What aspects of contemporary family life do the “Happylife Home” and the nursery satirize? What exactly have the Hadleys “purchased” for...

The Happylife home satirizes the way people try to use technology to raise their children, and, more generally, satirizes the way people use technology to try to make life "easier" for themselves. Written in the 1950s, though projected into the future, the story satirizes using television to raise your children, but the satire is equally, if not more, applicable to the present moment, when children can watch media almost constantly: in cars, at home, on computers or cell phones. 

The story illustrates that the easy life is not necessarily the good life, no matter what consumer culture might try to tell us. We need to control technology, not let it control us. Although the story says the house "sang to them ... and was good to them," the Happylife Home leads the Hadleys to misery. Technology in this story tears the family apart, in the parents' case literally. The amenities of the Happylife Home leave Lydia feeling useless and anxious as the home takes over her role, and lead the children to favor their nursery and its viewscreen as "parent" over their real parents. The $30,000 Happylife home plus $15,000 nursery buys little more than unhappiness and death.