Creating Sympathetic Characters

To create a sympathetic character, the key is to kill someone very close to them.  Preferably their mom.  But only if they liked her.  No one likes a character who hates their mother.  Stepmother, yes. Robot nanny, definitely. But if your character hates their mother, reference creating unsympathetic characters.  Even in Throw Mama from the Train, her son only sort of kind of hated her, and that made the movie acceptable.

Anyway, killing the mother or someone else really close, preferably when your character is very young is a good way to make a character more sympathetic. Physical attributes can also become sympathetic. For example, a girl with beautiful brown eyes, but a nose that is rather on the large side is much more sympathetic than her steely blue eyed perfect cheerleading counterpart.  Never use the word perfect, if you want your reader to find a character sympathetic. 

It's also important, if you have more than one sympathetic character to mix up the attributes that make them sympathetic.  You can kill one character's mother, but you can't kill every character's mother.  Unless you're writing a book about a world where everyone's mother has been killed, but then you'd need something even more sympathetic to differentiate your characters from the rest of the world, like that they have a blind father who they make soup for every day, from various wilderness shrubs.

How do you make sympathetic characters?