Is awareness of a problem a necessary criterion to feel the effects of the problem?

If a child has been brought up in a jail right from the birth without any knowledge of the external world, is the jail, jail to the child or a home? (Remember the movie, The Truman Show?)

We all want to minimize problems/pain/loss and maximize happiness/comfort/pleasure/gain etc. However, this is seldom easy to achieve and hence a large fraction of the population struggles with various problems from time to time. I am interested in one particular aspect about problems in general - Is awareness of a problem a necessary criterion to feel the effects of the problem?

I would like to break down the problem with problems into various components to get a better picture of it.

This post is mainly concerned about the cell which says 'YES AND NO' in the above tabular column.  Let's examine the conditions under which it is YES and conditions under which it is NO.

NO - This is a no-brainer. Whether the parents are aware of the possibility of mental illness at a later stage of their children's life or not, it has no bearing on the result. If the nature and nurture interplay results in the problem (mental illness in this context), the parents have to just deal with it (of course, the kids too)

YES - This is where things get interesting and troublesome. Irrespective of the awareness of the effect, if the children get the problem (mental illness in this case), they have got it. However, there is a chance that this problem might not be perceived as a problem by the parents. They might rationalize this by saying, "This is all a part of nature". However, if you ask the same parents whether they will drive a car which has a high probability of breaking down, they will refuse and not rationalize by saying, "This is all a part of nature". But when it comes to children, often parents fail to recognize the problems involved. This is where the answer to the question in context becomes YES. Awareness of a problem becomes a necessary criterion to feel the effects of the problem. 

What does all of this leave the knowledgeable other with? In the context of the child birth, I was the self-appointed knowledgeable other due to my strong anti-natalist ideology. Very often, I have tried to dissuade people from giving birth to children on various grounds but most importantly, the Anna Karenina principle - since we have limited control on the trajectory of a life of a child, there is a possibility of many things going wrong and hence it is logical to refrain from giving birth. However, not surprisingly, I often lose the battle in front of the power of the millions of years of evolution which has given people a strong predisposition to engage in procreation. But something got me thinking. I have always believed in the objective reality to the sensations of pain and pleasure. However, if a person does not become aware of the problem, will the effect of the objective reality still hold good? In such a case, should I even intervene? 

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?". Similarly, "If people don't perceive a problem as a problem, has the problem caused problems?"