‘Tis the season to be guilty.

Or at least it is for harried parents trying to make up for the other 364 days when they don’t have time for their kids.

With so much emphasis today on building careers and pulling in big incomes, the season for giving is becoming increasingly motivated by guilty consciences.

The Los Angeles Times recently polled 1,000 California households and found parents are worried they don’t spend enough time with their children.

Fifty-seven percent of fathers and 55 percent of mothers surveyed said they feel guilty about spending too little time with their families.

And with the coming of the holiday season – a time when family togetherness is stressed – parents are apt to want to fill that gap between them and their children with lavish gifts.

Unfortunately for them, those superficial gifts can’t replace the unselfish giving of a parent’s time-what’s now characterized with the 1990s buzzwords “quality time” and “parent/child bonding.”

One of the more ironic points of the California poll is the several respondents, including the wealthiest of the group, complained of “pervasive materialism” among their children.

Do you remember that kid in one of your grade-school classes that seemed to have a direct line to Santa Claus and a no-fail way to play on his parents’ guilt?

Maybe his parents were divorced and he was being raised in a single-parent household – like 18 percent of American families. Or maybe they just got so bent on providing the “good life” for their child they actually forgot about him.

Somewhere between daycare, the sitter, music lessons, the orthodontist and college, some parents forget to sit down and know their kid.

Years often flow along, punctuated every six months or so by some sort of family holiday or birthday. Resolutions are made to spend more time, but they’re forgetten in the midst of monthly bills (for the sitter, music lessons and orthodontist), income tax and college tuition.

Jack Solomon, author of “The Signs of Our Times,” theorizes that gifts – which can include everything from Ninja Turtles to Nintendo – are more than bribes for affection. In our modern time toys “are people substitutes, surrogates for absent or exhausted parents.

“To make certain that they aren’t at a loss for thing so do, we give our kids lots of toys (that is if we can afford them), and so assuage any guilt we may feel for leaving them so much on their own,” Solomon says.

Quite honestly, parents and their children have never gotten along perfectly, so this isn’t a new dilemma. But in or innovative modern age, we seem to find more and more ways to avoid complicated communication.

One fairly new line of greeting cards is targeted at parents who feel the need to cmmunicate with their kids, but don’t know how to do it face to face. The card acts as mediator and eases that sometimes stressful “parent/child bonding.”

This is not to condemn parents who obviously want the best for their children, but a suggestion to re-evaluate priorities or set priorities before you have children.