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With gratitude to Drs. Axelman and Bellinson for their eloquent deepening of our understanding of the need for the development and negotiation of internal and external limit setting in the child, in the parents, and in the consultation room, this discussion expands on those ideas by placing them in the historical context, in which “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child” has been replaced with “Use the Rod, Lose the Child.” Parenting by guilt and chronic parental anxiety leads to parenting too much to compensate for parenting too little, which in turn leads to both an overaggressive child with a poor internal brake system and the parent's split image of the child as both a feared but also a fragile object. Work with parents will necessitate substituting authenticity and benign authority for opulent neglect, and work with children in the playroom will have to take into consideration the possibility that the universal trait of seeking internal limits may be inhibited or impaired by underaggressive parenting, necessitating that the therapist step outside the traditional bounds of observer, interpreter, and transference object, and into the position of container and holding environment in which the child can repair the deficits in the capacity for self-regulation.