Most parents are refugees from the pain of their work experiences and the pain of their childhoods.
They enter each encounter with their own children in a state of inner pain and frustration. Their attention is scattered and their perceptions blunted by dramas that have been going on in their lives long before their children entered the scene. The psychic costs of the world of work, I hope you remember, are not only impacting on the people in the most conventionally stressful jobs. While there are many people who have succeeded in repressing the awareness of the psychic costs of their jobs, the constant frustration of their needs to be creative and to use their intelligence at work still has an important impact. But the embedded falseness in one's personality necessitated by competition in the economic marketplace inevitably carries over into the relationships at home.