What are D.H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner " comments on parenting?I'm doing a research paper on the parenting and i need to develop a...

I don't have a very high opinion of the parents in "The Rocking-Horse Winner."  Both of them are pretty selfish, petty, and cold.  We hear more about the mother; not very much is mentioned of the father.  All we know is that

"The father, who was always very handsome and expensive in his tastes, seemed as if he never would be able to do anything worth doing,"

and, as the mother bitterly puts to her son Paul, "He hasn't any luck."  She has the bad taste to talk very badly about their father in front of the children, and that distaste for him can only be catching.  The mother herself is selfish and cold.  Lawrence states bluntly of her lack of affection for her children,

"yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them."

Even later when Paul makes his mother all of that money, in order to earn the love that she doesn't feel for him, she does not appreciate it or use it wisely.  She squanders it, and still shows no love for her son.  At the end of the story we see her display anxiety over Paul's strange behavior, but still no love.  After his death, there is no display of emotion, and she had no idea that her own son had been betting on horses.  Even the gardner knew that for pete's sake.

So, both parents are overly materialistic, to the detriment of their family.  Their shallowness and greed come before everything, including their children, which drives their children away from them, and to do dangerous things to win their affection. They are unaware of the activities of their kids, and try to buy their affection with toys.  All of these things make them pretty lousy parents.

For a thesis, try going with something from the above paragraph, and tying it to Lawrence's themes of greed and vanity.  It could go as follows:  "The parenting of the adults in the story reflects the harm that greed can have upon the human spirit."  Then you could use examples of how the parents are all of the above (what I mentioned in the above parent), and how that reflected greed, and led to the destruction of Paul.  I hope that those thoughts helped a bit; good luck!