This is it

First you have to recognize that what happened to you, either as a child or maybe later, affects the way you treat other people, particularly your own children. Then you have to accept that even though you believe you are not doing what was done to you, even working against it, you emanate it in yourself and how you are in the world. For most people, most of the time, these are positive things. We were brought up to know good from bad and to hold dear moral values which we demonstrate and inculcate in our children, and even those around us. We are attracted to people who espouse and demonstrate their beliefs are like our own.
But let’s face it, it isn’t so clean and nice as that
If you were brought up to believe that you were lazy or stupid, and you hated your parents for portraying you in that way, you might be very aware of not letting that affect the way you bring up your own children, or treat your loved ones, but equally, you probably spent your whole life over-working in order not to appear lazy, or being addended to knowledge in order not to seem stupid. Your children begin by seeing you as the perfect role model, (though it’s obviously all down hill from day one), but your diligence and intelligence become aspirations for them. And you do judge them in the way you were judged, even if you try not to.
In truth, most of the gnarled and warped traits which are subliminal, the ones you want not to present, have much more negative effects on those around you, and they may never be comfortable with the thing they think or feel you want them to be, even if you actually don’t want them to be that.
To be fair to your parents, and the generation that they represent, they themselves were not treated well, and in most cases, suffered privations and abuses which were considered perfectly acceptable. They were almost all slapped or worse, without any claim to being mis-treated. They were expected to be seen and not heard, to be made to do work at a young age, to be given less physical love than they needed and so many more negative things, and they passed on much of this without change, because it was ‘the norm’ for them.
What about if you were deserted or ignored and left to fend for yourself in growing up? Did you achieve despite the lack of support, and as a consequence, expect others to do the same, or did you suffer for the lack of support and do you over-protect others and try to compensate? How many people actually believe that their children have it too easy and that the protection of this generation will lead to less independence and less achievement? How many others believe that the pressures to achieve and succeed have never been so intense as they are now, and that the relative wealth of society means that a net of secure love and material security should be installed under the tightrope they are walking? I think that if you survived an upbringing that was not positive, you will have to resolve in yourself the conflict between wanting it to have been OK, and so accepting its hardships as ‘acceptable’, and wanting to recognize its inadequacy and to avoid such suffering in others.
You want everyone to fulfill their potential. You reinforce their behaviour that is goal-directed and you recognize their achievements, but do you set an impossibly high bar for them because you never felt good enough yourself? Do you even recognize achievements that are not among your own goals? Worse, do you subliminally re-iterate the messages you were given about not being good enough?