Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Parents or other adult relatives should make important decisions for their (13 to 19 year-old) teenage children. Use specific reasons and examples to support your writing.
Sample Response
Parents are in most cases our first teachers and friends. From my experienceFrom my everyday experience, I have to agree with the statement that important decisions should be made by our parents or adult relatives. In the following paragraphs, I will give my reasons to support this statement. First of all, teenage children tend to livehave the tendency to live in their own fantasies. They do not clearly understand the realities of liferules of a real life. When I was 18 years old, I18 years old I thought that the world was perfect and everything seemed to be simple. Teenagers are generallybasically inexperienced, they aspire tofor independence and try to takemake their first steps towards freedom. I think that it is like starting to walk when a baby needs its parents for support. An independent life is a significant stage in a person's lifea big and significant part in a person's life. So, my point is that it is very important to take this step wiselymake this step right. SecondlySecond of all, I think that parents have the rightparents have right to interfere in their children's lives. They need to know what kind of friends their children have and how their children spend their spare timehow children spend their spare time. For example, I had an eighteen-year-old friendan eighteen years old friend who got really angry with his parents when they forbade him from associating withprohibited him from being a friend of a young man. Somehow his parents found out that that young man occasionally took drugswas occasionally taking drugs. That man died within a yearwas dead in a year because of drug abuse. After that incidentaccident, my friend thanked his parents for that interference. Finally, I think teenage children should be more open with their parentsopen-minded with their parents. It will help them to make the right choice and avoid many mistakes. To sum up, I believe that young people should trust their parents because they wish their children only the best.
Why this response received Band 6.5
The essay maintains a clear agreement and supports it with the central ideas of teenage inexperience, parental protection and open communication. Its strongest feature is the extended example showing how parental intervention can prevent harmful peer influence; the main limitation is that monitoring friendships is not always clearly connected to parents making major decisions. The priority is to define which decisions require adult control and explain why teenagers should retain autonomy elsewhere.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
A consistent position is supported by relevant reasoning and a detailed example, but the scope of "important decisions" is never clearly defined.
Identify specific high-stakes decisions adults should control and distinguish them from lower-risk choices that help teenagers develop independence.
Coherence and Cohesion
The reasoning follows a clear sequence from inexperience to intervention and communication, but the absence of paragraph breaks weakens the visible structure.
Use separate paragraphs for teenage inexperience, the protective example and the role of parent-child communication.
Lexical Resource
The response has adequate range for family, independence and risk, though several awkward collocations limit precision.
Prefer natural expressions such as "understand real-life consequences", "take steps towards independence" and "prevented him from associating with".
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
Meaning remains clear across varied structures, but comma splices, articles and noun forms cause recurring inaccuracies.
Check forms such as "real life", "have the right", "an eighteen-year-old friend" and separate independent clauses correctly.
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IELTS Writing Task 2
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Parents or other adult relatives should make important decisions for their (13 to 19 year-old) teenage children. Use specific reasons and examples to support your writing.
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.