This gets asked in two very different states of mind. Sometimes it is a worry about somebody else's child. More often it is a parent at eleven at night wondering whether they have already ruined something.
What the word is doing
"Discipline" has quietly come to mean punishment, and the two are not the same thing. The older meaning is closer to instruction: the things a child has been taught and can now do. A house can be full of consequences and short of discipline in that sense, and it can have almost no punishments and plenty of it.
What actually goes missing
| What people picture | What actually matters |
|---|---|
| Not enough consequences | Consequences that arrive sometimes, so none of them teach |
| Not enough firmness | Rules that change depending on how tired the adult is |
| Not enough respect | Almost no attention attached to the things that go right |
The child who genuinely struggles is not the one whose parents were too soft. It is the one who could not predict what would happen, so nothing they did seemed connected to anything that followed. Predictability is the whole mechanism, and it is available to a strict house and a gentle one equally.
The reassuring part
If you are asking this question you are almost certainly not describing your own house. A parent worried about it is a parent paying attention, and attention is the ingredient that is actually scarce. The fix, if one is needed, is rarely more severity. It is fewer rules, held to every single time, and somebody noticing out loud when they are kept.