The most fundamental aspect of life is people carving out an identity for themselves, using influences from throughout their life, like role models, environment, cultures, etc. Clearly, these influences on how people will develop in their adulthood are significant, but which of these influences holds the most weight in a person’s growth in the event that one is single handlyhandedly more crucial than the rest? In Our Time is a short story collection by Ernest Hemingway that focuses on the life of a boy named Nick Adams. Taken on the journey of Nick Adams’s life, from his early childhood to adulthood, the reader examines his struggles with identity and societal normalitiesnorms, while observing how Nick’s early childhood experiences affect the way he grows up. With two of the short stories, “Indian Camp” and “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” Nick’s father displays a lot of toxic masculinity, eventually rubbing off on Nick throughout his life, as seen in “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow.” As I inspectedexplored the themes touched on by these stories, I continually found myself noticing how Nick’s childhood affected the way he grew up. It is a common belief in society that children turn out to be their parents, but does that belief hold actual truth value?actually hold true? In thethis essay, I plan to dive deeper into this belief of children adopting their parents’ traits, presenting both sides of the argument, and finally, stating which side I agree with.