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Category Archives: child abuse

Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 4/4

29 Jun

Lori Gottlieb follows Amy Chua with Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University that has written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem.  Twenge is also the co-author of Epidemic. Twenge says, when ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great Job!”, the child learned to feel that everything he does is special … he never gets negative feedback on his performance … They grew up in a bubble, so they get out into the real world and they start to feel lost and helpless.


“Season 2 – Episode 9 – Does anyone let their kids play outside anymore? Cross the street? Do their own homework? Tie their own shoe? How do we prepare our kids for the real world while keeping them in a protective bubble? Jen and Barb talk to Dr. Wendy Mogel, nationally known clinical psychologist and author of the New York Times best selling parenting book, “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” about need to empower ourselves as Mothers to loosen the leash and let our kids fall, so they learn how to get up and are prepared for the future.”

Wendy Mogel told Gottlieb over the phone, “Please let them (kids) be devastated at age 6 and not have their first devastation be in college!” and “parents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they deserve special treatment.”

In fact, Twenge says, “Research shows that much better predictors of live fulfillment and success are perseverance, resiliency, and reality-testing—qualities that people need so they can navigate the day-to-day,” and many kids aren’t learning these skills anymore.

Near the conclusion of the Atlantic piece, Gottlieb said, “by trying  so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up.”

Return to Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 3 or start with Part 1

_______________________

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 June 29, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting, student behavior

 

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Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 3/4

28 Jun

Then Wendy Mogel, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles and the author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, echoes Kindlon’s words when she says, “Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety for them (their children) their entire childhoods, so they (the children) don’t know how to deal with it when they grow up.”


“Raising Cain is a 2-hour PBS documentary that explores the emotional development of boys in America today. Our guide in the program is child psychologist Michael Thompson, Ph.D. His book on the emotional lives of boys, “Raising Cain,” with co-author Dan Kindlon, was a New York Times bestseller. Raising Cain chronicles the lives of boys from birth through high school through powerful documentary stories about real boys. The interviews reveal the challenges and confusion that boys encounter while growing up in America.”

A family psychologist in Los Angeles, Jeff Blume, then told Lori Gottlieb, “A kid needs to feel normal anxiety to be resilient. If we want our kids to group up and be more independent, then we should prepare our kids to leave us every day.”

Eventually, Gottlieb mentions Amy Chua’s memoir, the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and says, many of today’s parents who are obsessed with their kids’ happiness share Chua’s desire for their children to have high achievement but without the sacrifice and struggle that this kind of achievement often requires.

Continued on June 29, 2011 in Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 4 or return to Part 2

_______________________

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).

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 June 28, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting, student behavior

 

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Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 2/4

27 Jun

Ann Hulbert, the author of Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children says, there’s always been a tension among the various recommended parenting styles—the bonders versus the disciplinarians, the child-centered versus the parent-centered…

Following Gretchen Rubin, Lori Gottlieb quotes Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, who says, “happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.”


“Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.”

Then Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at UCLA believes, “Many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment…with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.

Dan Kindlon, the author of Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age, says, If kids can’t experience painful feelings, they won’t develop “psychological immunity”. He also said, “We (parents) don’t set limits, because we want our kids to like us at every moment, even though it is better for them if sometimes they can’t stand us.”

Continued on June 28, 2011 in Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 3 or return to Part 1

_______________________

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).

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 June 27, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting, student behavior

 

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Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 1/4

26 Jun

At the end of What, Me Worry about Debt! I’ve got self-esteem protecting me, I mentioned Lori Gottlieb’s piece in The Atlantic magazine, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” and said I’d be writing about what she had to say.  This is it.

It is always good to know someting about the experts we read or hear, so who is Lori Gottlieb? Well, she graduated from Stanford Medical School, is an author, a journalist, a columnist and a psychotherapist. For the longer version, click on the first link in this paragraph.

Gottlieb mentions Gretchen Rubin, the author of New York Times best-seller “The Happiness Project“, and Gottlieb says, “Nowadays, it’s not enough to be happy—if you can be even happier. The American Dream and the pursuit of happiness have morphed from a quest for general contentment to the idea that you must be happy at all times and in every way.”

The best way to summarize Gottlieb’s long piece (12 pages printed) in “The Atlantic” is to quote a few of the experts she mentions. In fact, I boiled about 8,000 words to less than 1,000 and divided that into four parts spread over several days.

