I\'m building a CMS using Laravel 4 and I have a base admin controller for the admin pages that looks something like this:
class AdminController extends BaseCont
I've also ended up with this problem and cleared this mess by not calling constructor at child class and use extra needed dependencies inside the function parameters.
It will work with controllers because you won't need to call these functions manually and you can inject everything there. So common dependencies goes to the parent and less needed will be added to the methods itself.