Essay by 謝振禮老師 Jeenn Lee Hsieh

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真題還原

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? "Parents should allow children to make mistakes and let them learn from their mistakes." Use specific reasons and details to support your answer.

范文

Children from time to time make different kinds of mistakes--initially many of which are natural but later other mistakes could turn out to be undesirable . For that matter, as parents you had better be somewhat paradoxical in your attitudes toward raising children from stage to stage. The paradox is like that, at an early stage, children are always expected to stand up and walk as well as to open the mouth and speak; while at an older age, children are often asked to simply sit down and shut up.

Normally, mistakes that toddlers make are infantile events given them to grow up. For instance, you would never tie a rope to a baby and teach it to climb stairs by hauling it up by the rope. Nor would you spank a baby for not leaning to speak quickly enough. It is because babies learn by their own errors. So, if there is no learning happening, mistakes would have no worth at all. As can be imagined, mistakes might cause pain or impatience, and yet they could provide opportunities for growth. In this respect, only very small children should be allowed to make mistakes 'unconditionally' because this process of 'trial and error´' makes walking possible and speech possible.

While making mistakes is a fact of life, it is your response to the child's error that counts. When children should come to the age to start learning to distinguish right from wrong, you ought to explain what sorts of mistakes should not happen, being conditioned under different circumstances. Even though mistakes show what they need to learn, actually they need not learn every lesson the hard way or the wrong way. In other words, not trying to avoid situations in which children might commit 'dangerous' or 'immoral' blunders could be the biggest mistake of all on the part of parents. Therefore, it is not the right thing to do to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to some of children's serious mistakes because in any case it is important to put kids on the right track.

In a certain sense, for younger children there are no mistakes, save one--the failure to learn from a mistake. From stage to stage, children make mistakes of different sorts, to be sure; nevertheless, parents should learn an effective strategy to help their children move on, leaving mistakes far behind which might otherwise unfortunately become crimes in the future. Accordingly, the key to good parenting is not to see a child's 'negative' mistake every time as an end product, but rather as a 'positive' beginning for progress in life.