The American Mental Illness Olympics

March 24, 2011

The race to acquire a serious mental illness (SMI) is a race you “DO NOT” want to win, and Asians earned last place. If you are among the 97% of Asian-Americans without a SMI, thank your Tough Love parents.

To the average Caucasian-American parent, in a perfect world, all dreams come true and everyone is having fun and enjoys life daily.

That is the foundation of the self-esteem movement, which turned the average American parent into a SAP (a member of the Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness).

Here is more evidence that Tough Love parents, the Amy Chua’s of the world, are right while the SAPs are wrong.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 2008 said that Asian-Americans (coming in fifth in the mental illness Olympics) had the lowest prevalence of SMIs by race, while Caucasians took the gold medal; Latinos the bronze and Africa-Americas came in fourth.

American Indian/Alaska Natives took the silver SMI medal.

The most disturbing comparison was the one between young and old. Those 18 to 24 had four times the SMIs than people over fifty had. It is obvious that SAPs did not raise older Americans. I am sixty-five and my parents did not score high on the Amy Chua Tough Love scale, but they were not SAPs.

Another NIMH study says, “Moreover, African-Americans and Mexican-Americans were significantly less likely to seek treatment than whites.” There is no mention of Asians in this study.

The evidence suggests that Amy Chua’s Tough Love methods (or Tough Love parenting methods in general) lead to adults better able to cope with the challenges and stresses of life that most “will” face.


Self-Discipline may be the key to controlling mental health.

In addition, success at completing college shows that the average Asian Tough Love parent is more successful than all other parenting methods.

The National Center for Education Statistics (IES) said, “Bachelor’s degree completion rates of students seeking a bachelor’s degree at 4-year institutions varied by student characteristics, including race/ethnicity and sex. Asian/Pacific Islander students had the highest 6-year graduation rate, followed by White, Hispanic, Black, and American Indian/Alaska Native students.”

If whites were so successful at earning college degrees (since they were second place), why did they come in first in the SMI Olympics—the race you want to lose?

In fact, the IES says, “The educational systems that outperformed the United States in fourth-grade mathematics—namely, Chinese Taipei, England, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, the Russian Federation, and Singapore — all were located in Asia or Europe (where Tough Love parenting methods prevail).”

I’m confident that most American SAPs will continue to criticize Amy Chua’s Chinese-American Tough Love parenting style for being too demanding.

I’m also confident that most American SAPs will keep blaming US schools and teachers for the lack of student performance.

However, the average number of minutes (less than 5 a day) that s SAP parent in the US talks to his or her average SAP child that spends an average 10 hours a day watching TV or playing video games, or texting or social networking on Facebook shows who is really to blame for winning the SMI Olympics, and it is not Amy Chua.

I wonder how many of Amy Chua’s critics have placed at the SMI Olympics.

Discover more at In Defense of Tiger Mothers Everywhere

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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

The “Turkish Solution” Applies to China

March 17, 2011

I read an interesting post at Pajamas Media written by Stephen Green.

In Egypt Should Employ the ‘Turkish Solution’, Green explains what confuses many in the West and especially Americans.

The gulf between American beliefs and the reality of the developing world is often wide and foggy.

In fact, the average American cannot understand why the rest of the world isn’t up in arms demanding democracy such as the one that exists in the US today.

It is as if the average American is ignorant of their history, which is probably true.

In 1776, the United States was not what it is today. Many act as if all it takes is to flip a switch and the citizens of any country may form a democracy similar to those in Europe and North America without consideration that it took more than two centuries for the US to evolve from a republic into the democracy it is today.

That’s why Stephen Green’s “Turkish Solution” is worth reading.

The United States started with leaders such as George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  No other country applied pressure on the US to become a republic. It was an internal decision.

Like Atatürk, the father of Turkey’s Republic, Deng Xiaoping was the father of China’s current one party republic. Under his guidance, China wrote a new Constitution in 1982 setting term and age limits for officials serving in the Communist Party, which has more than 70 million members.

