To understand the inner child, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of personality. How the human personality is created is explained in a variety of ways from a variety of viewpoints. As any parent of multiple children knows, that while their children get essentially the same love and care, they each are unique, sometimes drastically different. Although our environment plays a large part in the development of the personality of a child, so do our genetics. Reunited twins, or the discovery of long lost parents often reveal amazing similarities in personality that can't be accounted environmentally. The only other explanation is that our genes determine a great deal about our disposition. Our disposition could also be called our karma, for the way one approaches life has a great deal to do with the reality one creates in that life.

There are a variety of components to the personality, explained in a variety of ways within psychology and spirituality. According to Dr. George Boeree (1997), Carl Jung calls the personality the psyche and theorizes it has three components: the ego (the conscious mind), the personal unconscious (personal knowledge that is not currently conscious, but could be), and the collective unconscious (that which we are born knowing or the "psychic inheritance"). The universal archetypes, such as the Mother, Father, Anima and Animus, Hero, Maiden, Warrior, and so on, are in the collective unconscious. They also have an effect on the personal unconscious as we individually live the archetypes the way our culture defines them. The inner child and Adolescent can be seen as one of these archetypes of the psyche.