The power of a Western-raised Muslim girl.

Most people want a traditional “back home girl” who isn’t influenced by the modern liberal movement.

Nothing wrong with that, but if you find someone from the West who is really on her Deen, thrived through the modern system, and wants to be a stay-at-home wife, she will be better at raising children in the West.

She knows the dangers and will do everything she can to homeschool.

A traditional back home girl won’t understand the modern threat as much, and will be less likely to homeschool.

Unfortunately, it’s becoming harder and harder to find these diamonds in the rough.

It is becoming obligatory NOT to send your kids to public school.

This isn’t the first time I heard this, but it’s so true Subhan Allah.

If schooling is finished (which it is), what else are public schools except disguised liberal agendas that are meant to destroy family units and focus only on the self?

If you live in a red state, don't be fooled and think your child is going to a conservative school, where the rule is, "You can have a boyfriend, but don't get pregnant because we have morals in this house."

What my dad taught me.

I remember my dad sitting me down and telling me when I was a kid that when I grow up, I have to provide for my family after Allah.

It is a man’s responsibility to take care of his family and provide.

That stuck with me for many years, and was the reason why I made sure I took a path that led to success, wealth creation, and also was something that I truly enjoyed.

You can set your own children up for success, but you have to start having deep conversations with them.

You need to normalize the “abnormal.”

Parents:

You need to normalize talking to your children about the "abnormalities" of Islam.

Tell them, and more importantly, show them why Islam is the truth, and what happens to people who don't have proper guidance.

Use examples from your own life and be vulnerable with them. Show them how society is dwindling because of a lack of Islam.

You don't need to do research, just use examples from your own life experiences and from your co-workers, acquaintances, etc.

Tell them about the Hadith of the Prophet ﷺ, who said, "Islam began as something strange and it will return to being strange, so blessed are the strangers."

Are your teenagers getting “therapy” without your knowledge?

There's plenty of school counselors that could be providing "therapy" to your children without your knowledge, especially after they're 13 years old when they have more adult privileges and privacy safeguards according to US law.

Ironically, at the most rebellious time of a child's life, they're being counseled by strangers who have no context to the situations that might be going on in the teen's house, and the religious "limitations and restrictions" might be causing them "trauma." Of course in this situation, the student might need some intervention or may even need to shelter somewhere else until they can legally get separated from their parents.

I'm talking about loving parents who don't abuse kids. Regular parents who just want to lay down foundational rules both from a parenting and religious perspective, which only becomes hard to impossible when kids are surrounded by indecency and lack of good manners all day every day.

Staying in shape.

Alhumdulilah, I can do more pull ups now than when I was in high school.

I'm in my 40s.

Staying in shape is not an option, and most people realize it too late.

When the commercials are more poisonous than the TV show itself.

Television is already poison and a waste of time, but when the commercials are for drugs that most people don't need, the poison becomes even more potent.

Antidepressants that most people don't need, and add-on medications to your antidepressants if your main anti-depressant is not working are some of the most common ads I've seen recently when flipping through channels at a hotel.

They'll never tell you that you need a social life, spiritual healing, or that Islam is the solution. If you’re not feeling better they will tell you your medication isn’t working, and you need to supplement it with another drug that's usually classified as an atypical antipsychotic.

When it becomes normalized to take multiple drugs to fix a chemical imbalance in your head that didn’t exist and now exists because you’re on these medications.

The irony is unbelievable.

Do you even know your child is getting “therapy” (indoctrination)?

Bad Therapy:

Over the past two years, so inundated have I been with parents' stories of school counselors encouraging a child to try on a variant gender identity, even changing the child's name without telling the parents, that I've almost wondered if there are any good school counselors. One parent I interviewed told me that her son's high school counselor had given him the address of a local LGBTQ youth shelter where he might seek asylum and attempt to legally liberate himself from loving parents.

There are good school counselors; I interviewed several. But the power structure's all wrong. Grant a leader the powers of a monarch, and he may gift his subjects freedom—but what's to tether him to his promises? That's placing a whole lot of trust in an individual counselor's con-science.

You might respond at this point: “Fortunately, my child has never been to see the school counselor.” But more likely, you don't know. In California, Illinois, Washington, Colorado, Florida, and Maryland, minors twelve or thirteen and up are statutorily entitled to access mental health care without parental permission. Schools are not only under no obligation to inform parents that their kids are meeting regularly with a school counselor, they may even be barred from doing so.

As long as a parent has not specifically forbidden it, a school counselor may be able to conduct a therapy session with a minor child without parental consent. School counselors are encouraged to make "judgment calls" about what information, gleaned in sessions with minor children, they may keep secret from the children's parents.