Today in China, decisions are made by consensus and not by one man as they were under Mao’s leadership for twenty-six years and China is building a legal system that did not exist 30 years ago.

In the early 1980s, China also embarked on a goal of improving education and raising literacy to well above 90%. That goal has not been reached yet but China is close to achieving it.

Deng Xiaoping was correct in 1989 when he said China wasn’t ready to become a democracy.

In 1976 when Mao died, 80% of China’s population could not read yet literacy is vital to the success of a democracy.

Ignorant citizens do not make good decisions when they vote.

The next challenge China faces is to find leaders with the vision of a Washington, Atatürk or Deng Xiaoping.

Democracy is not born from outside pressure. It must come from inside China as it did for America and Turkey and it is best if democracy arrives peacefully and not on oceans of blood.

China has already had its century of madness where it was bathed in blood. Enough is enough.

Discover Dictatorship Defined

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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

Why Blaming China is Wrong

March 14, 2011

It wasn’t until I finished reading Jonathan Fahey’s piece for the Associated Press of a new drilling method opening vast oil fields in the US that I discovered more evidence of how wrong many Americans are of China.

North Americans that blame China for lost jobs react from “ignorance” and “anger” — not facts.

Most are incapable of understanding the complexity of America’s suffering economy and are unwilling to sacrifice so the US can compete globally in manufacturing.

Unable and/or unwilling to understand, these people need a scapegoat so politicians running for office give them one — China.

The clue came when Fahey wrote, “At today’s oil prices of roughly $90 per barrel, slashing imports that much would save the U.S. $175 billion a year. Last year, when oil averaged $78 per barrel, the U.S. sent $260 billion overseas for crude, accounting for nearly half the country’s $500 billion trade deficit.”

What happens in China is not the reason for lost US jobs.

In fact, most of what China earns in global trade from exports is spent in other nations such as Australia, Pakistan, Brazil, Myanmar and South Africa until Chinese exports and imports are about even.

That $260 billion the US spent for imported oil that added to the deficit revealed the truth. Many in the US are unwilling to sacrifice for the good of the country.

However, as the Amy Chua Tiger Mother debate reveals, the real culprit of the trade deficit in the US is illiteracy caused by the average parent focused on the child’s daily fun instead of his or her education and the work it takes to earn it.

Begin to Read.com says, “Many of the USA ills are directly related to illiteracy.” Then the site provides a few statistics to make its point.


“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – Ray Bradbury

  • Literacy is learned. Parents who cannot read or write pass along illiteracy. (Did you notice there was no mention of teachers getting the blame? As long as parents blame someone or something else, illiteracy in the US will not improve.)
  • One child in four in the US grows up not knowing how to read.
  • Forty-three percent of adults at Level 1 literacy skills live in poverty compared to only 4% of those at Level 5
  • Three of four food stamp recipients perform in the lowest two literacy levels
  • Ninety percent of welfare recipients are high school dropouts—according to NumberOf.net, there are about 50 million Americans collecting some form of welfare.
  • Over 70% of the more than two million inmates in America’s prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level.

According to literacy fast facts from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), literacy is defined as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”

Studies say that about 13% of the adult population was at or above proficient in literacy. Since there are about 230 million adults in America that means only 30 million are proficient.

A CBS report on The Future of Jobs in America said, “Education has to be the final part of the strategy for job growth.”

Illiteracy is America’s “real” culprit and it is not the fault of China or America’s teachers. It is the fault of parents and middle-class Americans unwilling to sacrifice by changing spending and lifestyle habits.

Until most Americans face the facts, nothing is going to change. It is only going to get worse until there is no one left to blame but the face in the mirror. By then, it may be too late.

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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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It Started on a Sunday Hike (the home taught child) – Part 3/3

March 10, 2011

Those that read my work regularly may know that I was a public school teacher in Southern California for thirty years.

During that time, some of the toughest parents I met were Christian fundamentalist evangelicals and none was SAP parents (Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness).

One Caucasian student was home taught by his parents because they feared exposure to children raised by SAP parents and taught by teachers pressured to dumb down the work while inflating grades by the same SAPs.

