Children are not experienced enough to understand the behaviors of their parents. However, children actually "do" have a sense of what is wrong. Children also don't know how to tell their parents they need help, also, often children are afraid to tell their parents things too, I had noticed that a lot while raising my daughter in how her friends were afraid of their parents.

I do know that children tend to "feel" that when a parent goes away and doesn't stay involved that it must mean the parent doesn't love the child enough.

The "norm" that I had noticed with a lot of parents when I was raising my own child is the increase in how parents were getting more and more self involved and missing a very important part of raising their children to actually "form" an identity. The big problem I faced is that I did make it a point to be "there" for my daughter and help her form an identity was that her piers often failed to respect that because they were not raised that way.

What I have also noticed is that it is not even that a mother has to be a provider and doesn't have the time to nurture the way a child needs her to. Often there are mothers who are actually wealthy and are so self involved and fail to be "there" for their child as well. The same is true for the father who may be so self involved being successful that the father is not there for the child.

I saw an example of this one time when I took my daughter to a horse show. I noticed a little girl standing by the ring holding a beautiful white pony that I later found out her father spent $100,000 on. When I asked her why she was crying she said that "daddy promised he would be here today and he is not coming". Her father was teaching her to replace "love and nurturing" with things and thats a bad way to raise a child too. That is the one time that I had realized that even "the best" pony can't replace something important.

We are missing something very important in our society, it's been getting worse too. There is a hum on this site of so many struggling and a lot of these challenges began in early childhood.