Or, hear me out, he grows up resentful of all who lord their undeserved power over him, like billions of other children already do?
Most children are successfully socialized into the culture they’re raised in. I think the usual though process is “I was hit by adults when I was a child” -> “I hit children now that I’m an adult” rather than rebellion.
“Hitting children for any reason is wrong” is an idea that only recently developed in Western culture. It isn’t universal in space or in time and without it, children still generally didn’t grow up to distrust authority or hate injustice.
(Consider a similar phenomenon in the Soviet Army: the tradition of senior conscripts abusing junior conscripts. All those senior conscripts were recently junior conscripts themselves and yet the tradition continues.)
That’s a very black-and-white way of looking at it. As children grow older, so too do their elders. Eventually the power balance (so to speak) shifts, and both the child and the elder learn who can hit harder.
Locking up parents you don’t like in a nursing home is also a recent, Western development. Generally grown children don’t seek revenge against their parents even in societies where physical violence against children is common. On the contrary, these societies usually have strong norms requiring the respect of elders.
(It’s ironic that by historical standards, Western parents treat their children exceptionally well but Western children treat their parents exceptionally poorly.)
