13894 Parenting
IELTS Writing Task 2 Topic
'Bad Parenting' (Jeenn Lee Hsieh)
ielts360toef@hotmail.com 谢振礼
IELTS Prompt:
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? "If children behave badly, their parents should accept responsibility and be punished."
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your knowledge or experience to support your opinion.
Sample Essay:
Bad parenting often brings about bad results: children behaving badly. As a result, such parents should by law be accountable for their children's behaviors. This essay will explain how a teenager has become a delinquent and why irresponsible parents should be punished accordingly.
Various factors may contribute to juvenile delinquency, and it seems that every sector has its share of responsibility, with the ironic exception of teenagers themselves along with their parents. To avert the rising tide of crimes committed by youth, organizations concerned have joined forces, clearly leaving parents of evil-doers far behind. More often than not, futile efforts have been made by government units, social assistance agencies, psychology experts, sports groups, courts, churches and what not. Unfortunately, most parents are not even aware of what their children are hiding, let alone seeing to it that their kids are doing all right. To make things worse, the current judicial system provides special status and treatment for young offenders, and so much so that the names of juvenile delinquents as well as of their parents are protected and records are barred from public view.
Parents are of course to blame, at least in part, for the dreadful consequences of juvenile crimes that usually lead to near immunity. Strange but true, some such parents appear to be just as puzzled and immature as their wrong-doing children. In certain cases, they fail to understand whether their boys and girls 'have' problems or 'are' problems. So it would come as no surprise that they are not ready to believe that their children are capable of getting trouble with the law. Actually, this should not mean sparing parents from any kind of responsibility because it is a natural job to train their children the right way. Rather, this should mean that as adults they ought to be punished one way or another, even though criminalizing parents is not the best thing to do.
In sum, with regard to children behaving badly, whatever the cause, it always starts at home; and whatever the effect, it always ends in society. Parents therefore have their share of moral responsibility, if not legal responsibility from beginning to end, for damage done by their children to society. First thing first, let their names be known to show what kind of parents they are! (Essay by Jeenn Lee Hsieh 谢振礼 ielts360toefl@hotmail.com pigai zuowen)
