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BEST IELTS Writing Task 2, 2nd July
IELTS WRITING TASK 2
IELTS WRITING TASK 2
Many people today have children much later in life. Why do you think they are doing this? What are the positive and negative aspects of having a greater length of time between the generations? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.
SAMPLE ANSWER
It is likely that the main reason people are choosing to have children later in life is because they are also delaying getting married. A growing number of young people are now going to university, which adds at least three to five years of living without earning an income. In the past, people would get married in their late teens or early twenties but now this is being put off for at least ten years.
For this reason it may be purely economic. Another reason for people to put off having children is that so many women have entered the workforce and having even one child can disrupt a woman’s career. Women don’t just need time off for maternity leave in the beginning of their motherhood but they need to take off from work later as well.. The next ten to fifteen years after that entail complex planning of childcare, balancing time between work and family, as well as coping with the added financial responsibility.
The now widening generation gap has its positive and negative aspects. In a positive sense, older parents are more mature and tend to be more rational, level-headed and reliable than their younger counterparts. They have more life experience, are more financially comfortable and are more likely to stick to the routines required for bringing up children.
On the downside, a 35-year generation gap means that the parents and children have grown up in very different worlds, so it can make it difficult to comprehend each other’s motives and reasoning, compared to what was a 25-year age gap in the past. Older parents might also be less active or less in touch with how a young person thinks.
To conclude, people are having children later, mainly for economic reasons, and this tends to have its upside and its downside, but the change is certainly not going away in the near future.
