#17 - Advice columnist: Parents should not encourage their

[Administrator]

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[tetsuya0129]

Hi Powerscore,

I got this question right, whose credited answer is (C). But I had some trouble in figuring out the principles of answer choices A, B, and D. Please pardon me for this lengthy post. I was sort of thinking aloud.

My problem arose from my approach to principle-justify questions. I rely on the "logic flow"---a premise-to-conclusion flow---of a given statement or its underlying principle. When there is no clear indicator of formal logic, I tend to stumble.

Below are my attempt to list out the principles:

A: If something can make children be happy about it that they do well, parents should encourage their children to do so.

B: If something can help children have some easily satisfied desires, parents should try to ensure their children do so.

D: If something can help children have important achievements, parents should ensure their children do so.

I am highly hesitant when using conditional logic to present the principle; especially for (A) and (B), these sentences are probably just assertive without premises and thus without a "flow".

Yet, on the other hand, If these prescriptive statements are assertive without support or "flow", then, assuming such a statement is valid, they would imply that any subject mentioned should follow the prescribed advice regardless of circumstance, like "Human should be kind." Under this rationale, (A) and (B) would be wrong because the assertions do not prescribe what parents should not do.

I basically struggled between these two lines of analysis. Could you please break down the principles behind (A), (B), and (D) and let me know what I misunderstood?

Thank you very much,
Leon

[Adam Tyson]

Your breakdown of the principles described in each of those incorrect answers look great to me, Leon. The fact that none of them do anything to strengthen a claim about what parents should NOT do is one big problem they all share (and to be clear, this is a Strengthen question, not a Justify question, because the stem indicates we are looking for the answer that "most helps" rather than one that ensures the truth of the conclusion).

Did you prephrase before going to the answers? Here, you should be anticipating an answer that indicates that the premises, about certain motivations making kids unhappy and resentful, lead to the conclusion, which is that parents should not encourage those motivations. A good prephrase might be "parents shouldn't encourage anything that makes kids unhappy or resentful." With that in hand, your trip through the answers should be fairly quick and easy, and you won't be distracted by all these answers that fail to make that connection between the premise and the conclusion.

Your approach to any Principle-Strengthen question should be to create a rule that connects the premises to the conclusion in such a way that allows you to say "if these premises are true and we apply this rule, the conclusion seems to follow." Then, find the answer that matches that rule.

I'm not sure if that addressed your question, but it looks to me like you understood perfectly what you were reading and knew why the right answer was right and the wrongs ones were wrong. Great work!

[tetsuya0129]

Thanks a lot!

[manishatr]

I was stuck between B and C, but ended up picking B because I was stuck on the word "trait" for answer choice C. Can you explain how "acquiring a trait" would still be used to justify this reasoning?
Thank you!

[Dana D]

Hey manishatr,

Think of principle questions as applying a big blanket of truth over the stimulus. We're looking for some sort of blanket truth that we can add to the stimulus that will make their argument logically follow.

In this question, we're told parents shouldn't encourage their kids to value outdoing others. That's the conclusion. The only reasoning we're given for why we should draw this conclusion is because encouraging kids to value this fosters resentment and makes one less happy. But this only makes sense if we care about kids being happy - otherwise, why shouldn't parents still encourage their kids to outdo others? What if the whole point of parenting is to make your child strive for an achievement that is difficult to satisfy, as the stimulus says this competitiveness causes?

We're looking for an answer choice that would tell us this is not the case - parents shouldn't want their kids to be less happy, and that's why they shouldn't encourage them to value competitiveness. Looking at answer choice (C), it is even broader than that idea, saying that no people at all should encourage someone to acquire a trait that would make them less happy.

Answer Choice (C) does require you to equate the ideas of "outdoing others" and "a trait", but if you think of what it really means to try and outperform others all the time that is likely the trait of competitiveness. If you got down to (B) and (C) and the word 'trait' was the only thing preventing you from confidently choosing (C), you should be able to eliminate (B) for other reasons.

Answer choice (B) isn't broad enough to be a principle here that would justify the conclusion. If we said (B) is true, it still doesn't tell us why parents shouldn't encourage competitiveness. Parents could ensure their kids have some desires that are easy to satisfy and also encourage competitiveness - those are mutually exclusive - so why would we draw the conclusion that parents shouldn't encourage competitiveness?

[manishatr]

Thank you! This helped a lot!