The impact of early childhood lessons can be best understood from a biological framework. Since human beings, relative to the animals, survive by intellect rather than instinct, a human child's primary biological urge is to learn how to survive; to learn to be like his parents. In this context, the parent is the supreme, unquestionable authority. Winning parental approval is, in the child's mind, equivalent to being worthy of survival (lovable, good). Parental disapproval, likewise, is equivalent to a message that something about the child is, in some way, unfit for survival (unlovable, bad). Through parental expressions of approval and disapproval, the child learns to see the world, and himself, through his parents eyes. Barring traumatic events, what a child learns by about age six remains as a framework upon which all future learning is based.

This parental authority, based in a biological assumption of parental fitness for both parenthood and survival, is the ultimate measuring stick for the child's perception of his own “fitness for survival/goodness/lovability” or “unfitness/badness/unlovability.”

In the “ideal” family, parents have excellent self images, a good sense of their own self worth and a system of values that serves them well. They effectively pass these on to their children through modeling, mirroring, warm and loving support, encouragement and confidence in the child's growing ability. In the ideal family, the child learns he is loveable by being loved. He learns he is capable of loving by the warm response of his parents to his loving gestures. Being the ultimate authority, the parents showing of interest and concern for the child, treating the child as valuable, can't be questioned. All this is learned. All this is the framework on which future lessons are built.