Even in states that require parents to be notified of their kids' in-school therapy, school social workers remain free to meet informally with a child and inquire about her sexual orientation, gender identity, or parents' divorce; such conversations often do not count as "therapy.”

Imagine many refugee families or parents that speak little to no English. What is happening to their kids, completely unbeknownst to them? This is how children come home one day and all of a sudden identify as gay or lesbian, without any previous warning signs. The parent is completely hoodwinked. The public schools are rewiring our childrens’ brains, and we don’t even speak the language.

Subhan Allah.

A fascinating yet disturbing quote from a real case in the UK:

“I’d cry after every party, but I didn’t know how to stop. I couldn’t be ‘haram’ enough to enjoy the sin or ‘halal’ enough to leave it.”

Homeschooling is difficult, but no pain, no gain.

Umm Khalid from MuslimSkeptic, describing her experience as a homeschooler:

Homeschooling is tiring, time-consuming, and often draining work.

But on days like these, when testing my children on Quran turns into a dynamic discussion on hadith and sirah and a recounting of historical incidents and stories of battle, it’s simply beautiful and fulfilling. My tiredness melts away as I marvel at the children’s level of understanding, their natural instinct to tie together the ayat of Quran with the sirah events they describe, and their process of information synthesis.

This reminds me of a commonly recited set of ayahs in the Qur’an that fits well in this situation for homeschooling families:

“So, surely with hardship comes ease. Surely with ˹that˺ hardship comes ˹more˺ ease.”

.فَإِنَّ مَعَ ٱلْعُسْرِ يُسْرًا. إِنَّ مَعَ ٱلْعُسْرِ يُسْرًۭا

Surah 94: 5-6

What going to the Masjid can do for your mental health.

In Islam, it is obligatory for men to go to the Masjid and pray.

This sounds like a burden to the untrained eye, but it is a blessing in disguise.

A huge blessing!

It is the cornerstone of building a community upon righteousness.

The more you meet your brothers in the masjid, the more likely you are to interact with them, and build relationships with practicing families.

These relationships can then be used to build workflows and programs that help the community at large.

What is the opposite of not having a brotherhood?

You will be lonely and depressed, and that will affect all of your relationships, including your relationship with your wife and your kids.

This can easily spiral downhill, and instead of building, you'll be collapsing.

Antidepressants can ruin your life and your family’s life.

Blockbuster video on antidepressants, stimulants, and psychiatric drugs and how they can destroy your life.

This problem is creeping up more and more in schools, and kids are at the highest risk for these side effects since their brains are still developing.

Real advice from a real doctor whose in the trenches with these patients.

Remembering death is not morbid, it is what everyone needs.

Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said,

“Remember often the destroyer of pleasures: death.”

Source: Sunan al-Tirmidhī 2307

Qur’anic therapy in two powerful verses.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raajioon. - To Allah we belong, and to Him is our return.

We hear this phrase a lot, and we only use it when somebody passes away.

The reality though is, we need to use this phrase anytime we have any sort of calamity.

This is qualified by the previous verse in Surah Baqara, where Allah mentions:

We will certainly test you with something of fear and hunger, and loss of property, lives and crops, but give glad tidings to those who patiently persevere, who say, when afflicted with calamity: To Allah we belong, and to Him is our return.

(Surah Baqara 155-156)

We need to ponder over this powerful statement: Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raajioon.

Imagine how many people can feel relief over their problems when they realize that their problem isn’t really a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. Allah is our final destination, and it is up to me to do my best while asking Allah for help throughout my life. This calamity that happened to me, it is part of my test, and Allah will judge me on how I reacted to it.

Imagine how many people can stop relying on a magic pill to help with their problems, only to cause several more problems that didn’t exist before? This magic pill by the way, ends up becoming two, three, or even four magic pills that you will need, all because our mindset has become so far away from our Deen that we mimic the disbelievers even in how we cope with life. These same pills that were supposed to help you overcome your sadness has now caused you to fall even deeper in sadness.

Most therapists and healthcare professionals won’t tell you the obvious facts, which is that you need religion and you need Islam in order to really feel relief from your crises.

Medications are supposed to be a step-therapy until you find the underlying problem, not a long term solution, especially for mental health.

Algorithmic destruction of our girls.

Facebook (and probably Instagram) was out to make a buck from your child’s low self-esteem, causing her to feel ugly and depressed:

According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook tracked when teenage girls deleted selfies, then served customised beauty ads at that exact moment. 

The platform's algorithms identified these deletions as cues of insecurity or dissatisfaction, and acted on them by showing ads promoting skincare, makeup, or cosmetic procedures. 

