A Child’s fun and Self-esteem versus the Survival of a Nation – Part 2/3

April 15, 2011

Once a child’s behavior becomes a habit, the child feels entitled to always live that lifestyle.

Who is in charge of a child’s diet creating lifestyle habits?

The answer should be “parents” but in the US, it is normal for the child to make these decisions leading to children eating unhealthy food, watching TV, playing video games or social networking on Facebook for about 10 hours a day.

Unfortunately, statistics show the average American parent is doing a lousy job. One exception may be the Asian-American community, which includes Chinese and Japanese.

The definition for average says, a statistic describing the location of a distribution; “it set the norm for American homes”, which means this is the largest segment of parents in the country.

This is what parenting is measured against and if you don’t parent like this, you are not considered normal by  American standards—a form of peer pressure.

That normal American parent also protects the child from experiencing failure since failure hurts self-esteem.

Life Span reports, “The Japanese still live longer than anyone else…. The Japanese said their long lives was due to moderation in eating and drinking. Other advice was early to bed and early to rise, religious faith and hard work.”

However, in the US, the “average”, normal American parent is obsessed with the child’s self-esteem and is more concerned with the child having fun and telling the child to follow his or her dreams.

Did you know that about 40,000 young Americans migrate to Hollywood, California every year dreaming of becoming the next super star but less than one percent will actually land an acting role with no guarantee of fame, fortune or winning an Oscar?

President Barack Obama is the 44th president of the US since 1789 when George Washington was sworn in as the first American President. What are the odds that any child will become a president?

Individuals that achieve his or her dreams are in the minority — a very small minority.

When children dream such dreams, it is up to the parent to teach the child reality.

To be continued on April 16, 2011 in Part 3 or start with 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.

2 Comments | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, cultural differences, education, family values, parenting | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

A Child’s fun and Self-esteem versus the Survival of a Nation – Part 1/3

April 14, 2011


The front-page of a recent Sunday, Contra Costa Times newspaper shouted at me from inside its box, “Shortened Lives. Where you live Matters“.

I leaned over to read what I could through the glass/plastic and discovered that the average Asian-American woman lives twenty years longer than an African-American man does. The numbers were shocking.

The average Asian-American female lived to be 89.4 (Asian-American men live to be 85.1), while the average African-American man lived to be 69.9.  African-American women did better.  They averaged 77.5.

The Contra Costa Times feature went on to report, “The long life span for Asian-Americans follows a national trend.… Much of it may have to do with diet.”

Education was also mentioned. Statistics show that the more education one has, the longer one may live.

I bought the paper and read the piece and the before I was done reading, the message was that the government and health care were being held responsible to level the life-expectancy field.

I beg your pardon.

It isn’t the government or a doctor’s job to instill healthy habits in a child so he or she grows up to be a healthy adult with a chance at living a longer life. The government and doctors may give advice but the job falls to the parent.

To be continued on April 15, 2011 in Part 2 or discover how Tiger Parents are Saving America One Child at a Time

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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 5/5

April 11, 2011

There is a difference in values and education between urban and rural parents since many Chinese in rural China never went to school or had a school close to the village while larger towns and cities all had schools.

In the last thirty years that has been changing. After Mao died in 1976 and as late as 1980, twenty percent of Chinese were literate and 80% were not.  In the last thirty years, literacy has been raised to above 90%. If the average Chinese parent was a SAP, that wouldn’t have happened. 

In fact, I’ve heard that Amy Tan’s (the author of The Joy Luck Club) mother’s primary concern was that her daughter speak English without an accent.

Amy Tan writes that her mother wanted her to be a doctor and a concert pianist. Amy Tan’s mother was an immigrant from mainland China and she was not a SAP parent by any definition but she wasn’t as extreme as Amy Chua either.

China’s leaders in Beijing knew that for China to modernize and prosper, the people would have to be literate and educated so starting in the 1980s, the public schools spread into rural China for the first time in history to reach as much of the rural population as possible.

However, urban education is still better than rural education. It takes more than a generation to bring about changes this drastic.

Meanwhile, the opposite is happening in the United States where the average literate person reads at or below fifth-grade level and among younger Americans we find few serious readers.

While China promotes education and is supported by Tiger Parents of all stripes, in America for the last sixty years, the SAPs have waged a war on education to make learning more fun than educational, which has damaged America’s ability to maintain its economic status in the world.

To reverse this trend, what America needs is more Tiger Parents of all stripes and fewer SAPs.

Return to Part 4 or start with 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 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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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

______________

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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