IT IS best to teach deep-seated values to a child before he or she turns six, it’s said. It’s in those years when you can impart love of family, nature, activity, and creativity... it’s because, during those years, the child even when already in school, still has more of the home structure of play, learn, and mingle.

After that comes the big school when the influence of the parents is set aside and the focus is on schoolwork.

For many, there are the grades to maintain and the honors to earn. There are the rewards to gloat about and achievements to reach. What is within is now reduced to just being a winner... or loser, and being upright or a goon.

Many a time, we get to interact with people whose principles, scruples, and way of thinking and perceiving things just don’t make sense to you. There are people too who seems more aggressive than normal, or more sensitive.

Try visiting the family, interact with them, and you will see an imprint. Toltec writer Don Miguel Ruiz who is well-known for his book “The Four Agreements” call this “the domestication of humans”.

“We train our children whom we love so much the same way we train any domesticated animal: with a system of punishment and reward,” the book reads.

Over the weekend, I had to contend with personal issues of people going through difficult periods in their lives, and as I get a peek into the stories they tell, I see a very strong influence, if not chains, of the family and the family’s best intentions.

We all have an idea how the best intentions of families are actually not helping us any. Many are even shackled tighter and trapped deeper because of these.

Humans that we are, it’s difficult to escape. Especially when our idea of our self is already how we have been programmed.

To many, it will be a lifetime of finding oneself in the same situation. To some, it will lead to frustration, while others just give up.

“But there is really no reason to suffer. The only reason you suffer is because you choose to suffer,” Ruiz wrote. “The same is true for happiness. The only reason you are happy is because you choose to be happy. Happiness is a choice, and so is suffering.”