Families and How to Survive Them is a bestselling self-help book co-authored by the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Robin Skynner and the comedian John Cleese.

The book is a description and analysis of how and why we fall in love, how we develop from babies to adolescents to adults, and how during this development we so often become "stuck" in childlike behaviour, and how all these things are influenced by previous generations in our families.

The authors themselves have said that the aim of the book was "to make intelligible and accessible the psychological aspects of how families behave and function, what makes some work and others fail, and how families can move up the scale towards greater health and happiness".

[1] The motivation behind it was to "make available to the general public, in a way that was easy to absorb, those aspects of psychological knowledge we had found most helpful ourselves towards making life more understandable, meaningful, and enjoyable".

Cleese, who attended a lengthy course of group therapy at the institute in the mid seventies, was so impressed by what he experienced that, motivated by a desire to spread what lay behind the therapy to a wider audience, proposed to Skynner that they write a book summarising and outlining the principles involved.