What is the mood of "The Veldt"?

On one level, the mood of "The Veldt" is clearly one of fear and paranoia. We can sense this from the very first lines of the story:

"George, I wish you'd look at the nursery."

"What's wrong with it?"

"I don't know."

"Well, then."

"I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it."

"What would a psychologist want with a nursery?"

"You know very well what he'd want."

Clearly, the mother is upset about something. What we discover is that she is afraid that the technologically advanced house they have bought, and specifically the nursery, a kind of giant three dimensional TV set, has undermined their authority as parents with their two children, Wendy and Peter. There is a sense that the children know something the adults do not. There is something unsettling about the scenes of Africa they find in the nursery. Maybe Peter has tampered with the Nursery, so that the parents cannot control it?

This mood of paranoia is amplified when the parents confront the children about the nursery, and Peter flatly denies that they had anything to do with Africa. It is amplified still more when the father says he is thinking about turning the house off, Peter responds by saying "I don't think you'd better consider it any more, Father." Are the children becoming smarter and more powerful than the parents?

On another level, the story has a darkly comic mood to it. If we think of the story as a satire of the nuclear family, we can see how the efforts of the parents to "provide" for their children actually afford the children the means to supercede parental authority. Since the whole point of raising children is to make their lives better, we can see in the parent's reaction to their kids that 1) they don't understand them very well and 2) maybe their house has more to say about them and their desire to be "babied" than it does about their care for their children. In this case, Bradbury seems to suggest that maybe Wendy and Peter are the real adults in the story.