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About Lloyd Lofthouse

Lloyd Lofthouse earned a BA in journalism after fighting in Vietnam as a U. S. Marine. He then taught English and journalism in the public schools by day (for thirty years) and for a time worked as a maitre d' in a multimillion-dollar nightclub by night. Later, he earned a MFA in writing. He lives near San Francisco.

Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 3/9

03 May

Sleep Med.com reported, “Children require an average of 9 to 10 hours of sleep each night but it is estimated that 30 to 40% of children do not sleep enough.”

However, while our daughter was still in high school and resented being in bed before 10:00 PM, she often mentioned that many of her friends were still up at 2:00 AM on a school night writing e-mails or leaving comments on her Facebook page.

How much sleep were those teens getting?

The reason children require this much sleep is because recent research discovered the body and brain of a child and adolescent grows and develops while sleeping. If a child sleeps less (on average), he or she is not reaching his or her full potential.

Stanford.edu reported, “The average American teen-ager gets 6.5 hours of sleep on a school night, some lots less.… If they had adequate sleep, they would learn more.… Sleep experts consider adolescents to be between the ages of 11 and 22.”

In fact the Stanford study says, “Sleep deprivation can impair memory and inhibit creativity making it difficult for sleep deprived students to learn.”

“Teens struggle to learn to deal with stress and control emotion — sleep deprivation makes it even more difficult. Irritability, lack of self-confidence and mood swings are often common in a teen, but sleep deprivation makes it worse.

“Depression can result from chronic sleep deprivation. Not enough sleep can endanger their immune system and make them more susceptible to serious illnesses.”

This lack of sleep among “average” American teens may explain why Caucasian teens have the highest suicide and mental illness rate compared to Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Latinos.

In part four, we will see how diet may affect a child’s health, mood and ability to get an education.

Continued on May 4, 2011 in Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.

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Posted by on May 3, 2011 in family values, Parenting

 

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Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 2/9

02 May

In 2009, children and teens spent an average of one hour and 29 minutes on a computer while texting (on a cell phone) up to four times longer.

A PEW study from April 2010 says, “The typical American teen sends and receives 50 or more messages per day (on a cell phone), or 1,500 per month.”

In fact, teens spent less time talking on a cell phone than texting.

One way to combat texting is to call the provider and ask if texting may be blocked. We use AT&T and I asked and discovered that AT&T offers blocking so text messages cannot be received or sent. Even if a child/teen does not text, friends may send texts and it takes time to read them.  It also costs money to receive a text message. All of our cell phones are now blocked for texting.

A Kaiser Generation M2 – Kids/Youth/Media Survey (January 2010) said, “Total Media Exposure for all 8 to 18 year old’s average amount of time spend with each medium in a typical day was 10:45 hours

That average 10:45 hours was divided up with 4:29 hours spent watching TV; 2:31 hours listening to music; 1:29 hours on the computer; 1:13 hours playing video games; 30 minutes reading print media, and 25 minutes watching a movie.


Rules and Discipline by Dr. Archer Crosley

A Pew “Teens & Social Media” Study reported, “Nearly two-thirds of teens – 63 percent – have a cell phone; 35 percent of all online teen girls blog, compared with 20 percent of online teen boys and 32 percent of girls ages 12 to 14 Blog, compared to 18 percent of boys age 15 to 17.

It does not help that the US has More TV’s than people. More than 50% of homes have at least three working televisions. The average number of TV’s in homes for the US is 2.8, which means many family members may be in different rooms watching different programs.

If you are not in the same room and the TV is on for that many hours, where does quality time come from for talking to each other?

In addition, evidence is growing that early TV exposure undermines all the building blocks, and this study is proof that tuning into the tube at an early age contributes to attention problems (ADHD) and hampers learning.

In fact, children exposed to more than an hour of screen time daily eventually develop ADHD and other learning difficulties by the age of seven. Memory retention also declines as the brain is constantly shifting focus and remembers only those incidents, which have had most impact from the pleasure point of view. Thus, retention of academic concepts suffers. Source: Short Attention Span Theatre

There is also an “average” or “norm” for sleep, which will be the topic of Part 3

Continued on May 3, 2011 in Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 3 or start with Part 1

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

 
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Posted by on May 2, 2011 in family values, Parenting

 

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Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 1/9

01 May

Before anyone can avoid this trap, he or she must learn how to recognize it.

