I'm no expert and my kids are still young (one is just about to start school) but I have a philosophy that guides me here. I don't think you'll get "good" peop

I'm no expert and my kids are still young (one is just about to start school) but I have a philosophy that guides me here. I don't think you'll get "good" people if they are unable to evaluate decisions and make them independently of you. This means they need to be comfortable doing this, which means they must have practice, i.e. experience with making free decisions. But you want to guide them to the right way to approach it. If you imagine the ideal behavior you want to inculcate as a function, and the worst-case behavior you want to absolutely prevent, picture these as two functions. Somewhere in the region between these two functions is the kid's actual behavior. You are implicitly creating a region of allowable behaviors between these two functions. If you are a caricature tiger parent, there is no region, just two overlapping functions, and your kid has no experience of autonomy, they are completely unfree, unhappy, and unequipped to handle real life. On the other hand, a completely absent parent doesn't define those functions at all. The kid is totally unmoored. Sometimes kids in this situation figure things out on their own and feel like they benefited from not having a parent telling them what to do or not to do. But an awful lot of kids from this circumstance do not make it to a successful, free, or happy life. So this can work (I think it probably works better than caricature tiger parenting) but I don't think the odds are that good. What you need to do is build up the child's ability to make decisions. To do that, they need to experience making decisions and experiencing the repercussions. When they're a baby, they have no control, the functions overlap. When they become an adult, they are mostly on their own (though you should still intervene to prevent disaster). In between the two, you want the region of autonomy between the two functions to grow as they get older and get better at making decisions. So even when they're pretty young, you want to give them some berth. And make sure they trust you to help them, especially with making decisions, which means, telling you something doesn't trigger an intervention automatically. That's my philosophy in a nutshell.