TOEFL essay:Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? A person’s childhood years (the time from birth to twelve years of age) are the most important years of a person’s life. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

I agree that a person’s childhood years, from birth until twelve years of age, are the most important. All the information I’ve read about that time of life states that these are the years that form us. These years determine what kind of a person the child will become. During these years we learn about relationships, begin our formal education and develop our moral sense of right and wrong.

The early years are the time when we learn about relationships. First we learn about our parents and siblings, then about rest of the world. We learn how to respond to others based the treatment we’re given. If we’re loved, then we know how to love others. If we’re treated harshly, we may grow up to treat others harshly. We also form our ideas about our own self-worth from the way others treat us during these years.

They can convince us we’re worthless, or they can teach us we deserve love and respect.
There are the years when we begin our formal education. We acquire the basic skills － reading, writing, working with numbers － that we’ll use throughout our lives. We need a good foundation in these subjects. Otherwise, anything we try to do later will be undermined by our lack of skills. Perhaps the most important thing we can learn during these years is how to analyze information and use it. These are skills that will always be useful.

Most important, from my point of view, these are the years when we develop our moral sense of what’s right and wrong. Others teach us about good and bad, but later in our early years we begin to decide for ourselves. It’s also during this time that we begin to develop the self-discipline to live according to our morals.

I believe a person grows and changes for the better throughout the many stages of life. However, the foundation is laid in those first few years of life.