My goal with this series is to provide information and insite that may help young parents make better decisions while being better armed to recognize the dangers waiting for the average American parent and child due to societal and peer pressure to conform to the mainstream.

Another way to think about this is to conform to Political Correctness, which is also a form of peer pressure.

How do you know if you are an “average” American parent and what does being a member of the “norm” mean and/or look like?


Katie Couric speaks with author, Ellen Galinsky about the problems of over-praising kids to build self-esteem without demanding accomplishment.

When there is a scientific study, the population of the study that makes up the largest number of people will be described as the “average” or “norm”. No other group or population in that study is larger.

There will be a smaller number of people outside (below and above) the average.

That said, studies show the average American parent/adult talks to his or her child or children less than five minutes a day. If you don’t believe that, wait until you discover what the average parent, child and teen does with their time each day. Then you will learn that there isn’t much time left for talk.

In addition, family talk time is important.

Media Literacy Clearinghouse provides information from many studies to show what the average American does with his or her time.

For example: the average adult American woman watches 5:31 hours of TV a day while the average man watches 4:54 hours.  Children and teens watch an average of 3.5 hours daily.

Continued on May 2, 2011 in Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 2

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.

His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

 
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Posted by on May 1, 2011 in family values, Parenting

 

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The “Wanna Be” Natural – Part 3/3

28 Apr

Wanna Be bet his future on a belief that he didn’t need to get an education because he was going to be drafted into Major League Baseball (MLB) and earn millions.

My brother Richard’s (1935 – 1999) oldest daughter (from his second marriage) graduated from high school engaged to another student that had signed a contract to pitch for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The weekend after he signed the contract, he threw a wild party to celebrate. A fight broke out and he was hit in the head with a baseball bat and lost his ability to pitch. The contract was cancelled and no money changed hands.

Depressed, he fell into booze and drugs along with my niece, and the marriage fell apart.

I don’t know if Wanna Be’s dream came true but most don’t.

I recently read that an average of 40,000 young people flood Hollywood annually dreaming of being the next super star to eventually win an Academy Award.

However, less than one percent lands a role on TV or in film let alone super-star status.

The tragedy is that Wanna Be wasn’t alone.  Too many of the students I taught saw no reason to work in school since they had been convinced by a parent boosting the child’s self-esteem that if the child dreamed it, that dream would come true, which is another absurd example of the damage caused by the Self-Esteem movement.

Return to The “Wanna Be” Natural – Part 1 or discover A Ten Year Old Named Oscar

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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.

To subscribe to Crazy Normal, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on April 28, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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The “Wanna Be” Natural – Part 2/3

27 Apr

I don’t recall this student’s name so I’ll call him “Wanna Be”, and he was convinced he was going to be a big league pitcher. He often disrupted the class by announcing that baseball scouts were already watching him and his future was guaranteed.

Wanna Be saw no reason to read the assignments, study for tests, or do homework and he failed both semesters.

In the mornings before first period, I’d often run into Wanna Be before he had his liquid-sugar breakfast and he was a friendly guy—nothing like the surely, moody monster that walked into my fifth period after lunch with a 64 ounce Coke in hand.

The sugar he consumed at lunch often resulted in glazed eyes, a slack jaw, slurred speech and a serious change in behavior.


Liquid Sugar is Toxic

The student snack bar, which was more of a fast food outlet that served mostly French fries, pizza slices, nachos smothered in cheese and hamburgers, sold 64 ounce Cokes for less than a dollar.

Near the end of my teaching career, the high school also had soda machines installed in the hallways to make money for the school district. The vender split the profits.

One morning, I ran into the truck driver stocking the machines and asked how many sodas the students drank.  I recall that he said he stocked an average of 2,000 cases a week in the machines at Nogales and a case held 24 Cokes—that’s 48,000 Cokes a week at one high school. The high school had about 3,000 students. You do the math.

To be fair, the machines also sold water but most of the students hooked on this liquid candy hated water and had no qualms saying how horrible water tasted.

Continued on April 28, 2011 in The “Wanna Be” Natural – Part 3 or return to Part 1

____________________

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.

To subscribe to Crazy Normal, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on April 27, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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The “Wanna Be” Natural – Part 1/3

26 Apr

When I decided to write this post about one of the students I taught at Nogales High School in La Puente, California, I thought of The Natural, a baseball movie starring Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, and Glenn Close, where an average baseball player comes out of seemingly nowhere to become a legendary player with almost divine talent.

