Let's say that a child has a mom with brown eyes and dad with blue eyes. Since brown eyes are dominant, the mom can have either one brown (B) and one blue (b) version of an eye color gene or she can have two browns. As geneticists like to say, she can be either Bb or BB.
To make things easier, we will say that she is BB (both genes are the brown version). Since the dad has blue eyes, he has two copies of the recessive blue version. He is bb.
Each parent will pass one copy of their eye color gene to their child. In this case, the mom will always pass B and the dad will always pass b. This means all of their kids will be Bb and have brown eyes. Each child will show the mom's dominant trait.
Now if we flip things around where the father has two brown versions (BB) and the mom has two blue ones (bb), the child will still end up Bb and having brown eyes. It doesn't matter if B came from mom or dad. It only mattered that the child got a B.
I don't want you to think that if one parent shows the dominant trait, all their children will too. They may not. Let me give another eye color example to show you what I mean.
Imagine a mom with one version of the brown and one version of the blue eye color gene. She is Bb and has brown eyes. Dad is bb and has blue eyes.
These are the same eye colors that the parents had in the first example. But the result could turn out very differently.
The kids each have a 50% chance of having mom's brown eyes and a 50% chance of having dad's blue eyes. (This is because mom has a 50% chance of passing her B and a 50% chance of passing her b.) So in this case, the kids can end up with mom's dominant trait or dad's recessive one. Which one is a simple matter of chance.*
And if we take a Bb dad (brown eyes) and a bb mother (blue eyes), there is still a 50% chance for the child to have blue eyes. Again it didn't matter which parent gave which gene version. What was important is that these two gene versions were involved.
This is true for many, many traits besides eye color. But not all of them. Sometimes it matters whether your mom or dad has a dominant trait.
Blame (or Thank) Mom Through our discussion so far, you may have picked up on the fact that we have two copies of our genes - one from mom and one from dad. But this isn't true for every gene.
Explanation:
Except for a few special cases (see below), it doesn't really matter which parent gave you which gene. If a gene version is dominant, it will dominate whether it came from mom or dad.
So your chances of getting a dominant trait don't depend on which parent it came from. If mom gives you the dominant brown eye version of an eye color gene, odds are you'll end up with brown eyes. Same thing if dad passes the same gene. In neither case would you have higher odds for getting brown eyes.
Now that isn't to say that if mom has brown eyes then all her kids will too. They could end up with the other parent's recessive blue or green eyes. Or an eye color that neither parent has!
This is how brown-eyed parents end up with a blue-eyed child. Or how two parents who don't have red hair have a redheaded baby.
As you can see, genetics is a complicated business. But one thing we do know...no one is more likely to favor one parent over the other. Which traits you get depend on the combination of genes you get from both parents.
What I'll do for the rest of the answer is explain a bit about how genes work. Then I'll focus on some situations where the parents do matter. As you'll see, this is usually when a trait is on the X chromosome.
