Background
One of five children, my own upbringing was totally controlled by my father. He had been a chief petty officer in the Royal Australian Navy for 12 years and his approach to parenting was based on rigid discipline. If you did something wrong, you were belted; simple as that.
We had very little contact with other children in the small town that we grew up in. The whole of the time I was growing up, I never once spent a night staying over at a friend's house or had a friend come to stay over at ours. Weekends were spent working under the control of my father. Usually the three boys worked outside with him, while my two sisters worked inside with their mother.
There were very few open signs of affection in our family environment. I have never given or been given a hug by my father. I cannot ever remember seeing my father kiss my mother. As far as I know my father will go to his grave without ever telling any of his five children that he loved them.
Receiving a "well done" or any other form of congratulations for anything done well was also very rare. I can only remember receiving a "well done" once in my life. That was when my final year high school exam results were released in the "Sun" newspaper and I had scored first class honours in physics, chemistry, calculus and applied mathematics, and pure mathematics. This was pretty much a perfect score, and it was the only time in my life that my father even privately conceded to me that I had done something well.
Criticism for not doing well was freely and frequently handed out. I remember when I had to make a speech at my high school graduation ceremony because I was the school captain. As I walked off stage the deputy principal quietly said "well spoken" to me. When I saw my father afterwards his only comment was "you didn't say very much".
Throughout my early childhood another lesson we were taught was that "children should be seen but not heard". If we were out at a social function as a family we would be expected to sit quietly most of the time while the adults did all the talking.
I could continue on with this but I do not want to suggest that I was very badly done by in my upbringing. What I have written here is probably typical of the way many parents brought up their children at the time. But I think it is important for you to understand why I later became totally committed to being a good parent when my turn came.
This was just the foundation that I started from, and I think that I was very lucky to have the other learning experiences that allowed me to believe and see there was an alternative way to raise your children. The point is that, even as a naïve young man, totally ignorant in the ways of the world and the nature of people in it, I was already sure that the parenting I was brought up with was a long way from ideal.
Many people believe that you grow up like your parents, and that you inherit your behaviour from them. I have no doubts this is totally false. I believe that, in the absence of any definite decisions that you make regarding the way you want to behave in any given situation, your behaviour will "default" to those of your significant role models when you were young. That is usually your parents.
But this is not genetic; you are just copying their behaviour. Many people do not make decisions to act differently; most probably do not think much about it at all, and they seem content to simply act the way their parents did. That is the reason why a lot of (the same) people believe that you inherit your behaviour from your parents. You don't and you are free to choose the way you behave in any given situation.