This is what Hollywood does best—the stuff dreams are made of.

Then I Googled “baseball movies” and discovered a Site listing almost 200 from A to Z (there wasn’t one for “Z”, but “Y” had Yankees West and The Yankles.

If you love baseball as many Americans do, you may want to visit Boston Baseball.com.

I even searched for “Baseball Movies” on YouTube, which resulted in more than five-hundred thousand hits, and I was sucked into watching a few clips.

I could have watched baseball videos for hours on YouTube. I suspect entire movies are there ten minutes at a time.

However, that wasn’t what I wanted to write about.

I wanted to write about one student of the thousands I taught.  He was in one of my ninth grade English classes.

He hated water as many Americans do, and often started school with a liquid breakfast followed by a liquid lunch and a bag of greasy French fries. Then he arrived at his English class—my fifth period.

Continued on April 27, 2011 in The “Wanna Be” Natural – 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.

To subscribe to Crazy Normal, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on April 26, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, Parenting, Teaching

 

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The Un-Civil War Between Old-World Values and New Age Parenting – Part 2/2

25 Apr

Larry Summers cites in his debate with Amy Chua that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard emphasizing what those “two” achieved without a university education.

While Gates was building Microsoft and Zuckerberg Facebook, do you believe these two billionaires spent ten hours a day doing what the average American child (raised by SAPs such as Summers) does to enjoy the first quarter of his or her life?

Summers doesn’t mention that Warren Buffet, one of the richest men on the planet, attended the Wharton Business school at the University of Pennsylvania for two years then transferred to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Working part time, he managed to graduate in only three years.

Summers doesn’t mention that it is common that the top one percent of executives with annual incomes of $500,000 or more often have Ivy league educations from universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale or Princeton.


“Asian countries value education more than other countries.”

Summers doesn’t mention that the top 15% of the upper-middle class are highly educated and often have graduate degrees while earning a high 5-figure annual income commonly above $100,000.

To be specific, the median personal income for a high school drop out in the US with less than a 9th grade education is $17,422, and with some college that medium income jumps to $31,054, while a person with a professional university degree earns an annual medium income of $82,473. Source: Wiki Academic Models (this source was citing US Census data).

It’s okay if Summers and his fellow SAPs let their children and teens have fun the first eighteen years of life, but don’t forget, the average life span in the US is 78.3 years.

What are those children going to do for enjoyment while working to earn a living the next 60.3 years as an adult?

Most children raised by Tiger Moms such as Amy Chua shouldn’t have to worry. Those children (as adults) will probably be in the top 15% of income earners and enjoy life much more than those earning less than $18 thousand annually.

Learn more from Costco Connections “Is College Worth It?” or return to The War Between Old-World Values and New-Age Parenting – 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.

This revised and edited post first appeared on iLook China January 31, 2011 as Amy Chua Debates Former White House “Court Jester” Larry Summers

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Posted by on April 25, 2011 in Education, family values, politics

 

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The Un-Civil War Between Old-World Values and New Age Parenting – Part 1/2

24 Apr

One definition of the word “SAP” means “a foolish gullible person”. I copied that from Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, and Larry Summers sounds as if he were a member of the “SAP” generation.

A friend forwarded a link to Larry Summers vs. Tiger Mom, which was published in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on January 27, 2011.

Larry Summers, who has billed himself as a “hard ass”, was President Barack Obama’s top economic advisor for the last few years.

Summers recently left the White House to return to Harvard as a professor then had a debate with Chinese-American “Tiger Mom,” Amy Chua, who wrote an essay that appeared in the WSJ with a headline (she didn’t write), which said, Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.

Summers said why go through all the trouble to earn a university education when computers are eventually going to do the work that requires discipline.

He also said, “People on average live a quarter of their lives as children. That’s a lot. It’s important that they be as happy as possible during those 18 years. That counts too.”

Summers isn’t alone in his belief that children should focus on being happy instead of academic excellence.

The average American parent belonging to the Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness (more SAPs) spends less than five minutes a day encouraging his or her child to be happy, which explains why the average American child enjoys watching TV (4:29 hours daily); socializing on sites such as Facebook (1:29 hours); playing video games (1:13 hours); listening to music (2:31 hours) while managing to send an average of 50 text messages daily. Source: A Kaiser Generation M2 – Youth Media Survey in January 2010 (other studies support these numbers).

