26% of adults who recall being raised in more lenient households say that was a bad thing, compared with only 11% of those raised in stricter households — a 2.4:1 ratio from a YouGov US poll of 1,000 nationally representative adults fielded in October 2022. The same survey found that adults raised at about-average strictness report the most positive retrospective judgment (68% good, only 4% bad), suggesting that the regret gradient is not linear but steepens at the permissive tail. Both rates come from the same survey with the same response scale, making the cross-group comparison the most direct apples-to-apples evidence available on this question. No large-scale study appears to ask parents themselves whether they regret being too strict or too lenient; what exists is adult children’s retrospective verdicts on the parenting they received.
The outcome literature independently corroborates both sides’ risks. Pinquart’s 2017 meta-analysis of 1,435 studies in Developmental Psychology found that permissive parenting was associated with elevated externalizing problems — aggression, defiance, rule-breaking — in children and adolescents, while authoritative parenting (warmth with firm behavioral control) showed small but consistent protective effects. On the strict end, Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor’s 2016 meta-analysis in the Journal of Family Psychology found that spanking — the harshest expression of physical discipline — was linked to 13 of 17 detrimental outcomes across 160,927 children, and produced no improvement in the long-term compliance it was intended to achieve. The outcome picture thus points in the same direction as the retrospective judgments: permissive parenting carries greater documented cost than moderate firm discipline, but harsh control extracts its own toll.
The Gilovich framework would predict inaction dominates here, and the data support that prediction. Action regrets (having been too strict) are acute and salient in the moment — every confrontation registers as a potential scar — while inaction regrets (having been too lenient, having let too much slide) tend to crystallize later when adult children encounter the deficits in self-regulation, persistence, or frustration tolerance that consistent limits help build. The 2.4:1 ratio in retrospective negative judgment is consistent with this temporal asymmetry: the costs of leniency become clearest when the child is grown and the parent can no longer correct course. Both the YouGov figures and the developmental literature are imperfect proxies for parental self-regret on this question, and should be read as directional signals rather than precise estimates.