My colleague Martin, who sat two desks over from me in employee relations for most of the nineties, once told me his parents had a rule for everything. Bedtime at seven-thirty until he was twelve. No talking at the dinner table unless spoken to. Homework inspected nightly, errors circled in red pen by his father, a man who worked at a printworks and ran his household with the same precision. Martin could describe every rule in detail forty years later. He could also describe, with equal precision, the evening he broke each one.
Most people assume that strict parents and permissive parents sit at opposite ends of some parenting spectrum, as though the two approaches have nothing in common. But I spent over thirty years sitting across from people in crisis at a large manufacturing company, and the pattern I kept noticing was how often both types of adults ended up in the same chair for the same reason. The strictly raised ones struggled with authority because they’d been given too much of it too young and associated every boundary with punishment. The permissively raised ones struggled with authority because they’d never encountered it at all and experienced every reasonable expectation as an attack. The conventional wisdom says strict parenting produces rigid adults and permissive parenting produces flexible ones. What I actually observed was something more troubling.
Both produced adults who didn’t know what to do with discomfort.
The Overcorrection Problem
Every parent I’ve known well enough to have this conversation with believed they were breaking the cycle of their own upbringing. The strict ones grew up in chaos and swore their children would have order. The permissive ones grew up in rigidity and swore their children would have freedom. Both were reacting. Neither was choosing.
I know this because I did it myself. My father was not a talker. He provided. He showed up. He kept the house in order and expected the same from us. Love was expressed through structure, through making sure the bills were paid and the school uniforms were clean. When my boys came along, I told myself I’d be different. More open. More emotionally available. What I actually became was a man who worked sixty-hour weeks to provide and came home too exhausted to be present, which was a different version of exactly the same absence.
I’ve written before about the gap between who my grandchildren think I am and who my sons actually experienced. That gap exists because parenting happens in real time, under pressure, and the story we tell ourselves about what kind of parent we are rarely matches the story our children would tell.
The parents who controlled everything told themselves they were providing safety. The parents who controlled nothing told themselves they were providing freedom. Both were telling a story about their own childhood with the ending rewritten.
What Walls Actually Do
Here’s what I noticed about the Martins of the world, the ones raised under firm, sometimes harsh, sometimes unreasonable rules. They knew where the edges were. They knew what happened when you crossed a line. And because of that, they developed a very specific kind of muscle: the ability to assess risk, push back against something solid, and survive the consequences of defiance.
Martin left home at seventeen. Moved to a city where he knew nobody. Got a job, lost it, got another one. He told me once that every act of independence in his adult life still carried a faint echo of his father’s disapproval, but the echo didn’t stop him. It actually propelled him. He’d been practising resistance since childhood.
The children of strict homes had something to push against, and the act of pushing built strength. The rules were often unfair. The enforcement was sometimes cruel. But the existence of a boundary gave the child a surface against which to define themselves. “I am not this. I will not do it this way.” That’s an identity forming. That’s a person learning, through friction, who they are.
Studies suggest that encountering manageable difficulty early in life can help build the psychological architecture for resilience. The keyword there is manageable. A wall you can eventually scale teaches you to climb. A wall that crushes you teaches you nothing except how to lie still.
I’m not romanticizing strict parenting. Some of those walls did crush people. I sat with enough of them to know that. But the existence of resistance, even imperfect resistance, gave children something to work with.
The Invisible Trap of Nothing
The permissive homes were harder to diagnose because the damage looked like freedom.
I remember a young woman in her mid-twenties who came through our HR process after repeated conflicts with her line manager. She was bright, articulate, genuinely talented. She also fell apart every time someone gave her critical feedback. Not because she was fragile by nature, but because she had no framework for processing the experience of being told no. She described her childhood in glowing terms: supportive parents, open communication, freedom to make her own choices. She used the word “empowered” more than once.
But she couldn’t tolerate disagreement. She couldn’t sit with the discomfort of being wrong. She interpreted every correction as a personal rejection, because in twenty-five years of life nobody had ever made her do anything she didn’t want to do.
A muscle that never meets resistance never develops strength. That’s the sentence I keep coming back to, and the longer I live the more I believe it applies to almost everything about human development. Emotional resilience, self-discipline, the ability to delay gratification, the capacity to recover from failure — all of it requires practice, and practice requires encountering something that doesn’t bend to your preferences.