The War Between Old-World Values and New-Age Parenting will continue on April 25, 2011 in Part 2

Discover Bush and Obama’s Ignorant Gaff

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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.

This revised and edited post first appeared on iLook China January 31, 2011 as Amy Chua Debates Former White House “Court Jester” Larry Summers

To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on April 24, 2011 in Education, Parenting, politics

 

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Parenting 101 — the Amy Chua Controversy

19 Apr

I’m sure that Amy Chua had no idea she was about to light a Baby Boomer fuse that would explode when she wrote her essay published in The Wall Street Journal about Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.

In 2000, Paul Begala, a political strategist for President Bill Clinton, wrote in Esquire, “The Baby Boomers are the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self aggrandizing generation in American history.”

Begala was right.

Starting in the 1960s, the Boomers also gave birth to the narcissistic, self-esteem generation.

When Amy Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother went on sale, my wife and I went to the local Barnes and Noble and bought a copy. It took us more than a week to read the book. My wife went first.

However, the morning that Chua’s memoir went on sale, dozens of one-star reviews appeared on Amazon.com condemning the book before anyone had time to read it.

Later, Amazon.com deleted many of these critical reviews that were bitter, caustic, personal attacks on Chua’s parenting methods and had nothing to say of the memoir. It was obvious that most if not all of those early one-star reviews were based on the essay in The Wall Street Journal.

Nancy (not her real name), who works for Barnes and Noble (where we bought a copy of the memoir), told us of an experience she had substitute teaching in a girls P.E. Class. She said there were about 150 girls. Half were Asian and half were Caucasian. When Nancy told them to sit and read or do what they wanted, the Asians took out books and studied. The Caucasians started to text, do makeup and gossip.

Studies show that the “average” American Boomer parent talks to his or her children less than five minutes a day and more than 80% never attend a parent-teacher conference. Boomer parents are so self-absorbed with other interests that TV, the Internet, video games and other teens become substitute parents to their children.

However, when most Chinese mothers (or Asian American) come together, their conversations focus on their children and education, which explains why studies show Asian-American students have the lowest incidence of STDs, teen pregnancy, illegal drug and alcohol use and the highest GPAs, graduation rates from high school and highest ratio of college attendance.

What do you think the “average” Caucasian Boomer mothers talk about when they get together?

A close friend of mine, who isn’t Chinese, read Amy Chua’s essay and many of the comments attacking Chua for her tough stance as a mother. He said it is obvious that Chinese mothers love their children and American mothers don’t because love means sacrifice.

Discover Recognizing Good Parenting

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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Posted by on April 19, 2011 in Education, family values, Parenting, substitute teaching

 

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Perils of the Public School Classroom – Part 2/2

18 Apr

Less than 100 years ago, children were the property of parents and could be sold into a form of slavery called servitude. Children of the poor often ended in factories and coalmines as young as five years old and labored twelve-hour days six days a week. Then in 1938, the child labor law was passed and the pendulum swung the other way 180 degrees until today, we see incidents such as these taking place in American classrooms.

I knew an eighth grade English teacher that was knocked out by a student. The student ended with five days of suspension then was transferred to my English class where she walked in tardy one day and lifted a leg to fart in my face in front of about 34 students before sitting down. I never met the parents.

Between 1999 and 2000, 135,000 teachers were physically attacked by a student and over 300,000 elementary and secondary school teachers were threatened with injury in the United States. Source: Lib.Umn.edu

American teachers are not alone.

The Guardian in the UK reported, “A quarter of school staff have suffered violence at the hands of a student and a third have been confronted by aggressive parents.”

What’s needed is to swing the pendulum back half way and return to dunce caps and stools in the classroom corner, corporal punishment and fines or even jail time for parents and/or students of all ages.

Of course, we could swing the pendulum back to the 17th century when some of the American colonies had laws on the books that allowed the courts to execute children that did not change unacceptable, rebellious behavior by a certain age.

Maybe we should include the parents of those children too.

However, instead of the situation improving, President Obama wants to take away job security for public school teachers and no one in Washington D.C. mentions the parents or the students when academic performance is not improving.

Return to Perils of the Public School Classroom – Part 1 or discover Presidents Bush and Obama’s Ignorant Gaff

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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.

To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on April 18, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, Parenting, politics, Public School, Teaching

 

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