On October 25, 2009, this Blog was moved to:
http://learningchina.wordpress.com/
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There is nothing to envy about many American families. They are in worse shape than the economy.
My wife is Chinese. She lived in China the first twenty-eight years of her life. She is now an American citizen. In China and other Asian countries, family is important.
If you study Confucian philosophy and the Five Great Relationships, you would understand. For the most part, the younger generation respects, honors and obeys the elders, and the elders are responsible for preparing the younger generations for a prosperous life. I did not say a happy life. I said prosperous. That means hard work.
What does that have to do with family? Everything.
I taught high school English, journalism and reading from 1975 to 2005. Facts about American kids and their families were drummed into my head in one workshop after another at the high school where I taught. During those thirty years, I worked with more than six thousand students and met with hundreds of parents.
One of the most common questions parents asked was, “What can we do to get him to read and do his homework? He won’t listen.” I said, “Turn off the television and any computer linked to the Internet. Learn to say no and mean it.” Most never followed that advice.
The scary thing is that many American parents don’t know how bad a job they are doing. The average child watches seven hours of television daily and spends several more text messaging or camping on Websites like YouTube. That same child goes to bed late and gets up early to go to school. Most American kids aren’t getting the nine hours of sleep necessary for their mental and physical growth.
In addition, more than forty percent of American children are latchkey kids. At the end of the school day, latchkey kids go home to an empty house because both parents are working to pay for that ten thousand dollar credit-card debt the average American family owes.
Obesity and diabetes among American children is an epidemic. Kids are not eating nutritious, home cooked meals. Instead, they are surviving off Coke, Pepsi, French fries and fast food. I often had kids come in after lunch to my fifth period class with sixty-four ounce Cokes. Their speech would be slurred and their eyes glazed. Research shows that too much sugar messes with long-term memory and the area of the brain that solves problems.
Many American kids cannot find the family they need at home, so they find one on the streets. In Los Angeles, there are one-hundred-thousand kids that belong to street gangs. Other major cities also have street gangs. Street gangs become the family of choice when parents are not there or not talking.
When we pick our daughter up from school, we see the ratty dressed kids on their skateboards hanging out by the graffiti covered walls in the mall parking lot. We watch them lighting cigarettes. Our daughter says many of the kids she knows at her high school get drunk regularly and smoke.
While growing up, our daughter was reading or spending time with family. The TV was off. On weekends or afternoons, while I was doing home repairs or yard work, she was helping.
Then she started making friends with kids from the average American family. When our daughter’s friends heard what her life was like, they felt sorry for her, and she started to feel sorry for herself.
Most Americans don’t know what a real family is. After all, everything is relative based on experiences growing up. If you live in a house where the inhabitants watch endless television or surf the virtual world with video games as a constant daily companion, the abnormal becomes normal.
When compared to the other racial groups in America, Chinese American children have the lowest incidence of teen pregnancy, drug use and STDs. They also have the highest college attendance rate.
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
My children never come home to an empty house, if I am not home when they get home their father is. The television isn't turned on until after homework and chores are completed. Bed time is enforced. Dinner is eaten sitting at the table. I even cook from scratch, do a heap of canning and raise a garden.
Yes, I know, I am an "odd duck".
Kathy, to make sure that TV wouldn't have too much of an influence on our daughter we limited TV to an hour or two a week and visited the library once a week. Our daughter did not grow up on TV. She grew up reading books.
Tai, yes, family is important. We make it a point to eat dinner together with all distractions turned off. While studies show that the average child talks less than five minutes a day with their children, my wife and I probably talk hours a day with our daughter and have done that since an early age. I have a lifelong friend that raised his three children the same way. His sons went to college, earned degrees in the sciences and all have good jobs.
Mrs., Raptor, during the thirty years that I taught in the public schools, I always had great kids as students although they were in a minority and their parents usually sounded like you describe your family. Thank you for doing the great job that you have done raising your children. During parent conferences, most of the parents that came were parents like you. Few of the parents with kids that were failing classes or getting in trouble all the time would come to the conferences.
Sgt. Mom, although you were a single mom, living overseas as long as you did helped distance your daughter from the toxic culture that appears to permeate America's schools. I have been disgusted for decades with the same things you found abhorrent when you returned to America from Spain.