Where are the Parents – Part 4/4

April 14, 2010

Obesity and diabetes among American children is an epidemic. Many children and teens are not eating nutritious, home cooked meals. Instead, they are surviving off Coke, Pepsi, French fries and fast food. I often had kids come into my class after lunch with sixty-four ounce Cokes. Their speech would be slurred; their eyes glazed. Research shows that too much sugar messes with long-term memory and the area of the brain that solves problems.

School Library

Many American kids cannot find the family they need at home, so they find one on the streets. In Los Angeles, there are one-hundred-thousand kids that belong to street gangs. Other major cities also have street gangs. Street gangs become the family of choice when parents are not there or not talking. Drug use among teens is also a problem leading to depression and low self-esteem. This may result in decreased interest, negative attitude, drop in grades, many absences, truancy, and discipline problems.

When we pick our daughter up from school, we see the ratty dressed kids on their skateboards hanging out by the graffiti covered walls in the mall parking lot. Our daughter says many of the kids she knows at her high school get drunk regularly and smoke.

Return to Where are the Parents – Part 3 or start with Part 1

_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Leave a Comment » | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, education, family values, parenting | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Where are the Parents – Part 3/4

April 14, 2010

Obesity and diabetes among American children is an epidemic. Many children and teens are not eating nutritious, home cooked meals. Instead, they are surviving off Coke, Pepsi, French fries and fast food. I often had kids come into my class after lunch with sixty-four ounce Cokes. Their speech would be slurred; their eyes glazed. Research shows that too much sugar messes with long-term memory and the area of the brain that solves problems.

Teen drug abuse

Many American kids cannot find the family they need at home, so they find one on the streets. In Los Angeles, there are one-hundred-thousand kids that belong to street gangs. Other major cities also have street gangs. Street gangs become the family of choice when parents are not there or not talking. Drug use among teens is also a problem leading to depression and low self-esteem. This may result in decreased interest, negative attitude, drop in grades, many absences, truancy, and discipline problems.

When we pick our daughter up from school, we see the ratty dressed kids on their skateboards hanging out by the graffiti covered walls in the mall parking lot. Our daughter says many of the kids she knows at her high school get drunk regularly and smoke.

Continued in Where are the Parents – Part 4 or return to Part 2

_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Where are the Parents – Part 2/4

April 14, 2010

When I was still teaching, one of the most common questions parents asked was, “What can we do to get him to read and do his homework? He won’t listen.” I said, “Turn off the television and any computer linked to the Internet. Learn to say no and mean it.” Most never followed that advice and I seldom saw improvement in that child’s study habits or grades.

Teens watching TV, not reading or doing homework

The latest research, published in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics, shows that having a bedroom television not only leads to more TV viewing, but also results in less time spent with the family, less time exercising, lower fruit and vegetable intake, more sweetened beverage consumption, and in lower grades. Source: Onslow/Allison

The scary thing is that many American parents don’t know how bad a job they are doing raising their kids. The average child watches several hours of television daily and spends several more text messaging or camping on Websites like YouTube. That same child goes to bed late and gets up early to go to school. Most American teens aren’t getting the nine hours of sleep necessary for their mental and physical growth and sleep is important.

In addition, more than forty percent of American children are latchkey kids. At the end of the school day, latchkey kids go home to an empty house because both parents are working to pay for that ten thousand dollar credit-card debt the average American family owes.

Continued in Where are the Parents – Part 3 or return to Part 1

_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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1 Comment | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, education, media | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Where are the Parents – Part 1/4

April 13, 2010

There is nothing to envy about the “average” American families. It’s in in worse shape than the economy (and I wrote this in April of 2010 almost a year before Amy Chua’s essay appeared in The Wall Street Journal).

My wife is Chinese. She lived in China the first twenty-eight years of her life. She is now an American citizen. In China and other Asian countries, family and earning an education through hard work is important.

American Classroom

If you study Confucian philosophy and the Five Great Relationships, you will understand what I’m talking about. For the most part, the younger generation in China respects, honors and obeys the elders, and the elders are responsible for preparing the younger generations for a prosperous life. I did not say a happy life. I said prosperous. That means hard work—mentioned more than once in the Chinese Constitution.

Article 42. Citizens of the People’s Republic of China have the right as well as the duty to work.

What does that have to do with parents raising children? Everything.

I taught high school English, journalism and reading from 1975 to 2005. Facts about American kids and their families were drummed into my head in one workshop after another at the high school where I taught. During those thirty years, I worked with more than six thousand students and met with hundreds of parents.

Continued in Where are the Parents – Part 2 or discover Education Chinese Style

_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

From Fast-Food to Killing – You Decide

April 13, 2010

I read Man Sentenced to death over China school stabbings and thought, “Is this another Columbine Copy Cat—but in China, the Middle Kingdom. where harmony rules?” Then I read in another piece that McDonald’s plans to double the number of fast-food restaurants in China from about 1,100 to 2,000 by the end of 2013.

Fast Food in China

It’s a fact that a fast-food diet has been observed to aggravate asthma, move mood swings, provoke personality changes, muster mental illness, nourish nervous disorders, deliver diabetes, hurry heart disease, grow gallstones, hasten hypertension, and add arthritis. Source: Healing Daily

Without making any claims that fast food might be connected to that man stabbing those children in China, I’m going to point out a few facts and let the reader decide.

America leads the world in violent assaults on school children of all ages. Prior to 1950, when the fast food industry took off and spread like a cancer, there were a total of forty-five recorded school-related attacks in the United States (over a time span of almost two centuries).

After 1950, the number of school-related attacks soared to about two hundred.  In China, recorded school-related attacks didn’t start until May 14, 2000. Since then, there have been more than a dozen. Source: List of school-related attacks

Here are two timelines for the growth of the fast-food industry in American and China. Study the dates. Compare to growth of school-related attacks. Decide.

History timeline of fast food in America

History timeline of fast food in China

See “An Invasion of Fat” http://wp.me/pN4pY-hb

 

3 Comments | American culture, Chinese Culture, crime, economy, food | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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