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Category Archives: Parenting

Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 7/9

10 May

Knowing about other parenting methods that work helps a parent identify if he or she is falling into the American mainstream trap and how to avoid it.

One successful parenting method was started in 1980.  In 979, Phyllis and David York, two family therapists from Pennsylvania were struggling to raise an out-of-control teen daughter.

Phyllis York wrote a book on the topic of ToughLOVE, which is listed on Amazon.com

Before launching ToughLOVE, the Yorks explored traditional strategies including individual and family psychotherapy, changing schools, and trying to raise the teen daughter’s self-esteem through judo and riding lessons.

In their words, they tried “getting tougher, more permissive, more understanding” and nothing worked.


Then York and his wife, Phyllis, imposed a stern new code of behavior in their home.

It worked.

The following year, the Yorks founded ToughLOVE, an organization to help other parents beleaguered by incorrigible offspring. “The essence of our philosophy is that parents must take a stand with their children,” says David. “Teenagers must learn to accept the consequences of their actions, and parents must stop trying to protect them.” Source: People.com

Since its founding, more than 2 million parents have been active members of ToughLOVE, joining or forming thousands of support groups worldwide. By the time ToughLOVE went from a nonprofit to a for-profit company, there were more than 250 chapters across the U.S. and Canada. Source: ToughLOVE (corporate Website)

Continued on May 11, 2011 in Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 8 or return to Part 6

_______________________

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 10, 2011 in family values, Parenting

 

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Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 6/9

09 May

Since I was a public school teacher from 1975 to 2005, I saw the self-esteem movement among parents change the schools. I not only saw it but my job as a teacher was made more difficult as false self-esteem became the focus of the “average” American parent and not academics. Instead childhood “fun” replaced “work”, which is what a child must do to learn.

Due to the self-esteem movement, there was pressure for grade inflation and dummying down the curriculum so it would be easier on the students to be successful and feel good about him or herself.

Once the “average” child started spending that 10:45 hours a day talked about in Part 2, students went home and put pressure on parents still practicing old-world parenting methods.

Research shows that peer pressure has a much greater impact on adolescent behavior than any other factor.

Think about it. Your teenager spends more of his or her waking hours with peers than with family members. That interaction is more powerful than the influence of teachers and other authority figures. If a child feels compelled to fit in, the teen may do things that go against his or her beliefs simply to be part of the group.

Peer pressure may lead to experimentation with drugs and alcohol, sex, skipping school, and various high-risk behaviors. If you notice a sudden change in your child’s appearance, clothing, and attitude, especially if accompanied by secretive behavior, the child may be succumbing to the influences of peers.

Parents should be especially alert to sudden changes in the friends who make up their core peer group. An unexplained change in the type of friends your child associates with could indicate that your child is vulnerable to new influences that may not be positive. Source: Aspen Education.com

The need of teens to conform to peer group norms and values has often been witnessed by teenager workers as well as parents. When one refers to the “tyranny of teens”, one is expressing an awesome appreciation of the powerful energy and pressures generated by this strange social configuration called the peer group.

Parent/s often surrender to the power of the teen subculture. The parent/s experience feelings of futility. “There’s nothing I can do; they won’t listen anymore.”

When that happens, the teenager is left trying to manage his life while the adult ponders just where his approach went wrong. Another variation in a parent’s response to the teens peer subculture is enlistment in the opposition thinking, “If you can’t beat them, join them.”

Then one or more parents try to become like a teenager leading to an ineffective parenting. In Part 7, I will write about a proven way to overcome the negative influence of peer pressure.

Continued on May 10, 2011 in Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 7 or return to Part 5

_______________________

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 9, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior

 

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Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 5/9

08 May

Parents are a vital element of a child and teen’s education. Parents must be involved even if the children are attending public or private schools.

Teachers cannot do it all.

Students must read daily at home, do classwork, homework, and study for tests.  The job of a parent is to make sure the student does that work.  If a student fails a class while attending school, the main reason is he or she was not doing the work or studying while in class or at home and the parent failed in his or her job.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, there are about 64 million students in primary through secondary schools in America, while It has been estimated that 1.5 million students were homeschooled in the United States in 2007 (with a confidence interval of 1.3 to 1.7 million), constituting 2.9% of students.

It’s obvious that if a parent is teaching his or her children at home, the family is spending quality time together instead of watching too much TV, playing video games, sending text messages, or social networking on the Internet (see Recognizing Good Parenting – Part 2 for the average breakdown of time for each activity).

Instead, home taught students talk several hours a day with parents, and it pays off.

Academic statistics for home-taught students is impressive.

