Consider the following comments on family.
The family is the first place we learn both love and injury.
A society that praises the family rarely asks what it costs the women inside it.
Call no man happy until he is dead.
Solon
We are born into our first loyalties before we are old enough to consent to them.
The home that shelters a child can also be the cage it spends a lifetime leaving.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that the family is neither the sacred haven its defenders imagine nor the mere prison its critics describe, but the institution where a society quietly decides who is owed care and who is not. Open by granting the conservative point, that families do work no state can replicate, absorbing illness, age and failure without invoice or contract. Then complicate it: the same bonds that protect can also trap, and appeals to family loyalty have long silenced abuse and bound women to unpaid labour. A strong third move asks who gets counted as family at all, since the law and the culture have repeatedly redrawn that line around blood, marriage and choice. Caution: resist both the nostalgia that mourns a family form that was never as stable as remembered, and the cynicism that reduces an enduring human attachment to a unit of economic convenience.