The public argument about strict parenting has been running for years and it isn’t useful to anyone inside it. One side says it produces achievement, the other says it produces damage, and both are describing real people.
The more useful question isn’t whether it was right. It’s what it actually did to you, specifically, and what of that is still operating.
What it frequently built
Genuine capability. Discipline that survives without motivation. A high tolerance for difficulty. The ability to work when you don’t feel like it, which isn’t a small thing and which a great many people never acquire.
These are real and people are often reluctant to credit them, because acknowledging the benefit feels like endorsing the method.
What it frequently cost
Conditional self-worth. The most common. Achievement produces relief rather than pleasure, and it lasts about a day before the next thing. Worth that has to be re-earned continuously is exhausting, and it doesn’t respond to further achievement — which is why the promotions don’t help.
Fear of failure disproportionate to consequences. A mistake at work producing a physiological response sized to something much larger.
Difficulty knowing what you want. If preferences were never consulted, the apparatus for detecting them is underdeveloped. People arrive in their thirties genuinely unable to answer what they would do if it were up to them.
Perfectionism and procrastination together, which are the same thing: if it can’t be done perfectly it can’t be started.
A hard time with rest. Rest as something earned rather than needed, and unearned rest as a moral failure.
Why the verdict keeps people stuck
Most people oscillate between two positions. It was abuse and it explains everything. And it was normal, everyone I knew had it, and I turned out fine.
Both are attempts to settle the question, and settling it isn’t the work. The unsettled version — that it gave you real things and cost you real things, that your parents were doing what they believed was necessary and were sometimes wrong, and that you can be grateful and injured at once — is harder to hold and it’s where the movement is.
What actually changes
Separating the standard from the self. The internal voice is frequently a parent’s, and most people can identify whose it’s and what it sounded like. Noticing that it’s a recording rather than an assessment changes its authority.
Doing things badly on purpose. The most effective intervention and the most resisted. Submit something at eighty per cent. Take up something you’ll never be good at. The discovery that nothing happens is the treatment, and it has to be experienced rather than reasoned.
Locating preference. Small questions, repeatedly. What do you want for dinner, what do you want to do on Saturday. People with this history frequently can’t answer, and the practice of answering is genuinely a skill that rebuilds.
If you’re now a parent
A great many people arrive at this material when their own child reaches the age at which it started for them. Raising a child differently without discarding what was worth keeping is its own piece of work, and it’s one of the more hopeful things on this site.