Different people respond differently to the same situations. It's not as simple as "lay down the law, and the child will behave". Sometimes that seems to work

Different people respond differently to the same situations. It's not as simple as "lay down the law, and the child will behave". Sometimes that seems to work great, as with you, and sometimes it works out fairly badly (as with me... ;) ). It might well be that you'd have been a well-behaved child even had the parenting been completely different; twin studies suggest that quite a lot of behavior is built-in.