托福独立写作模板之成长规则

　　托福独立写作题目：家长应该为孩子的成功制定规则吗?

　　Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: parents must have strict rules to help their children to be successful.

　　Young people today are bound by a myriad of social and legal conventions, and it seems to me that these rules are excessive and often ineffective. Young people are governed by too many rules.

　　First are social conventions. In my country, young people are expected to follow a fairly standardized and linear path on the road to adulthood. "Responsibility" is the operative word. Schooling follows a certain road: K-12 education to prepare you for college, college to prepare you for work, work to prepare you for a respectable career and a brief period of independence before settling down as an adult. Deviating from this is generally frowned upon. It sounds terribly irresponsible to drop out of college and go backpacking through India, for example, and for many young people, it probably is. Then again, this is exactly what Steve Jobs did, and nobody can argue with those results. The problem here is that, while we mean well in enforcing these rules, they're highly inflexible and box the creativity of youth at a critical stage in their development. Social conventions, which were originally intended to anchor young people, instead end up restricting their paths of development.

　　Second are legal conventions. The laws governing the behavior of young people aren't really commensurate with the physical and emotional realities of youth. For example, in my country, you must be 18 in order to buy cigarettes and 21 to buy alcohol, but for some reason you only have to be 17 to go to war. This means that those too young to be trusted with the responsibility of vices like smoking and drinking might still be old enough to experience the trauma of military combat. Vices like smoking and drinking are irresponsible uses of time, because they tend to derail you from the life trajectory that society prescribes. Serving in the military, however, is not, because soldiering is the epitome of a standardized, linear, and responsible life. These laws only add up to an unclear message to youth about how they must be responsible but that we don’t trust them to be responsible. Such contradictory ideas are not beneficial to youth and their role in society.

　　Now, admittedly, young people do need guidelines when growing up. It's an oftentimes scary and confusing process. Without the right type of guidance, it can be very easy for young people to go down the wrong path. But sometimes the right type of guidance is no guidance, and sometimes taking the wrong path can teach you how to find the one you're meant for. The problem with the rules confronting young people today is they're too many and too inflexible. They don't encourage young people to learn, to adapt, or to find their own way. And they don't trust young people. All they do is stunt the growth of a generation of youths, who then go on to foist the same lousy system on the next generation. To me, this isn't a system that begets "responsibility."

　　So yes, I think society has created too many rules for young people. The only way things will improve is if we give them a little more freedom and trust in finding their own way, while still being there to provide guidance should they want it. When they finally do acquire a sense of responsibility, it'll be because they grasped the concept themselves. (Richard, 561 words)