Exercise Fill in the gaps with the proper word from the box

brother and sister, so he was 3____________ by a 4__________chosen by his parents' social worker. Unfortunately, his foster father was a strict 5__________ and often beat him. Bob rebelled against this strict 6_______________ and by the time he was eight, he was already 7____________ stealing from shops and playing truant. By the______________ time he reached 8_________ sometime around his 13th birthday, he had already appeared in court several times, charged with 9______________. crime. The judge blamed his foster parents, explaining that children needed 10____________ parents and guardians who would look after them properly. The foster father objected to this, pointing out that Bob's 11________ - his two brothers and sister - were 12___________ children who behaved at home and worked well at school. This has raised some interesting questions about the modern family system. While it is true that parents should not be too 13____________ with children by letting them do what they want when they want, or be too 14_____________ by sheltering them from the realities of life, it is also true that they should not be too strict. It has also highlighted the disadvantages of the modern 15_______________ family where the child has only its mother and father to rely on (or the 16____________ family, in which the mother or father has to struggle particularly hard to support their 17__________). In fact, many believe that we should return to traditional family values and the 18__________ family: extensive research has shown that children from these families are generally better behaved and have a better chance

Keys:

1. formative, 2. divorced, 3. brought up, 4. foster family (a child who lives with a foster family is a foster child), 5. authoritarian, 6. upbringing, 7. running wild, 8. adolescence, 9. juvenile, 10. responsible, 11. siblings, 12. well-adjusted, 13. lenient, 14. over-protective, 15. nuclear, 16. single-parent, 17. dependants, 18. extended