Bad logic from Annie's Mailbox

Annie's mailbox response to a parent whose son's girlfriend doesn't have a curfew:

You might consider raising his weekday curfew by one hour as long as it doesn't affect his school performance, but giving him unlimited freedom is actually likely to create some insecurities. We feel sorry for Holly, whose parents give the impression they don't care about their daughter.

Yeah yeah yeah, I know that's the conventional wisdom. But think back, in first person, to your own adolescence. Think about the first time you, personally, didn't have a curfew, or it wasn't enforceable, or it was otherwise feasible for you to stay out however long you wanted.

Did you feel insecure? Did you feel like your parents didn't care about you?

I don't know about you, but I felt pretty much neutral about the whole thing. I didn't even feel anything strong enough to say I felt liberated. It was just "Finally I can let the evening's activities take their natural course without having to be home at some completely arbitrary time." Since then I have once in a while felt a glimmer of liberation, just like how I sometimes revel in the fact that I can sleep until noon and eat junk food for breakfast and no one will stop me, but overall it was a small sigh of relief that life was now more reasonable.

Actually, if anything made me feel insecure or that my parents didn't care about me, it was arbitrary rules. Arbitrary rules made me feel like my parents didn't care about me, personally, as an individual, with my own personal needs. It made me feel like they were trying to parent an archetype or a stereotype, or trying to pat themselves on the back for being such good parents. "You can't go to that boy's house unless his parents are there. Look at us, we are such good parents, much better than the parents who let their daughters go to boys' houses unsupervised." As it happens, they didn't have to worry about the boy. I couldn't even get him to kiss me. However, I didn't feel comfortable around his father and wasn't about to go to his house if the father was there. How could I feel secure and cared about with rules like that?