Basic Trope: The idea that morality and job inclination gets inherited from generation to generation just like many personality traits.
- Straight: Betty's a doctor just like her parents Alice and Charlie are both doctors.
- Exaggerated: Betty's a doctor just like her parents, all four of her grandparents, and all eight of her grandparents.
- Downplayed: Betty's a nurse, while her mother Alice is a doctor and her father Charlie is a paramedic.
- Justified:
- Betty showed an interest in the medical field even before she learned of her parents' careers and they nourished this interest for most of her life.
- Family Business
- Implied: Betty is a very good young surgeon. When asked how she learned so much so fast, her answer is "I paid attention to my parents".
- Inverted: Charlie and Alice are doctors, but their daughter Betty can't stand the idea of being one despite them encouraging her to be a doctor.
- Subverted: Betty considers following her parents' path, but decides not to as she grows up.
- Double Subverted: And then her parents die and she chooses to honor them by following in their footsteps.
- Parodied: Betty's earliest memories consist of her parents helping her perform brain surgery on an elderly patient.
- Zig Zagged: Betty is very much not a doctor like her parents, mostly because she becomes nauseated at the idea of surgery, and is rather horrified by many stories, and thus chooses to become a teacher. However, when someone is wounded, she immediately takes charge of the scene and talks as if she knows what to do...because as disgusted as she was with her parents' description of being a doctor, she still paid attention to them.
- Averted: People in the story don't have any greater or lesser of a chance at any job because of their parents.
- Enforced: The author of the story is has a friend who came from a family that had three generations of nurses and incorporated this into his stories.
- Lampshaded: "My parents were doctors, too. I always wanted to be like them!"
- Invoked: Betty's grandparents noticed their respective children's inclination towards being in the medical field. They helped their children get together in the hopes that they'd have a child who would do the same, hoping that the combined money from all of their careers would set their bloodline well-off financially.
- Exploited: Betty uses her parents' reputation to help her get through medical school.
- Defied: Betty knows right off the bat that she doesn't want to be a doctor, and is annoyed with her parents constantly trying to push her to become one.
- Discussed: "Just like her parents, a dynasty of doctors...".
- Conversed: "Three generations of doctors. That's no coincidence, is it?"
- Deconstructed: The pressure on Betty to be a doctor like her family even though she doesn't think she wants to be one takes a toll on her mentally, leading her to become abrasive and lashing out at the people around her, calling them out on trying to influence a life that is only hers.
- Reconstructed: The people around her lighten up on her and allow her to take her own course in life. After the pressure is lifted, she realizes that she does want to follow in her parents footsteps, she was just too stubborn and determined to resist the pressure to realize it.
Back to using your gift of birth passed down to you.
