While children were usually present while their parents farmed or ran family businesses or raised livestock, there is no place for children of a retail clerk on the floor of the department where he works, or for the offspring of a computer programmer in the cubicle farm where she spends most of her hours. Even when we do live near our extended families, most of those siblings and grandparents are also working - so children are displaced. So every morning, most of our children are taken to daycare centers or sent off to schools. Their parents rush off to work, pick the kids up on the way home - or the children come home to an empty house and wait for their parents to get home. By the time everyone is home, there's little time or energy left for much interaction.
Most people insist that nobody has time for regular sit-down family dinners any more.
Weekends are often full of work brought home and soccer games or other scheduled activities. Home just isn't all that central to most people in any real sense any more. Work and school are the center of most people's lives, and most schools are designed to prepare children for being good little employees. I do think that a grassroots movement back to the home as the center of our lives will naturally improve those problems and make many more positive changes in our society. Again, I'm not talking about women leaving the workforce - and in fact I don't believe it's truly healthy for children to be around either men or women exclusively instead of being raised equally by people of both genders.