Colin, your worries so honor your parenting role, lol.
I think what is called good manners, though often looked as a controlling or bourgeois bias, is most certainly a necessary teaching since we live as a group, and you can also consider this as the essential Buddhist observance of respect for the other… lol
I had three children and one of them now is also raising her first child so asked me how did I manage since it seemed that the three of them were taught those proverbial good manners without any remembered incident and they all developed what is apparently a wholesome free will too, lol
I realize that when I was raising these three, I paid attention to my ‘no’. I would pay attention if their action or request would be answered by a no, or not, on my part and if I said.. no, I would stick by it, and never go back.
I think the mistake we tend to make as worrying parents is that if we say no, we then are afraid to have a fight and if it is a toddler a tantrum. But if you happen to stick to your 'no" the child, who is in fact quite smart, realizes quickly if you will stick by it or not. And when he/she realizes you do stick, then the fight disappears.
While if you say 'no" and then start to negotiate, then the child feels, ‘all right, so to get what I want or to do what I want, I need to fight, and then I do get what I want, or I do get to do what my parent said no at first.’
And this fight/negotiation is exhausting for the parent, but also for the child ! And it is a source of great anxiety for the child, to know he has to fight, and he doesn’t know how hard the fight will be.
While a parent who says no for a certain thing and it is final, then the child feels, ok lets move on, it’s a no.
Of course you cannot say no to everything, so you have to pick what is essential to you as safety or as what behavior you want your child to learn.
It is interesting because I never really reflected on that before, I intuitively would say ‘no’ to certain things I deemed essential and it si in fact my daughter who said to me I knew that when you said no, it was final and it felt like there was a wall there and it felt safe.
The other thing and it is also my daughter who in fact taught me this. The way you behave yourself with others is incredibly important, as your child really observes you all the time,. So my daughter, again, told me, when I was small I saw that you treated others in a terribly respectful way and you would apologize often to anyone if you had made a mistake. And she added not just to other people but also to us children if you had got angry and you would come back to us and say, I am sorry I told this in an angry way, I apologize, but the message is the same though. So she said these things taught us this is what you do.
So Colin, humble little thoughts but it seems to have worked sort of well, lol
I think really that thinking about that you say no to, and what you authorize when they are very young, is essential.
And as they grow, you give more and more freedom of course to what they choose, and yes they will make mistakes, you wil cry inside, lol, but they will learn totally so much more this way.
And then lots of gentle humor soothe a lot of situations, it’s never too late to give a sense of humor oneself, and it takes off the drama of life… lol