When it comes to Parenting, One Size Does Not Fit All – Part 4/5

April 10, 2011


In China and Asia, the average parent is the polar opposite of the average American parent. That’s why they are often called Tiger Parents.

However, Chinese/Asian parents will not all be the same. Though most would fit the description of a Tiger Parent as opposed to the average American parent more concerned with self-esteem and the child having daily fun, the average Chinese/Asian parent sets standards that do not take into account self-esteem or having fun, but those standards would vary from parent to parent.

Most urban parents in China would have higher standards than most rural parents. The higher the status and success of the parent, the better chance the standards would be higher for the child too, which explains why Amy Chua’s expectations for her daughters are set so high (Amy Chua is the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.)

After all, Amy Chua is a Yale professor and the author of two New York Times bestsellers. Chua’s father also teaches or taught at the University of Berkeley in California as a math professor.

In China, most mothers identify who they are by the success of their children in school and later in life.

By contrast, American SAP parents may act as if their children were from another planet and a member of a fragile species until the child turns 18, becomes an adult, and reverts to being a member of the human species.

To be continued in Part 5, April 11, 2011 at 12:00 PST, or return to Part 3

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

When it comes to Parenting, One Size Does Not Fit All – Part 3/5

April 9, 2011


When I was a teacher, I often heard parents tell their children/teens, “If you don’t want to do what the teacher asks, you don’t have to.” Then when the child earned a failing grade in the class the accusation directed at me would often be, “You were boring. That’s why he/she didn’t want to do the work in your class.”

If I was so boring, why did any student earn As and Bs in my class and some always did?

Every year, one or more parents concerned more with the child’s self-esteem than his or her education would demand that the student be moved from my class to another teacher that was easier — which meant a teacher that never failed a student.

I knew a teacher at the high school where I taught that automatically gave credit for 50% of the grade to every student as if it were a gift.   All a student had to do in his class was five percent of the work to get a D- since every student started with a 50% handicap.  If another student did 40% of the work, that resulted in an A-.

We talked of this for months, and he never yielded his opinion that it was the only fair way to grade a student.

I also know a property owner with apartments that once had a single-mother tenant that took her two children to Disneyland in Florida for a week but could not pay her rent that month.

I heard this dead-beat parent (that seldom paid her rent on time) say she would rather have her children in a class where their self-esteem wouldn’t suffer than have her children in a demanding teacher’s class. She wanted her children to have fun everywhere they went — at last until those children turned 18.

I had an opportunity to see inside the apartment. The children shared the larger of two bedrooms. There was a TV, a computer with an Internet connection and an expensive video game with toys scattered across the floor.  Both children were in grade school at the time and had mobile phones with unlimited texting.

If you want to see how these SAPs (Parents that belong to the self-esteem arm of Political correctness) fight for their beliefs, click to Amazon and read enough reviews and comments of Amy Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother to discover a more complete picture.

To be continued in Part 4, April 10, 2011 at 12:00 PST, or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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When it comes to Parenting, One Size Does Not Fit All – Part 2/5

April 8, 2011


In Part 1, I mentioned that I’d been a public school teacher. I also mentioned an essay in The Wall Street Journal and a memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, released by its publisher a few days after the essay appeared

To carry this conversation further, I want to say that studies and personal experience in the classroom as a teacher say that 80% of American parents never attend a parent- teacher conference during the 13 years of a child’s public education.

For me, it was less than 20% but more than most of the staff at the high school where I taught since I made more phone calls to parents than any of the 100 teachers where I worked.

This means the “average” American child grows to be a self-centered, selfish, narcissistic adult with few of the values that made America great. Instead of a solid work ethic, the goal is to have as much fun as possible on a daily basis while chasing dreams that often do not come true and go into debt doing it.

The reason for this is that the average American parent has fallen for SAP (The self-esteem arm of Political correctness).

This method of parenting, which started in the 1960s, has been the loudest in US history and often condemns anyone that falls outside its “soft, boost self-esteem and have fun” approach to parenting.

The SAPs are also responsible for the battle against spanking as a last resort to child discipline.

To be continued in Part 3, April 9, 2011 at 12:00 PST, or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

When it comes to Parenting, One Size Does Not Fit All – Part 1/5

April 7, 2011

Over at my fledging, Crazy Normal Blog (forty-three posts to more than eleven hundred here), I’ve written about my time in the classroom as a teacher since the topic/theme at that Blog is education. Since I was a public school teacher in California from 1975 to 2005, that topic is of special interest to me.

It was a challenging and demanding job that absorbed time like a sponge.

One undeniable fact that I learned while teaching is the value of a supportive parent involved in a child’s education.

Sad to say, the “average” American parent is not “involved” and doesn’t know what the word means.

If it weren’t for an essay, Why Chinese Mothers are Superior, that appeared in The Wall Street Journal on January 8, I doubt this conversation would be taking place.

Then Amy Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was released January 11 and advocates of the soft self-esteem style of American parenting that has dominated the US since the 1960s came out of their hives and attacked.

At iLook China’s home page, I have a dedicated menu of this subject. If you visit the Home Page, scroll down and watch the menus on the right side of the screen.

Eventually, you will see the menu “About Tiger Mothers and Tough Love“.  Almost every post in that menu touches on the value of parenting and education.

Decades of “mostly ignored” studies in the US show that the average American parent (I take average to mean about half of all parents) talks to his or her child less than five minutes a day, while the average child spends about 10 hours a day having fun watching TV, playing video games, social networking on Facebook, and/or sending text messages, etc.

To be continued in Part 2, April 8, 2011 at 12:00 PST.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

My Mother Would Have Burned This Book – Part 5/5

April 3, 2011

In China, the concubine is a trophy showing a man’s success. No major religion on earth has had a lasting impact on the Chinese culture in more than a thousand years.

In fact, the concept that lust is a mortal sin does not exist in China unless a Chinese has adopted Christianity as his or her religion.

That does not mean China is without morals but the moral codes of China exist without the sin of mortal lust as Catholics and many devout Christians believe. In fact, I’ve known mainland Chinese that are extremely moral and would put most Puritans to shame.

The idea to focus on Robert Hart’s struggles with his Victorian, Christian morals while living in 19th century China’s concubine culture sprouted when I first read his journals and letters published by Harvard University Press.

Other influences were Anchee Min’s Empress Orchid and The Last Empress: A Novel, which go into detail about the lives of the more than three thousand concubines that belonged to the emperor.

After all, in 19th century China, the more power and wealth a man had, the more women he owned.

Another influence was the movie directed by director Zhang Yimou in 1991, Raise the Red Lantern, which “focuses on the ever-shifting balance of power between the various concubines while the husband ignores much of what is going on — taking his pleasures when he feels like it.”

For anyone that might agree with “colorado outback” or my “mother” that My Splendid Concubine should be censored, burned or put on a “DON’T BUY LIST”, Amazon Kindle offers a free preview of the first few chapters as does the Websites for My Splendid Concubine and the sequel, Our Hart, Elegy for a Concubine.

Read the first few chapters of the novel free and learn if you agree with “colorado outback” that this novel is “soft porn” and should be banned. Why spend money for something you may want to burn unless you really want to burn it?

Return to Part 4 or start with Part 1

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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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