Having Children Later in Life

Nowadays, more and more people decide to have children later in their life. What do you think are the reasons for this? Do the advantages of this trend outweigh the disadvantages?

Annotated response

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Having babies is regarded as a new trend of marriage, especially in these days when soon becoming adolescent parents might face plenty of troubles. It is easily seen that the financial burden is one of the reasons why many spouses tend to delay their childbirth because giving birth early forces them to tighten the budget. In this essay, I will and effects of this trend.

The fact that pregnancy has been more common in older women stemming from late-life marriage whose benefits are huge. Tying the knot early, in some cases, would cause constant quarrels about rights of child-rearing between young couples due to their immature thoughts on marital values. In contrast, delayed marriage may secure better conditions for children’s future. This would help singles have more time to seek a financially stable job and broaden behavioural experience before deciding to live with someone forever. Besides, of divorce in recent years partly contributes to late childbirth. The reason is that the lack of compatibility forces many couples to and marry again. Therefore, they may start having children after age 35.

As mentioned above, the benefits of late childbirth are undeniable, however, elderly parents, also face threats that they can foresee. Indeed, raising kids is more arduous than that at a young age, not only because their health will decline but also because their children are too little to self-manage. Moreover, having children when reaching over 35 can affect pregnancy due to ageing health. As a result, babies are not healthy enough or even die a premature death.

In conclusion, stable income and make delayed marriage more appealing. The thing is we need to consider the pros and cons of this to decide what is right for a happy union.

Overall assessment

Why this response received Band 6.0

The response addresses both questions with relevant reasons for late childbirth and a recognizable weighing of benefits and drawbacks. Its main limitation is imprecise wording and occasionally unclear phrasing, together with a conclusion that stops short of stating whether advantages clearly outweigh disadvantages.

IELTS criteria

How each score was decided

Task Response

6.0

The response covers relevant reasons, advantages, and disadvantages, but the position remains underdeveloped because the conclusion does not clearly state whether benefits outweigh drawbacks.

Coherence and Cohesion

6.0

Ideas are arranged in a mostly logical progression with basic linking devices, though some connections, such as the opening of the second paragraph, are strained or mechanical.

Lexical Resource

6.0

There is an adequate range of vocabulary on marriage and childbearing, but frequent awkward or inaccurate collocations, such as 'later in age' and 'soon becoming adolescent parents', reduce precision.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy

6.0

A mix of simple and complex sentence forms is used with reasonable flexibility, yet recurring grammatical errors, including tense and article problems, slightly impede clarity at times.