There's a lot of extreme reactions when it comes to apparently dichotomous situations, where the solution to an unbalanced state seems to always be to- Go as far to the opposite side as humanly possible to make up for it. For example: Some people over-discipline and even plain abuse their kids. So, let's learn from that behavior to prevent it from happening again in the future. So far so good. But then.. lets react to the past mistreatment(perhaps done to the parent themselves) by overcorrecting with utterly lackadaisical disciplining of their own kids, just so they "won't be like" their own strict parents. Forgoing any boundary-setting rules, and becoming just a functionally non-parent beatnik, eventually reduced to enlisting child psychologists for help to control their unruly child because as they exclaim: "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"