How much do you have in common with the adults who raised you?

Maybe you share a parent’s sense of humor, an aunt’s perfectionism, a guardian’s extroversion or a sibling’s determination — or maybe you feel like your personality is unique among your family members.

In “The Challenge of Raising a Kid Who’s Just Like You,” Jessica Grose, an Opinion writer, observes her similarities with her daughter:

For me, lately, the hardest part of parenting is raising a kid whose personality reflects my own like a mirror. One of my children is a perfectionist and incredibly hard on herself, just like me. My discomfort comes from watching her struggle with the same things I continue to struggle with at 40, and knowing in my heart that these issues may plague her all her life and that there may not be much I can do about it.

Here’s a small example of how it plays out for us: She brought a library book with her on our family vacation a few weeks ago and accidentally left it on the plane to Florida. First, she was worried that her school’s librarian would be mad at her. No matter how much we tried to reassure her that she wasn’t the first kid to misplace a library book and that the librarian wouldn’t take it personally, she was still anxious about it for the whole trip, to the point of not sleeping one night.

Then, without any prompting from me or my husband, she took money from her allowance and put it in her backpack, preparing herself to pay for the lost book on the Monday she returned to school. (I was proud that she wanted to take ownership but dismayed by her obsession with such a forgivable mistake.) Even though the librarian didn’t really chastise her, and she did pay for the book, my daughter still occasionally mentions the incident, donning the discomfort of that moment just to feel it bristle against her skin.

I’m intimately familiar with these feelings, as they’re also what I feel when I make any kind of mistake, and watching my kid experience them is even worse than feeling them myself. It’s not even just knowing that I can’t shield her from that anxiety; it’s also feeling guilty that she inherited my neuroses.

The whole episode made me flash back to taking calculus in my senior year of high school, getting a pop quiz I was totally unprepared for and bursting into extremely public and uncontrollable tears. In addition to my embarrassment, I bombed that quiz and remember losing sleep over whether that would mean that I would fail the class, then not get into any colleges, and end up permanently unemployable. It was a fully ridiculous set of catastrophic fears that caused me an unnecessary amount of upset. It’s an avalanche of feelings I would love my daughter not to get buried under.

Yet she isn’t going to stop being who she is — nor would I want her to — so the goal for me is to figure out how to support her and also get to a place where my own feelings about her feelings are less overwhelming.

Students, read the entire article and then tell us:

• How much do you have in common with the adults who raised you? Are there personality traits you see in yourself that you also see in them? Which ones?

• How do you feel about the similarities between yourself and your parents, guardians or other family members? Do they ever cause you distress, as Ms. Grose experienced? Or do you feel differently?

• Are there traits you see in the people who take care of you that you do not see in yourself? Which ones? Why do you think that is?

• How do you think parents like Ms. Grose should talk to their children about what they have in common? How have your parents addressed the similarities they share with you?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.