Topic 2

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Parents are the best teachers. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

Who are the best teachers in our life? In my opinion, the first teachers we have in our lives in
most cases are our parents. They teach us to walk, to speak, and to have good manners before we
reach “the real world. ” More than even the professional teachers that we have in school, parents
are generally the most involved in the development and education of children.

The main reason for my view is that our parents are the best teachers at the beginning of our lives,
which actually corresponds to the parents’ role in nature. Parents are most committed and
involved in teaching their children; they have a kind of instinct to sacrifice a part of themselves
for the betterment of their children. They love us and have great patience while passing down
their knowledge to us. They wish us a success and thus will not teach us bad things. And of
course, implicit learning occurs when children unconsciously copy some of their parents’ habits
and styles of behavior.

Also, during the second stage of child development, adolescence, parents can still be in the best
position to offer advice even though the children might not accept it. In this case, perhaps the
child’s friends would be the best teachers. Adolescents are notoriously rebellious in many cultures
and may automatically reject any advice from their parents. My first marriage for instance, was
solely a matter of doing the opposite when my parents tried to intrude in offering their advice. So
in such matters, parents should be much more flexible and be rather the partners with their
children. So we can see that being a teacher of growing child become more and more complicated
case as the time passes and many parents are simply not able to meet the increased demands.

On the other hand, I would say that parents are not professional teachers and they tend to be very
biased by their love of their children. So wishing good things and an easy life may prevent
children from maturation. In any case, parents usually can present only one viewpoint of the
world, while good teaching should be based on different attitudes. Thus, when children go to
school and have a great diversity of teachers, they learn much more than their parents could
probably give them. Furthermore, once our parents get older, they become more conservative and
cannot always be objective in regard to modern trends and fashions. Thus we need to take their
advice with caution during that period. However, some kind of intuition which I believe shared
between relatives about what everybody needs and great love which exists in a families still
makes our parents very good teachers and advisers at any time.

In short, while parents are not the ideal teachers, and well-rounded children will generally need a
great diversity of teachers in their lives in order to have a more accurate view of the world,
parents are generally the most committed of all teachers and have the greatest emotional
investment in their children and their future.

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