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As childhood life scripts are formed by the age of 5 or 6 years old, and certain aspects originate in infancy, our family dynamic plays a large part in our own personal life scripts. The ideal situation is where all members of the family are loving, with many positive attitudes being formed. The worst is when all members are unloving, with various combinations of loving and unloving possible.

From a child’s point of view the most important is to have a loving father and mother.

A loving father offers protection and discipline; an unloving father who is harsh, critical and controlling can lead to children, especially male children, having problems with authority figures. 

A loving mother is nurturing, guiding and accepting. An unloving mother can be spoiling, aloof or may be ambivalent.

Loving brothers brings loyalty, daring and enterprise. Unloving brothers can be bullies and rebellious.

Loving sisters are intuitive, caring and have finesse. Unloving sisters play the martyr or drama queen and are spiteful.

Looking at this list of attributes it is easy to identify the influence your family had on your life script and therefore on your life. Very few family members would follow this exactly; most would be a mix of attributes. To the extent that these behaviors become part of our own scripts we mimic our parents and siblings. 

Trials with subliminal statements and students found that the statement which had the most effect in improving student performance was “Mom and I are one”.

Boys tend to compete with their fathers for the mother’s affections and girls tend to compete with their mothers. As a result both can become expert politicians and manipulators, playing the one parent off against the other as well as manipulating their siblings. This is particularly harmful if the parents are not alert for this.

It must be remembered that we as parents are our children’s first teachers. What they learn from us and our parents is often passed on to their children. This is how family traditions are born.

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