CD...that was an excellent post and earned you points!
One of my favorite compliments came from one of my daughters. She said "you know one of the reasons I love you?" I said "what?" She said "because you're the only 'Mom' who dresses and acts like a 'Mom.'" She went on to explain about some other kid's mothers and how they dressed like their daughters and behaved like them, too.
Children *need* discipline in order to function. Life is hard enough. You have to know what the rules are. Study after study after study has proclaimed loudly that kids freak out if they don't have boundaries. They need them to feel safe.
I despise people who treat children like "short adults." They aren't "short adults," they're CHILDREN. Their brains function differently. The ability to understand and cope with "delayed gratification" doesn't even start firing in the brain until they're approaching or in their teens.
I really wish I could have seen the facial expression I have that caused my children to freeze and do a mental rewind on the last five minutes of their life to search for whatever grievious error they had just committed. (It was fun to watch them do that.) They'd find it and apologize. Sometimes it was a small thing, like forgetting to say "please" or "thank you." Sometimes it was a bigger thing like "having a tone" when they spoke to their parents.
There's no simple solutions to problems like this, CD. Schools have classes that do things like the "sack of flour" project. (Sometimes it's an egg.) My kids did it with a five pound sack of flour. They were told that was an infant and to carry it around and care for it as if it were an infant, to teach them about the responsibilities of parenthood. (I babysat the sacks of flour for them.) Some kids took it deadly seriously, some kids didn't. They thought it was a big joke. Those kids are going to grow up to be real parents someday and it's a scary thought.