In addition, I’ve added videos to support Gottlieb’s message.

We start with Donald Winnicott, the influential English pediatrician and child psychiatrist, who said you don’t have to be a perfect mother to raise a well-adjusted child.

Continued on June 27, 2011 in Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 2

_______________________

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).

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 June 26, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting, student behavior

 

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What, Me Worry about Debt! – I’ve got self-esteem protecting me – Part 3/3

21 Jun

What looming disaster has the self-esteem movement created?

Rachel Dwyer of Ohio State University says, “By age 28, those students may be realizing that they overestimated how much money they were going to earn in their jobs. When they took out the loans, they may have thought they would pay off their debts easily, and it is turning out that it is not as easy as they had hoped.”

According to The Smart Student Guide to Financial Aid, these debts range from $10,000 to more than $100,000.  In fact, a total of more than $1.7 trillion in federal education loans have been made since beginning of the loan programs.


Link to the entire program of Your Life, Your Money

In addition, the estimated total private student loans outstanding as of June 30, 2009 were approximately 157.8 billion.  The overall total education loans outstanding, federal and private, was about $763.4 billion in 2009.

When I wrote this post, the Student Loan Debt Clock said that number now stood at more than $900 billion dollars.

If we go back to the beginning of this series of posts, you will recall that many of these young adults also carry credit cards beyond the student loans and undergraduates are carrying record-high credit card balances. Source: Credit Cards.com

The average (mean) balance grew to $3,173, the highest in the years the study has been conducted. Twenty-one percent of undergraduates had balances of between $3,000 and $7,000, also up from the last study.

In addition, close to one-fifth of seniors carried balances greater than $7,000, while the average college graduate has nearly $20,000 in credit card debt. (Source: Sallie Mae, “How Undergraduate Students Use Credit Cards,” April 2009)

The results of this study has revealed that the movement to boost vanity among our children for the last five decades has created a debt crises that many young adults may struggle for decades to pay off while sacrificing a better lifestyle than their parents may have experienced.

Even more disturbing is a piece by Lori Gottlieb in the Atlantic, How to Land Your Kid in Therapy, which deals with why the obsession with our children’s (self-esteem) happiness may be dooming them with unhappy adulthoods. I will write summary of this long article in another post (Gottlieb’s Atlantic piece ran 12 pages printed).

Return to What, Me Worry about Debt! – Part 2 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 June 21, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting

 

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The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 7/7

18 Jun

The day I discovered the principal was not going to do anything about Macario, I finished my workday at 6:00 PM and drove to the police station that served the neighborhood where Macario lived, which was a fifteen-minute drive in the opposite direction I would take to go home and the drive home usually took an hour in the afternoon and evening due to rush hour traffic.

When I arrived, the lobby at the police station had several other people already there waiting to talk to the officer working the counter. While I waited, I broke out the red ink and correct student work.

I had to wait a half hour before I could talk to the officer on duty and get the proper forms then spend another thirty to forty minutes filling out the forms, which resulted in a squad car with two officers visiting Macario’s home to question him and his parents then report the incident to child services, who then became involved.

After child services became involved, Macario had more counseling in addition to the school counselor, his mood improved but the joker in teen was gone.  He even started to do the schoolwork in my class and managed to bring his grade up to a “C” or a “B” by the end of second semester.

To do this, he spent more time at Janice’s house doing homework and a few years later he graduated then I lost contact with him and Janice never hearing from them again.

Moreover, Macario was one of about 6,000 students that I taught during my thirty years in the classroom. I have hundreds of stories similar to this one but not about sexual abuse.

According to studies, one in six men has been sexually assaulted by the age of 16. Source: Sexual Abuse of Males

Return to The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 6 or start with 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 June 18, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 6/7

17 Jun

I did not agree with the ogre idiot but the principal refused to take this incident to the next step and contact the proper authorities such as the police and child services.

The law in California is specific. Since I was a teacher and the one that reported the incident, I was the one that could lose his job if Macario was sexually molested and it went unreported to the proper authorities, and the ogre idiot would not lose his job.

I had no choice. I had to finish the job that the principal should have done.

My school days were often 11 hours or longer. I usually arrived at 6:00 AM when the gates were unlocked and seldom drove home until after 5:00 PM and sometimes stayed as late as 11:00 PM to work with my journalism students.

The time I spent at school does not count the time I spent at home correcting student work or planning lessons.  On average, I corrected at least 20 to 30 hours at home after having spend a workweek that often ran 60 to 80 hours at school.

