped and diverged.

He and I became Facebook friends. We virtually introduced our daughters, who connected through Instagram.

The distance between Karachi and St. Louis: now a bit shorter.