"Us" and "them"

When I go about my daily tasks, i.e. chores: ironing, picking up the clothes lying around in my room, cooking, etc. I often think about my mom. I get flashbacks to her daily routines. I think about her urging me to pick out my clothes the night before school or about preparing my lunch the day before instead of waiting to do it half an hour before I walked out of the door the next morning. I think about her ironing on Saturday nights while watching Sabado Gigante or mopping the floors on a sunny Saturday morning instead of running away from chores under the excuse that it's a "nice day outside."
Now, don't get me wrong. I haven't always had these flashbacks and I don't always follow in my mother's footsteps in this way. In fact, I am nowhere near as clean and organized and disciplined as she was during my childhood. But, as I strive to be more organized and disciplined post-college, these memories inspire and motive me.
Going back in this way helps normalize what I'm doing and deters me from sitting down in front of facebook, for instance, or from taking a nap when I know I should be getting ready for the next day. I suppose that for most of us this process is more subconscious. However, for some of us, the households we grew up in do not inspire such actions. For some of us, our childhoods consisted of parents who did not work, suffered from some mental or physical illness and were bed ridden most of the time. Some of our parents did not wake us up for school--we woke ourselves up. Some of our parents did not iron or mop or pick up the clothes on the floor consistently, except for some small bouts of inspired moments when this was the case. And I imagine that for those of us whose parents struggled in this way, inspiration to go about completing daily tasks must come from somewhere else.
I think about these things because of my line of work; because everyday my job reminds me of the lines that are drawn between "us" and "them." My job causes me to think about thinking patterns that shape our behavior or our potential to learn and grow. And often, we are products of the upbringings we had--with the possible exceptions of those outlier children--the Rory Gilmores and the Barak Obama's and the genuises who managed to pull themselves up by the genetic bootstraps they were given. But for most of us, we are direct products of our environments. When we experience this kind of lack, where do we get the tools we were "supposed" to get when we were 5 years old and the foundation for our adult lives was being laid?