Are the parents portrayed positively in "The Veldt"?

I feel like I don’t belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and nursemaid. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and scrub the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic scrub bath can? I cannot. And it isn’t just me. It’s you. You’ve been awfully nervous lately.

When David McClean, the psychologist, instructs them to turn everything off for an entire year, the Hadley parents respond with surprise. They ask, "But won’t the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up abruptly, for good?" Their response once again proves that they care too much about their children's immediate feelings and do not know what is truly best for them. Eventually, George and Lydia decide to lock the nursery and take a vacation, which shows that they are "good" people attempting to fix their mistakes. Unfortunately, Peter and Wendy turn on them by locking their parents inside the nursery where they are eaten by hungry lions.

How is childhood depicted in "The Veldt"?

The children, Peter and Wendy, are discussed, and their characters are foreshadowed before they appear in the story. There is already strong evidence that their parents spoil them. The nursery cost half as much again as the rest of the house, but their father justified this extravagance on the basis that “nothing’s too good for our children.” When George and Lydia locked the nursery for a few hours a month ago to punish the children, they threw tantrums which their parents still recall.

The fact that the children spend all their time in artificial environments gives their childhood an ersatz, unreal quality. Apart from the nursery, they are described as attending a “special plastic carnival” across town. This lack of authenticity and contact with the natural world seems to have led to the frequent thoughts of death that give George and Lydia cause for concern.

When the children enter the story, they are described in highly artificial terms, eyes like agate marbles and smelling of ozone. They have ruined their appetites with junk food and their parents do not scold them for it. They quickly demonstrate their lack of respect for George and Lydia, who have taken a long time to realize what their offspring are really like. George eventually concludes:

Who was it said, “Children are carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally”? We've never lifted a hand. They're insufferable—let's admit it. They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring. They're spoiled and we're spoiled.

This realization comes too late. As David McClean notes, the children have already come to care much more for the nursery than for their parents, because it has spent more time entertaining them. The conclusion shows that the unnatural nature of Wendy and Peter’s spoiled, over-engineered childhood has led them to feel no natural affection whatsoever for the parents who gave them everything.