Guidance to me means being an example and setting limits, not controlling or being punitive. Guidance to me means teaching that actions can have negative consequences or rewarding consequences, allowing the child to experience natural consequences, and teaching them how to think about consequences before they act.
The conservative examples sound like environments of non-acceptance, control, and punishment.
Just because your friend's parents allowed her to smoke weed and were liberal doesn't mean they were totally lax. I'd need to know more. Maybe her parents felt that making weed taboo would only make it more desirable, which would give it and other drugs undue power. Maybe her parents were successful socially and in work, and were good examples. Maybe they taught her values and tools for experiencing success. Maybe they set limits but weren't abusive, which gave her a foundation for feeling confident and capable.
I've heard plenty of stories on the forum and elsewhere of people whose parents let them do whatever they wanted, and while they enjoyed it at the time, they didn't know how to understand the variety of limits adults are faced with nor how to deal with them, and they felt directionless.
My parents were conservative, punitive, and non-accepting of difference. And I was very different from them.
My father had social anxiety and, while other people liked him and sought his friendship, he had no intimate, close friendships. My mother had some friendships, but her being sociable was limited by my father's not being sociable, so I never had an example of true intimate friendships and relying on friends for support, including friends who support by challenging one's ideas and beliefs, or to have friendships that were as important and strong, or almost as much, as a marriage and the nuclear family.
My mother was supposedly my friend and I hers, but that friend hit me and verbally abused me, and my focus was on pleasing her and being attentive to her wants and needs, but it wasn't mutual. She did not seek my approval, but I was to seek hers. So it's hard for me to understand a parent as a friend, but I would have appreciated and benefitted from parents who taught me critical thinking skills and rewarded good behavior, rather than setting demands and punishing any behavior that strayed from those demands. I would have appreciated parents who weren't isolated and isolating so that I could have had examples of the benefits of friendship.
Their punitiveness and non-acceptance also made it difficult for me to understand limits in the adult world because I tended to rebel against and resent authority since it was equated with control. I reacted to much authority as controlling and therefore not to my benefit, and I didn't have the skills and savvy to work with authority to my advantage, nor to mutual advantage.
