I agree with you. My grandma used to say, "children are as complicated as people, only more so." But rules and obedience are an essential abstraction. With my

I agree with you. My grandma used to say, "children are as complicated as people, only more so." But rules and obedience are an essential abstraction. With my own young kids, I try to let them challenge the rules and chart their own course as much as I can, but if you go with no rules at all I think you are almost as likely to end up with a bad result as if you parented through only rules and obedience. When confronted (as all parents inevitably are from time to time) with blanket ideas for "how to raise children" I find it helpful to swap out "children" for "employees" and then "farm animals" and see how the advice sounds from those two additional perspectives. Children are kind of a middle ground between those (as well as being many other things). There's very little science to parenting, unfortunately. It's mostly intuition and magic.