What about your character's parents?

[caporushes 8]

I think it depends on the character, but for the most part I do put a decent amount of thought into their parents/upbringing in general. It's a pretty formative relationship, even when absent, so I think it's vital to consider. I don't necessarily come up with that much information for the parents themselves if they don't play an active role in my character's life at the outset, but I do prefer to at least put SOME thought into where they came from (both metaphorically and literally). A lot of the more specific details I kind of work out on the fly as they become relevant though. 

 

I think the most detailed thought I've ever put into it though was for a character I made in response to an ad from the player of her "father". Her parents (living, deceased, and otherwise) were such a core part of her it was really important to me to nail down a lot more detail than I normally do about her family situation. It gave us both some really great plot directions, too, so absolutely worth the effort overall. It's fun! 

[Shayne 5]

All of my characters have fleshed out family dynamics. Some are supportive and some are abusive, and some fall squarely in-between or swing more toward one side or another. Kaeya is close to his parents, as they're Trill and that's typical of Trill culture. They don't always agree on things (they groomed him to be part of a familial legacy and he bucked the trend by getting Joined, which smarted) but they support one another and his parents have been instrumental in helping pass down the centuries of generational knowledge they hold on Manevian customs to his child.

Alan does not know what happened to his parents, and he was raised on an impoverished colony world by human settlers who were homeless. It's a source of strife for him that he isn't aware of what led his two Betazoid parents to abandon him on a junk pile, as that is extremely uncommon for Betazoid society. It is unlikely he will ever learn what happened to his parents so I didn't bother fleshing them out, but I did flesh out the people who took care of him as a toddler/young child. 

Peer is an AI who was constructed by a terraformer seeking to push the bounds of life itself, and struggles with participation-induced stress responses as they killed many colonists on the planet to try and fulfil their original directive of preserving the planet's homeostasis. They since gained self-awareness and understand the moral implications of their actions. Their creator is now deceased, and they have been adopted by Kaeya, who is Shari's most recent host.

 

Hiram's parents were human diplomats who went to Laile to try and assist the population there but were killed by a militant group called the Laile Resistance. Hiram was kidnapped by them and trained as a soldier, with the assistance of a tropane alkaloid called hishuri that somewhat sublimated his free will. Hiram has no recollection of them and efforts to track down relatives willing to take Hiram in (as he was very violent and unsocialized) were unsuccessful. He was then adopted by a Starfleet admiral and his wife who intercepted his vessel in the area and deprogrammed. He has a loving relationship with them and credits them with his success.