Few studies have assessed whether offspring resemble their parents regarding behavioral inhibition (BI) and whether inhibition is associated with parenting attitudes. The goals of this article were (1) to establish the associations between retrospectively assessed childhood BI features in parents and current reports of BI in their 12 year-old offspring from a large community sample and (2) to determine whether parental and offspring BI dimensions were associated with the level of parental care. The sample included 453 adolescents (mean age: 12 years) and their 741 biological parents. Analyses of the BI, ‘general fears' and ‘fears at school', dimensions showed that there was specific parent–offspring similarity for each dimension, although the effect sizes were modest, which suggests an important role of nonshared environmental factors in the development of BI. A modest but significant negative association was found between parental care and the fears at school dimension in offspring.