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.
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.
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.
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.
My family had a date to walk the mile to the local Sunday Farmer’s Market, which up until today has always been a pleasant experience.
However, at the Farmer’s Market, I came face to face with the ignorance and hate that surveys say about 40% of Americans have concerning China.
It started out as a conversation with a young man giving away free samples of a local newspaper as part of a program to grow subscriptions.
The feature story on the front page said, Walmart sex-discrimination case headed to the Supreme Court. This led to a conversation about Wal-Mart being anti union. The newspaper vendor said that in Europe Wal-Mart had no choice about unions then I mentioned that Wal-Mart had stores in China where all the workers belong to unions.
The conversation then turned to China. Eventually the newspaper vendor asked why I knew so much about China, and I told him that I write a Blog about China.
Since spending a decade researching Robert Hart for my first two historical fiction novels, it has become my goal to explain why China is the way it is since it was during that decade that I discovered how biased and ignorant many in the West are of China.
That’s when the fair skinned WASP with the ruddy winter blush on his cheeks stepped in. He was standing several feet away with his trained dog sitting on its box. He’s there almost every Sunday demonstrating what a great animal trainer he is. Since I have no interest in training animals, I’ve never had a conversation with him.
Without being asked, he said China was guilty of killing twenty million women. (I don’t remember the exact words but that’s close enough.) Within minutes, he would boost the number to forty million.
I attempted explaining that China’s central government cannot be blamed for centuries of cultural behavior and that there were laws against female infanticide in China today. I started to explain that even the one-child policy is misunderstood but he cut me off.
The WASP with the ruddy face waved his arms above his head and shouted I should get two Communist flags and wave them in the air so everyone at the market would know I was a China lover.
I don’t love China. I also don’t hate it. Instead, I want to understand.
America, with all of its flaws and there are many, is my country but I do not blindly love the US either. I wore the uniform of a US Marine and fought in Vietnam out of youthful patriotism decades before I discovered that in Vietnam then in Iraq, US presidents launched wars based on lies and deceit.
Standing there at the Sunday Farmer’s market, the adrenalin started fizzing through my body as my PTSD was triggered and I moved into combat mode thinking of all the China facts I could teach this ignorant, biased WASP, while realizing that he didn’t want to learn.
The Marine Corps taught me not to get into a fight that I couldn’t win and winning meant killing before being killed.
I decided to walk away but before leaving, I jabbed an index finger in his direction and said, “Your biased opinions are based on ignorance. There is a lot you should learn of China.”
That’s when the WASP doubled the figure of female deaths in China from 20 to 40 million.
If surveys are correct, about 120 million Americans hold the same ignorant, biased opinions of China that this WASP believed.
Most Sinophobes know nothing of The Opium Wars; Sun Yat-sen in the early 20th century seeking help from the British Empire and the US to build a democracy in China and being rejected; or the facts behind China’s Civil War and all the other history that led to China being as it is today.
It’s true that female infanticide has been a cultural practice in China for centuries. It’s also true that the CCP passed laws to end that practice and sends teams into rural China to teach the people that it is wrong. That doesn’t mean that all the Chinese will change.
In fact, The Society for the Prevention of Infanticide (SPI) says, “Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilization, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.”
SPI says, “One way to control the lethal effects of starvation was to restrict the number of children allowed to survive to adulthood.”
Even “Darwin believed that infanticide, ‘especially of female infants,’ was the most important restraint on the proliferation of early man.”
“Today,” SPI says, “At least 60 million females in Asia are missing and feared dead, victims of nothing more than their sex. Worldwide, research suggests, the number of missing females may top 100 million.
“Estimates indicate that 30.5 million females are ‘missing’ from China, 22.8 million in India, 3.1 million in Pakistan, 1.6 million in Bangladesh, 1.7 million in West Asia, 600,000 in Egypt, and 200,000 in Nepal.”
However, the ignorant WASP at the Sunday Farmers Market was “foaming” at the mouth about the evils of China when in fact, SPI says, “The colonists brought infanticide to America from England while at the same time finding that the Indians practiced it as well.”
In addition, “In 1646 the General Court of Massachusetts Bay had enacted a law where ‘a stubborn or rebellious son, of sufficient years and understanding, would be brought before the Magistrates incourt and such a son shall be put to death.’
“Stubborn child laws were also enacted in Connecticut in 1650, Rhode Island in 1668, and New Hampshire in 1679.”
In Modern American “In 1966, the United States had 10,920 murders, and one out of every twenty-two was a child killed by a parent.”
“Statistically, the United States ranks high on the list of countries whose inhabitants kill their children. For infants under the age of one year, the American homicide rate is 11th in the world, while for ages one through four it is ‘first’ and for ages five through fourteen it is ‘fourth’.
“From 1968 to 1975, infanticide of all ages accounted for almost 3.2% of all reported homicides in the United States.”
I learned something new today. I learned that it is easier to deal with ignorance at a distance on Blogs and Internet forums where there are others reading what I write than it is talking to ignorance face to face.
It took more than an hour for my burst of combat adrenalin to work its way out of my system and it wasn’t until I finished writing this post that I was calm again. I wanted so much to attempt smacking down that WASP and discover if I had remembered what the Marine Corps drilled into me of hand-to-hand combat. After all, that training kept me alive in Vietnam, and I’ve broken bones learning martial arts.
However, I’m glad I walked away. Violence is not a solution to ignorance and it won’t open closed minds. After Vietnam and the Marines, I was a teacher in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005) where I learned how difficult it is to open minds.
You cannot teach someone that doesn’t want to learn.
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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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