On a recent chilly night, I put on a pink hat (a…weird decision since my hair is purple), so my four-year-old daughter wanted to wear her pink hat. Our commonalities go deeper than headwear: She sways to music the same way I do, loves The Great British Baking Show the way I do, and on this weekend’s donut run, my husband said she dramatically sighed and said, just like her mother, “My nerves are shot.”

Though parenthood is far from formulaic, it’s still fraught with plenty of this kind of inadvertent copy-pasting. We experience a similar phenomenon as adults when we catch a glimpse of our reflection in the mirror or hear ourselves talk and think, “I am my mother!” Replication happens all the time with parents and their kids, and often the stakes are higher than pink hats and reflections.