The following appeared in a newsletter published by the Appleton school district.

The following appeared in a newsletter published by the Appleton school district.

“In a recent study more than 5,000 adolescents were asked how often they ate meals with their families. Almost 30 percent of the teens said they ate at least seven meals per week with their families. Furthermore, according to the same survey, teens who reported having the most family meals per week were also the ones least likely to have tried illegal drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. Family meals were also associated with lower rates of problems such as low grades in school, low self-esteem, and depression. We therefore recommend that families have as many meals together as possible. We predict that doing so will greatly benefit adolescents and turn troubled teens away from bad behaviors.”

Write a response in which you discuss which questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation is likely to have the predicted result. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the recommendation.

In this argument, the author is trying to assert that the higher frequency that the adolescents always eat meals with their family together is beneficial to the lower likelihood of turning teens to bad behaviors such as attempting to illegal drugs or tobacco. However, the author’s illustration is not persuasive in following reasons.

Firstly, the author quotes the recent study that 5000 adolescents were asked how often they ate meals with their families. Obviously, the author intends to prove that the less times the teens ate meals with their families, the higher chances they would get allured by the illegal drugs or other bad behaviors. However, there would be other probable eternal explanations to demonstrate why teens ate less at home with their families. For example, a lot of teems are studying at the boarding public schools, which means that they need to live and study there over the weekdays and they only get back to their home during the weekends. For this reason, these teems would just have a few chances to have a reunion with their families and eat meals with their parents due to this objective reason. Thus, for this part of the author’s arguing, it is less convincing and cannot have a persuasive causation to turning teens away from bad behaviors.

Secondly, even though family meals are associate with the lower rates of problems such as low grades in school, low self-esteem and depression, the author is still not sufficient to display the correlation between the teens’ bad behaviors and these lower rates of problems that the author has mentioned. To be specific, it is possible that other issues rather than lower self-esteem and depression might lead the teens to try the illegal drugs or alcohol. For instance, the social circles of people surrounding these adolescents would formulate the negative influence or examples for them to imitate if they are trapped in the circle of street thugs and make friends with them.

Lastly, in the ending conclusive sentence, the author is supposed to claim that having more meals will benefit teenagers to form a better and heavier habit as well as turn troubled teens away from the bad behaviors. Actually, the latter part of the consequence might be implausible since the author has been overestimated the efficacy of this recent study. There is no denying to say that having the more meals with family might prevent teens who have not had these bad behaviors from getting addicted to it, but it probably would not prove that this method may turn these troubled teens with these bad habits back to the original right track. Or I can say, this might be not enough. More efforts should be down to make a substantive difference, like more communication in the family, professional teenager counseling, and well-organized instruction.

Therefore, in order to predict the result that the author has expected, it is necessary to consider the issues mentioned above to make the author’s illustration more compelling and persuasive.