The permissive parents, with genuine love and genuine intention, removed the resistance. They thought they were protecting their children from the pain they’d experienced. What they were actually doing was removing the conditions under which psychological strength develops. Children need more than permissive parenting to develop the internal scaffolding that carries them through adult life.
The Shape of What’s Missing
I pushed my older son toward a career path that made sense on paper. Engineering. Stable. Well-paid. Exactly the kind of security my own upbringing taught me to value. He followed the path for three years before telling me he was miserable, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to accept that I’d been wrong.
That was strict parenting dressed up as guidance. I’d given him a wall, and eventually he pushed back against it. The pushing cost us both something. But it also forced a conversation that changed our relationship. He had something solid to reject, and in rejecting it, he found his own direction.
My younger son got a different version of me. By then I was tired. Work had intensified. I’d read enough parenting books to distrust my own instincts. So I stepped back. Gave him space. Let him make his own decisions about school, about friends, about how he spent his time. I called it trust. He later told me it felt like indifference.
He didn’t rebel. There was nothing to rebel against. He drifted. Found his footing eventually, but it took longer than it should have because he had to build his own walls first before he could push against them, and building walls from scratch when you’re twenty-two is a harder job than it should be.
The children of strict homes at least knew the shape of what they were rejecting. The children of permissive homes had to figure out the shape of what was missing, which is a more abstract and more exhausting task.
What Resistance Actually Teaches
Thirty years of sitting with people during grievances and terminations taught me that workplace conflict is rarely about the stated problem. The stated problem is a policy violation or a missed deadline. The real problem is almost always that someone feels unheard or disrespected. And the people who handled that feeling worst, in my experience, were the ones who’d never practised handling it at all.
The strictly raised employees could usually name what was bothering them. They’d been trained, however clumsily, to identify authority, to recognise power dynamics, to articulate grievance. The permissively raised employees often couldn’t. They knew something felt wrong but lacked the vocabulary for it because they’d grown up in environments where nothing was supposed to feel wrong.
There’s something writers on this site have explored around how a predictable life can starve the mind as surely as chaos damages it. The same principle applies to childhood. A childhood without any friction, without any “no,” without any experience of being overruled, produces a person who is perfectly comfortable right up until the moment someone disagrees with them. Then they have no tools.
Resistance teaches you that discomfort is survivable. That’s the lesson. Not that discomfort is good, or desirable, or something to seek out. Just that you can encounter it and come out the other side. A child who never learns this arrives at adulthood believing that any discomfort is an emergency.
The Middle That Nobody Wants to Hear About
I’m sixty-three. My boys are in their thirties. Both married, both parents themselves. And I watch them navigate the same impossible calculation I navigated: how much structure, how much freedom, how much pushing, how much letting go.
My older son leans toward structure. Routines, expectations, consequences. He sounds like my father sometimes, which is a strange thing to notice. My younger son leans toward openness. Conversation, negotiation, choices. He sounds like a version of me I tried to become in my forties and couldn’t quite pull off.
Neither of them is doing it wrong. But both of them are, to some degree, reacting to what they experienced rather than choosing from a neutral position. That’s the intergenerational trap. Parents who loved their children but didn’t know how to show it produce children who vow to show love differently, and sometimes the showing looks like removing every hard thing from a child’s path.
The middle ground is boring to talk about. Nobody writes passionate essays about consistent, moderate boundaries enforced with warmth. Nobody shares viral posts about the parent who said “no” kindly and held firm while their child cried and then held their child afterward without apologising for the boundary. But that’s where parental acceptance and resilience intersect in actual brain development.
The wall needs to be there. The child needs to hit it. And the parent needs to be on the other side of it, not as a punisher, but as a person who cares enough to maintain it.
My granddaughter called me “the patient one” recently. My son overheard it and mentioned it later with a half-smile that carried thirty years of history. I wasn’t patient with him. I was either too rigid or too absent, depending on the year. Patience is something I only learned after I stopped being too busy to practise it, and even now I catch myself defaulting to the old patterns when I’m tired.
The parents who controlled everything and the parents who controlled nothing were both trying to love their children well. I believe that completely. The difference is that one set of children had something to define themselves against, and the other set had to build a self from scratch in open air, with no edges, no friction, and no way to know if they were strong until they needed to be and found out they weren’t.
A muscle that never meets resistance doesn’t know it’s weak until the weight arrives. By then, the work is harder than it ever needed to be.