Many people outside of education believe a teacher’s job is only the time he or she spends teaching, which is about five or six hours a day during a school week, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. To keep a credential, teachers are required to take annual classes and workshops to stay current in their field, attend staff meetings, and spend 20 to 40 hours of annual duty supervising sports outside the regular school day.

I also corrected student work before school, at lunch, after school and any time I could find during class when my students settled down and quietly worked on an assignment, which was rare.

To be continued on June 18, 2011 in The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 7 or return to Part 5

______________

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 June 17, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, student behavior, Teaching

 

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The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 5/7

16 Jun

My first step after talking to Janet was to make sure both of them came to my class after school.  We talked again and he admitted to me what had happened but stuck to his story that he managed to fight his way free, get some clothes and escape the house.

That’s when I called the ninth grade counselor to see if she was free, and I walked him and Janet to her office where we had a meeting.  After I reported what I knew and Macario admitted that’s what happened, I left that meeting to fill out the proper form, which went to the principal.

The principal at that time was an unpopular ogre and not popular with the teaching staff. Since he’d been running the school, many teachers had found jobs in other school districts and left to work elsewhere. We even lost a few of our vice principals due to the ogre.

He was one of those administrators that believed teachers were responsible for everything and blamed them for students not studying, misbehaving, failing, not reading—you name it and it was the teacher’s fault.

In short, he was an ogre idiot that spent more time criticizing teachers and writing them up than anything else he did. I half suspected he would blame what happened to Macario on me in some way. That’s how twisted he seemed to be.

That ogre idiot called Macario into his office the next day.

A few days later, I asked Macario for an update. He said after he talked to the principal, the ogre idiot (my words) dismissed the case and said to go back to class.

I met with the ogre idiot and asked him why he was not following up. By then, more than a week had gone by since the sexual assault, and the ogre idiot told me he thought Maracaro was lying to get attention.

To be continued on June 17, 2011 in The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 6 or return to Part 4

______________

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 June 16, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 4/7

15 Jun

Janice told me that Macario’s parents both worked and were out of the house before he left to school.

She said the only reason he ate a good breakfast was that she made him eat something like a banana, an egg and a piece of toast when he arrived at her house to walk her to campus each morning.

Janice was not only Macario’s best friend and lover, she was also more of a mother to him than his mother was.

The story she told me was that while he was still in the shower that morning, two strange men broke into the house and tried to rape him.

They came into the bathroom and dragged him out of the shower.  He fought and said he managed to break free, but his eyes darted away again as he answered my questions about what happened after the men dragged him from the shower.

He claimed he fought his way free, grabbed some clothes and escaped from the house and hurried to meet Janice on the way to school where he told her what happened to him.

To be continued on June 16, 2011 in The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 5 or return to Part 3

______________

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 June 15, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, Teaching

 

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The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 3/7

14 Jun

Macario was a talker and loved to be funny and get people to laugh, which wasn’t always welcome when it disrupted a lesson.

However, I must admit, even when Macario interrupted a lesson with one of his off-the-wall jokes or comments, I often laughed too.   It was impossible not to like him.

Then, as he often did after he cracked the entire class up, he would apologize.

Janice, on the other hand, was an “A” student that enjoyed reading books and was as determined as I was to motivate Macario to do the school work and study.

I conspired with Janice to find ways to trick him into doing his homework, which even for the young girl that loved him was a challenge. He was more into having fun than being serious about anything.

Some might wonder why I didn’t contact his parents. In fact, I had called them several times over the months and even had a face-to-face parent conference, but his study habits did not change.  I tried referrals to the counselor, and assigned after school detentions and even a Saturday school. Nothing worked

That is when I made the decision to see if Janice could help.

Between us, Janice and I managed to squeeze a “D” out of Macario in English his first semester in high school.  Without her efforts, he would have failed.

To make a long story shorter but not too short, I kept Macario after class that day and asked him what was wrong. He swore nothing was wrong but I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was disturbed and had lied to me because he glanced away to stare at the floor when he answered the question.

This was unusual since Macario had never lied to me. When confronted for something I saw him do in class, he always admitted guilt and said he was sorry (once again).

However, when Janice came into fifth period after lunch, I asked her what was going on and she told me everything she knew.

To be continued on June 15, 2011 in The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 4 or return to 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 June 14, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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