Yeah, I believe your opinions are valid. I have three kids. In my early experience as a dad, parenting was a lot harder than I expected! @wildfamily and I spent an entire summer touring the U.S. and interviewing 40 families about life with kids, in order to better understand how other people manage the hard parts of parenting, etc. We produced a documentary feature film on this subject, called Wild Family. One of our key takeaways is that we (parents) are both teachers and students. Our kids are also our teachers and students. They are mirrors for us, allowing us to see where we're at emotionally, as we grow together, witnessing each other. I believe that the next level of conscious parenting agrees that our kids are our equals, each with our own soul contracts and our own lessons to learn, and our own karma. And this view of equality grants each person the potential of self-mastery. There is freedom in this, for kids and parents alike. As you say, when the parent stifle's a child's willpower to the extreme, there's a possibility that the child's patterning of powerlessness will make them subservient as they grow older, and this is where I think spanking can be detrimental (just my person thinking, not a judgment of any kind). An ideal father figure is tender. An ideal mother figure is embracing of a child exactly as is. These are my beliefs and they're echoed through many people's voices in the aforementioned film.