[true_religion]

While it's often pointed out that children are not rational actors, I'd also like to include that parents are not rational actors all the time either.

Often people want to impose a rule on their children without properly evaluating it because its what they were taught, and has become part and parcel of their socialization.

Other times people must impose a rule on their children due to government regulation (e.g. you can't leave children under X age home without someone over Y age responsible for them). In those cases, people fail to explain their guiding logic because no one likes to say "I have to do this, the government is making me do it through threat of jail time" and thus their justification---both to themselves and their children---comes off as flimsy.