Living things pass traits to their offspring. Traits are features like eye color, hair color, height, flower color, and leaf shape. You got your traits from your parents — that is why you might have your mother's nose or your father's curly hair. These passed-down features are called inherited traits.
Compare pictures of family members — which features do children share with their parents? Grow plants from seeds of different parent plants and observe which features the baby plants inherit. Draw your own face and label which features came from which parent.
Have you ever been told "you look just like your mom" or "you have your dad's smile"? That is because you inherited traits from your parents. Inherited traits are features that are passed from parents to their children — things like eye color, hair color, height, nose shape, and whether your earlobes hang free or attach directly to your head.
Every living thing inherits traits. A kitten inherits its fur color and pattern from its parents. A baby sunflower inherits the color of its petals from the parent plant. A tadpole inherits the ability to grow into a frog because its parents were frogs. Inherited traits are the reason babies always look like the same kind of creature as their parents — a robin's egg always hatches into a robin, never into a blue jay.
You get traits from both your parents, which is why you might have your mother's brown eyes but your father's curly hair. You are a unique mix of traits from both sides. This also explains why brothers and sisters can look different from each other even though they have the same parents — each child receives a different combination of traits. It is like reaching into a big jar of mixed jellybeans with two hands — you get something from the jar both times, but you might pull out different flavors each time.
Not everything about you is inherited. The language you speak, the food you like, and the sports you play are all learned, not inherited. A child born in France to Chinese parents who is raised in Brazil will speak Portuguese, not Chinese or French. Inherited traits are only the ones built into your body from birth — the physical features your parents' bodies passed to yours. Later in science, you will learn exactly how this passing-down works (it involves tiny instructions inside your cells called genes), but for now the big idea is simple: you look like your parents because they gave you their traits.