GRE Essay: Encouraging young people is harmful.

[Konstantin]

Hello!

Question:
Encouraging young people to believe that they can accomplish great things if they try hard enough is both misleading and potentially harmful.
Answer:
I disagree with the speaker in respect of his categorical assertion about just harmful effects of such an encouraging of young people. I strongly believe that youth should be encouraged in order to keep confidence and be successful in their future lives. However, some forms of approval, namely extreme kinds of them, could cause some negative consequences. But the latter is appropriate for any activity, not merely for nourishment.

Experience tells us that if we aren’t trying to do something, we will never achieve it. No one could understand how to swim without plumbing into water and this principle can be applied everywhere: in studying, in business and in a private life. However, it’s hard to make the first steps, because the possible results are vague and the way is quite dangerous. But who are the first people, urging us to go into a small pond? Of course they are our parents; we trust them and this belief in their rectitude helps us to overcome a lot of hurdles during our lives. I think that “great things” is a very relative term; it completely depends on age and social circumstances. For a child it is to go swimming; for an adult, in certain context, – to be well-paid and so on. Often, parents have to merely say to their child that he should dream and that his dreams will have been realized. However, thinking that he will be a very important person in the future could make the child reluctant to perform necessary daily responsibilities and, as the result, he will become not a businessman, but a “lazyman”. So, it’s a primary concern of parents to maintain the appropriate balance between the today and tomorrow.

Very likely I will agree with the position that a hard working is the one possible way to accomplish great and astonishing things. But when we aren’t believe in success, we can’t cope with all these obstacles on our way toward them. Very often, we have seen situations, when children from simple working families are also becoming the workers and, I suppose, that the initial cause of such a behavior is not poverty. These children simply unable to understand that there is another life and barriers among social grades are surmountable. At the same time, when a person is emphatically told that he had to work hard every day to be very reach and prosperous, the harmful effects could emerge. At first, the private life of the child could be dangerously restricted, because under such pressure he will forget about anything except success and in the long run he will have burnt out. Secondly, such pressure from the parent may cause some mental problems, like inferiority complex, that will be a great disadvantage in the adulthood. Nevertheless, people should read special literature to encourage their children properly and minimize or even eliminate all these potential dangers.

In sum, I want to say that everyone has a distinctive fate and future. But, sometimes, a father’s simple inspiration: “You will have done it” could change everything and lead his son toward incredible success.