Where are the Parents?

Where are the Parents?

by Lloyd Lofthouse

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.

Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of ‘My Splendid Concubine’. He 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 and for a time worked as a maitre d’ in a multimillion-dollar nightclub by night. He now lives near San Francisco with his wife, and they have a second home in Shanghai, China. His first novel, ‘My Splendid Concubine’, won an honorable mention in fiction from the 2008 London Book Festival; another honorable mention in general fiction from the 2009 San Francisco Book Festival and a third honorable mention in fiction at the 2009 Hollywood Book Festival. His short story, ‘A Night at the Well of Purity’, was a finalist for the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards.