A fundamental psychological shift further separates the experience of today's children from that of previous generations. Decades ago, most kids carried parents around inside, whether they wanted to or not. Through endless channels, parents constituted a deeply felt, internal presence, however neurotic and oppressive it might sometimes have been. But what I encounter again and again in my practice is the startling reality that many parents have become psychically extruded from the inner lives of their children. While helicopter dads and soccer moms have become more and more adept at managing the logistical challenges of 20th-century family life, they're often too frenetically busy to exert an emotionally magnetic presence in the internal landscape of a child's world.
Increasingly, kids feel the fabric of connection tearing. From an early age, they've learned that most of the time they…