Your future kids will probably pick up your temper or your patience. Start practicing the one you’d want copied.

Children learn tone long before they learn arguments. Whatever you do under pressure, especially the fast reactions you never chose, is the most likely thing to be copied, because it is what gets seen most often and what teaches a younger person how normal sounds. The traits that carry forward are rarely the ones anybody intended.

The people around you now are the practice, whether or not kids are ever part of your life. Notice the first two seconds after something annoys you this week and slow them down deliberately. That small gap is where the choice actually lives.