Generations correct each other. The parent who was hit does not hit. The parent who was ignored does not ignore. The parent who was shamed does not shame. This is how moral progress works in the domain of childrearing — each cohort identifies what its own parents got wrong and refuses to replicate it. The mechanism is healthy in principle. In practice, it has a characteristic failure mode: the correction overshoots. The parent who was hit does not hit, but also does not impose any consequence at all. The parent who was ignored does not ignore, but also cannot tolerate a single moment of the child being alone with themselves. The parent who was shamed does not shame, but also cannot tell the child that something they did was wrong. The pendulum swings, and the next generation ends up needing to correct the correction.
The over-correction phenomenon is not a bug in generational parenting. It is the default trajectory, observable across cultures, eras, and ideologies. The cohort that grew up under strict Victorian discipline produced the permissive parents of the 1920s. The cohort that grew up in the relative looseness of the 1920s produced the structured, scheduled parents of the 1940s and 1950s. The cohort raised under the rigid 1950s produced the loose, child-centered parents of the 1970s. The cohort raised in the looseness of the 1970s produced the helicopter parents of the 1990s and 2000s. The cohort raised under helicopter supervision produced the current generation of gentle, validating, anxiously-attuned parents — and the next correction is already visible in the early commentaries, the books complaining that gentle parenting has produced children who cannot tolerate frustration. The cycle is so reliable that you can almost set a calendar by it.
The mechanism is psychological and not mysterious. People parent against their own wounds. The salience of the wound is high; the salience of what their parents did right is low, because what worked did not produce a wound and therefore did not draw attention. The result is a corrective focused on the specific failure mode of the previous generation, with insufficient attention to the failure modes of the opposite extreme. The corrective is calibrated to one direction of error, and when it overshoots — as it almost always does — the new generation discovers a new set of problems that their parents, focused on the old problems, did not anticipate.
There is a structural feature that makes this worse: the evidence for the failure of any parenting style takes about twenty years to mature, because that is how long it takes for the children to become adults whose outcomes can be assessed. By the time the data is in, the parents have already finished raising the children, and the new generation has already begun parenting their own children against the now-visible failures of the previous generation. The feedback loop is too slow to permit fine-tuning. It permits only large, lagging corrections that overshoot.
The collective work, for any generation that wants to do better than this, is to notice the over-correction pattern in advance and try to dampen it. This is hard because it requires holding two things in mind simultaneously: the failure mode of the previous generation, which is salient because it produced your wound, and the failure mode of the opposite extreme, which is not salient because you did not experience it. The discipline is asymmetric. Most parents cannot do it. The ones who can — the ones who can say, "My parents were too strict, and I am at risk of being too permissive, and I am going to deliberately impose some friction even though my instinct is to remove it" — produce children who do not need to correct against them as hard. The cycle dampens. It takes a generation or two of conscious work to dampen it noticeably.
There is also a cultural dimension. Over-correction is more pronounced in cultures with high parenting-discourse density — cultures in which parents read books, listen to podcasts, and absorb a consensus about what the previous generation did wrong. The consensus amplifies the correction. In cultures with lower parenting-discourse density, the over-correction is smaller because each family is calibrating against its own family of origin rather than against a shared narrative about the previous generation. This is one of the unexpected costs of a highly literate parenting culture: the corrections coordinate, and coordinated corrections overshoot more reliably than uncoordinated ones.
The honest position is not to pick a side in any given cycle. The honest position is to recognize that you are in a cycle, that your generation's corrections are probably overshooting in some specific way, and that the work of Law 5 is to keep watching for the overshoot and dampen it where you can. This will not make you popular with the other parents in your cohort, who are deeply invested in the correction. It will, however, produce children who are slightly less in need of correcting against you. That is the only reliable way out of the cycle, and it is slow.