In 1997, a study of 5,402 home school students from 1,657 families was released. It was entitled, Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America. The study demonstrated that homeschoolers, on average, out-performed their counterparts in the public schools by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects.

This was confirmed in another study by Dr. Lawrence Rudner of 20,760 homeschooled students, which found the homeschoolers who have been home taught their entire mandatory school years had the highest academic achievement.

Another important finding of Strengths of Their Own was that the race of the student does not make any difference. There was no significant difference between minority and white homeschooled students. For example, in grades K-12, both white and minority students scored, on the average, in the 87th percentile.

The motivations for home schooling are based on a concern about the school environment (85% of parents that teach at home); a desire to provide religious or moral instruction (72% of parents); and a dissatisfaction with academic instruction at schools 68%.

There are other reasons but these three areas make up the majority.

In addition, Ordination.org reports, “For the third consecutive year, ACT college admissions test scores are higher for homeschoolers than for other students. Homeschoolers’ average composite score was 22.8, compared to the national average of 21, out of a possible 36. On the SAT, homeschoolers, who comprise less than 1 percent of test takers, earned 568 verbal and 532 in math. The national average…was 505 verbal and 514 math.”

A few more facts from Home School Resources Guide.com may clarify the picture more.

– 71% of homeschoolers actively participate in the community. Traditionally schooled students averaged only 37%.

– 76% of homeschoolers were more likely to be involved in civic affairs, compared to only 36% of their public-schooled counterparts.

– 58.9% of the homeschoolers surveyed reported they were “very happy” with life, in contrast to 27.6% of traditional students.

If you are a parent that is home teaching your children, breathe a sigh of relief, because the odds are that you do not fit the definition of the American “average” or “norm” for a parent.

Another factor that plays an important role in being a parent is peer pressure among teens, which I will deal with in Part 6.

Continued on May 9, 2011 in Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 6 or return to Part 4

_______________________

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 8, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 4/9

04 May

A poor lifestyle and diet leads to health problems and health problems affect mental development, which may result in a child with a poor education and low literacy skills.

Studies show that breakfast is important, but when I asked my students during the thirty years I taught (1975-2005) how many ate breakfast each morning, only a few indicated they did. Most didn’t.

However, a study of over 59,000 children and teenagers in Europe consistently indicated that eating (a nutritious) breakfast was protective against becoming obese and reducing one body mass index (BMI).

Why is breakfast and good nutrition important? The adequacy of nutrition during the early formative (childhood) years may have long-term consequences on the brain. Because shrinkage of the brain actually begins in young adulthood, any insidious influence of diet could begin early and progress over a period of many decades. Clearly, diet is influential on brain growth and function throughout the entire lifespan. Source: Psychology Advice

In addition, in the last 2 decades, type 2 diabetes (formerly known as adult-onset diabetes) has been reported among U.S. children and adolescents with increasing frequency.… Studies indicate one-third of U.S. children born in 2000 could develop diabetes during their lifetime.

Studies also link diabetes to a decline in mental function. For “relatively mild” type 2 diabetes, Diabetes patients…were slower on tasks requiring rapid and precise processing of new verbal information. Source: Diabetes, Obesity, Cardiovascular Disease

Other studies show that a loss of brain cells and memory function may result (from diabetes), especially in the hippocampus—a brain region involved in learning and memory.

Scientists are only beginning to understand how general cognitive deficits occur, but new studies are providing some clues. Source: Society for Neuroscience


Today, the average adult consumes about 150 pounds of sugar a year.

To discover health problems caused by too much sugar consumption, watch the embedded video. To learn more, discover the history of refined sugar.

Poor childhood health has life-long impacts, with devastating effects on a child’s education and future socioeconomic status. Childhood obesity is especially paralyzing. Research has shown that once a child has become obese, he or she struggles simply to pursue an education.

If the current childhood obesity trend in the United States continues, by 2050, at least half the population will be obese and could very possibly be less educated than the overall population today.

Nearly one-fifth of U.S. children ages 2 to 19 are obese (today), and recent estimates in schoolchildren indicate the obesity rate is as high as one-third in some rural areas. Source: Britannica Blog

To learn more see the Definition of Obesity

There are three highly successful, documented parenting methods in the US. In  Part 5, we will discover the advantages of being home taught instead of attending a public or private school, which proves that the more time a parent spends with his or her child, the better chance that child has for academic success.

Continued on May 8, 2011 in Avoid the Mainstream Parent Trap – Part 5 or return to Part 3

_______________________

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 4, 2011 in Education, family values, Parenting, student behavior

 

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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

_______________________

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 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

____________________

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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