However, when he was old enough to go to high school, he managed to convince his parents to allow him to be among teens his own age.  It was obvious from the start that this tall, pale skinned Caucasian teen had been raised by Tough Love parents (probably not as demanding as Amy Chua) to be a disciplined, polite young man that earned excellent grades in high school.

When his parents enrolled him in the high school where I taught, they requested the counselor put him in the toughest teachers’ classes.

As a ninth grade student, he ended in my English class where I recruited him into my journalism class.


Most high school journalism students are disciplined and work hard.

Then, in his senior year, he became editor-in-chief of the high school student newspaper, and I was the faculty advisor. He never missed a deadline. He even managed to intern at a local newspaper his last semester in high school.

Last time we shared e-mails a few years ago, he was the news anchor for a network TV station in Palm Desert, California. He’d even spent a tour in the US Navy.

The fact is that there are great Tough Love parents in America but the average US parent according to many studies is a SAP that allows the child to spend an average of 10 hours a day watching TV, on the Internet probably on Facebook, playing video games or sending out hundreds of text messages while eating unhealthy food.

The SAP crowd is noisy and nosey.  For example, I just searched Amazon for books with topics on Self Esteem and discovered 3,358 books with those words in the title or description.

When I searched Tough Love, the results came back with eighteen titles.

I also discovered that there’s a Website that talks about Self Esteem Magazines for Children. I didn’t find any magazines about Tough Love, but Chinese parents don’t need magazines to know how to be a better parent than a SAP.

Return to It Started on a Sunday Hike -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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

It started on a Sunday Hike (the Lunar New Year dinner) – Part 2/3

March 9, 2011

At a recent Chinese-American Lunar New Year dinner, all Asians were talking about Amy Chua’s essay in the Wall Street Journal, Why Chinese mothers are superior, and her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

They were angry with Chua. They said Chua was going to make their job as parents more difficult since most American Caucasian parents would stereotype them and disapprove.

Since most of the Chinese-Americans I know were born and raised in mainland China, I had to remind them that Amy Chua grew up in the US and was not Chinese but Chinese-American.

While her Middle Kingdom born and raised mother and overseas Chinese father raised her using perfectly acceptable, universal Tough Love parenting methods, she was also exposed to America’s evangelical atmosphere where far to many preach his or her brand of parenting, religion, politics and lifestyle as if it were the only acceptable way to live.

Among Chinese in America or China, I’ve seldom heard anyone preach what he or she believes is the best way to raise children, live and worship.

However, one of my closest Caucasian friends in the US does nothing but preach.

The consensus among the Asians I’ve heard was that it was wrong of Amy Chua to brand Tough Love parenting as a Chinese method.

In fact, it isn’t. All through history, Tough Love has been the way most parents raised children all over the globe. SAP (Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness) is the exception and is a recent, flawed belief. The SAP parenting model could be called the curse of a wealthy family or culture, which often leads to its downfall.

According to the reader reviews for Amy Chua’s memoir at Amazon.com, at 11:59 AM on Sunday, February 06, 2011, one-hundred-and-fifty-seven (157) people rated her memoir as a four or five star read.

Many of these four and five star reviews were thoughtful, long and well written.

In contrast, there were one-hundred-thirteen (113) one or two star reviews and most that I read were short with a few long-winded rants that seldom go into detail about the book itself.

The results show that more than 58% of reader reviews enjoyed her work or supported some level of Tough Love parenting leaving 42% opposed to her memoir/parenting style.

I didn’t count the three star reviews since they are somewhat neutral.

Then there is the on-line opinion poll the Wall Street Journal conducted to discover which style of parenting was considered best for raising children.

The Permissive Western parenting style most practiced by SAPs, earned 37.7% of the 35,201 votes, while 62.3% voted for Demanding Eastern parenting.

The results from Amazon reader reviews and the WSJ poll on the subject seem to indicate that SAPs make up about 40% the population, which may represent the “average” American parent and child.

To be Continued in Part 3

Return to It started on a Sunday Hike – 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

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