The word 父母 is formed by directly combining two fundamental, pictographic characters: 父, which depicts a hand holding a tool or scepter, representing the authority and role of a father, and 母, which depicts a woman with two dots emphasizing breasts, representing the nurturing and biological role of a mother. These two standalone characters for specific, individual parents are placed side-by-side without alteration to create a single, unified concept that encompasses the dual, complementary source of one's origin, the collective unit of "parents". It is a conceptual fusion, not a grammatical construction, merging two core familial figures into one holistic term.