Your last paragraph (if I'm reading it correctly) leads to a point I've often mulled over. We tend as parents to overcompensate for what happened to us as children. I think this happens at the social-historical level too. Traditional child-rearing was something between harsh and brutal. Physical and emotional violence was common. We have rightly come to abhor that. But, typically human, we (or at least the educated white North American middle class) have merely flipped a bit and gone to the opposite extreme of elevating our children to little gods. This can't be good for the little buggers, deceive ourselves and adore our own virtue though we may. (Side note to the indignant: I like children. Including my own!)

Back to how, as parents, we overcompensate for what happened to ourselves in the past: we do this unconsciously, so it's hard to know that we're doing it. And it's a bad thing, because almost inevitably we end up creating a mirror image of the old mistakes. But there is a way out of this dilemma: personal healing and growth. To the extent that one can integrate one's own experience, feel one's own feelings, etc., one becomes free of the compulsion to resolve them through one's child and able to behold the child as an independent being.