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.

I remember glancing into a bathroom vanity a few years back and doing a double-take.

In the dim light, I could have sworn I saw my mother's face staring back at me. It was her slightly curved nose, her oval face and heavy eyelids. What could have been an unwelcome reminder of aging instead took me back to my childhood. I remember watching intently, enamored by her face, as my mother applied her makeup for parties.

A homely sort of child, no one ever told me I looked like her when I was young.

Nonetheless, I was still stunned when the doctor handed me my newborn daughter.

She looked nothing like me.

Her hair was much lighter than my black locks. Her skin was considerably paler. She looked so much like her paternal grandmother, Georgia Kelley, a Midwestern woman of European descent.

Perhaps we expect to replicate ourselves, at least to some degree. But this baby girl looked just like her father, himself a product of a biracial marriage.

One visitor tried to tell me that all newborns resemble their fathers initially. It's an evolutionary adaptation to reassure dad that he's actually the daddy.

Dr. Alan Templeton, professor of genetics at Washington University School of Medicine, says he hasn't seen any scientific research supporting that theory.

"I'm actually very skeptical of it," he said. But there is plenty of research on organisms, including humans, showing that they rely on resemblances as part of kin recognition. And we treat those we recognize as kin differently than non-kin, he said.

"This is evolutionarily quite old, and not unique to humans," Templeton said.

My sisters joke that I look like my daughter's nanny when we are out in public.

Like any biased parent, I think she's beautiful. But I was tickled when our second child arrived with the exact same almond-shaped eyes as my entire family. He looks like a miniature version of my younger brothers. It's a public display of genetic prowess: We won round two.

There must be a biological imperative involved. We are hardwired to want to pass along our own very special DNA. The crooked smile and hazel eyes are genetic affirmation.

Almost immediately after a child is born, speculation begins on who the child looks like. It's one of the most popular topics of discussion as babies' faces change so rapidly in those early years. And when we tell someone their child looks like them, the typical response is usually a big smile.

But in this age of increasingly biracial and multiracial families, cross-cultural adoption and fertility treatments with donor eggs or sperm, there will be more children who look strikingly different from their parents.

I've known a few white women who have married Pakistani men and subtly changed their appearance once their children were born. Typically, blond hair gets dyed a shade or two darker. They get tired of answering the question: "Is she really yours?"

We want to look related. We want outsiders to know we are on the same team, a family.

Parents who adopt children from another ethnicity deal with intrusive (and sometimes obnoxious) questions fairly regularly. Questions such as "How much did they cost?" and "Why didn't you adopt a white baby?" make the old jokes about the milkman seem downright charming.

One mom delights in telling the story of taking her adopted son, who shares her blue eyes and blond hair, to restaurants. She's been told by bystanders: "Oh, there's no mistaking he's your son."

She smiles and says: "You're right."

I've heard my share of awkwardly phrased questions when people see pictures of my children. Sometimes they'll ask, "What is their father?" I'm always tempted to answer by species rather than race. But I know the subtext. Skin color, hair color, eye color -- those primitive markers signify if you're one of us or one of them.

That shorthand just doesn't work as well in today's world.

When people tell me my daughter looks just like me, I am secretly delighted, even though I don't buy it. But there are reasons she frequently makes me want to pull my hair out: her stubborn personality, her passionately held opinions, the smart remarks and the proclivity to collect mounds of clutter.

Looks notwithstanding, she is an uncanny reflection of myself.