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.
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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
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