This is so fucking key. The dominant parenting models are all about being a dictator or a buddy, but kids don't need either. What they need (and we all need if we're being honest) is a mentor. The primary job of a guardian, after keeping you alive, is mentoring you into a more mature version of yourself. Once that's understood, a lot of stuff becomes obvious.
Would you mentor a 5-year-old the same way you'd mentor a 25-year-old? What "taking care of" someone means changes across our lives, and so does mentorship. The way you take care of a 25-year-old having financial problems is different from how you take care of a 3-year-old who keeps trying to burn themselves. The difference is related to core competencies. The point of a guardian is to build your core competencies, and make sure you make it through the process alive. The point is to make people as competent and powerful as possible.
But that goal is completely unenforced by our social system, and if anything dictatorial and lazy parenting are rewarded. Children have no tools to fight back against parents, they have no allies, no outlets, and the systems charged with building their competencies completely fail because the capitalists don't want you to be truly powerful. The capitalists want you dependent so you're dependent on them, and this translates into dependence on your family. (They own everything, you own nothing.)
If instead the entire society is built around making everyone as capable and powerful as possible, then the dictatorial model of parenting is undermined, and the mentorship model of parenting is reinforced. This means guaranteed housing, guaranteed healthcare, guaranteed work, empowering education, cheap food, plentiful public spaces, guaranteed childcare, collectivized household labor, and extensive community networks present in every aspect of daily life. What's the point in emancipating yourself at 15 from your abusive dad if the alternative is sleeping on the street?
The lack of real democracy is why we have both dictatorial parents and dictatorial (a.k.a. bratty) children. Neither is accountable to their community, society at large, or humanity, so every interaction becomes a power struggle dominated by the more forceful party. If the parent is abusing their child, the child has no-one to appeal to. If the child is abusing their teacher, the teacher has no-one to appeal to, and instead is thrown under the bus. It's all the same shit: individuals struggling for power as individuals to dominate everyone they can in every situation while they can. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but those in the weakest position in society lose the most often - and that means kids.
Culturally we can manifest this in part by doing as much as we can to do the things that a proper system would force us to do: mentor and educate our children to be as competent as possible in all areas of life, push them to develop their own independent social lives, encourage them to develop their own resources (and even give them a head start), and treat them with the respect due a full human being (if a very ignorant one) without giving up our own expectation for our own equal dignity.
But that will only ameliorate the problems of your individual household. The only complete, long-term solution is to restructure our society to make this guaranteed, regardless of what family you're born into, regardless of whether the parents cooperate.
