iLook China

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.

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