This realtime targeting was designed to capitalise on negative feelings and encourage spending.

Yes, keep giving your child access to social media and a smartphone that you don’t even know how to enforce boundaries on because you’re also sucked into the matrix.

Bad Therapy Step 9: Encourage Young Adults to Break Contact with "Toxic" Family.

Therapists can poison your children. So much so that they can cut off their relationship with you, which is a major sin in Islam:

Clinical psychologist and author Joshua Coleman has devoted his entire practice to a phenomenon known as "family estrangement": adult children cutting off their parents, refusing to speak to them, even barring them from seeing the grandkids. A large-scale national survey confirms a recent increase in this phenomenon: almost 30 percent of Americans eighteen and older had cut off a family member.

Are the ostracized parents typically abusive? No, Coleman said; in general, he doesn't believe they are. From his own practice, Coleman has observed that adults who were abused as children very often blame themselves for the abuse. "Often, they're more interested in salvaging whatever they can of parental love." […]

When parents confront the adult children who've cut them off, Coleman tells me, the most typical explanation they give is: "Well, my therapist said, you emotionally abused me or you're emotionally incestuous. Or you have a narcissistic personality disorder? The parents, of course, respond defensively, and that just feels like proof positive to the adult child!" Coleman added, "I've wanted to write an article for the longest time with a title something like, Your Biggest Threat to Your Relationship with Your Child Isn't Parenting, It's the Therapist They're Going to See at Some Point."

One of the most damaging ideas to leach into the cultural bloodstream, according to Coleman, is that all unhappiness in adults is traceable to childhood trauma. Therapists have made endless mischief from this baseless and unfalsifiable assertion.

This is precisely how therapy often encourages young people to look at their lives. If your career isn't going well, if you're having trouble in relationships, if you're dissatisfied with your life, commence the hunt for hidden childhood traumas. And since parents are ultimately responsible for your childhood, any unearthed "childhood trauma" inevitably reads as an indictment of parents.

This might seem impossible, but remember this. Many practicing Muslim parents are already struggling with their children because the children are told not to do certain things in Islam, even though it is the norm for the child 8+ hours each day.

“Why can’t I listen to music?”

“Why can’t I go to the dance?”

“Why do I have to wear a hijab?”

“Why can’t I have a boyfriend?”

“Why can’t I have a girlfriend?”

“Why do I have to pray in school? Can’t I just come home and pray?”

There is already a lot of clash inside your child’s mind because they feel like they have to live two different lives.

Now imagine your children hearing the words that makes it “click” for them. Most of their problems were because of their parents. Your kids might not even go to a therapist, but now the therapist comes to them in the form of viral social media posts by so-called “experts” in the field of therapy.

Your relationship with your child was already on thin ice, and here comes a bad therapist with the ice pick. Let’s not forget your children’s’ non-Muslim friends who are already more likely to think their parents are “toxic” because they try to enforce basic rules.

The threshold for discipline and tolerance keeps dropping, and now a parent’s actions or restrictions are considered abusive over petty things.

We have to remember that cutting off the ties of kinship is a huge sin in Islam, and has severe consequences:

“And those who break the Covenant of Allah, after its ratification, and sever that which Allah has commanded to be joined (i.e., they sever the bond of kinship and are not good to their relatives), and work mischief in the land, on them is the curse (i.e., they will be far away from Allah’s Mercy); And for them is the unhappy (evil) home (i.e., Hell).”

Ar-Ra`d 13:25

Parents will make mistakes and will be hard on children and there will always be a pull and tug, but it’s no reason to literally cut them off for the rest of your life.

Of course none of these scenarios are a guarantee, and the public school child can end up being a righteous Muslim, but you have to be realistic with the statistics. Don’t turn the exception into the rule and think your child or your family are the exception and immune to the problems and desires of society.

Even the Prophet ﷺ was guaranteed Jannah, but he was still told by Allah to praise his Lord and ask for forgiveness in Surah Nasr. He ﷺ took action and kept taking action till his last breath, even though he was promised Jannah. He didn’t want to be complacent and just let things go nilly willy.

Don’t ruin your relationship with your children from the start. Mothers especially need to stay at home and nourish the child and solidify that relationship between mother and child. Research has shown that babies literally mourn when their mothers are not present, and if your child is in a daycare, their relationship with you in the long run will continue to be damaged, requiring more and more effort to repair later on.

Once again, we’re talking about normal parents who make normal parenting mistakes, not parents who are sexual predators or those who abuse their children physically and emotionally.

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Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up

Bad Therapy Step 8: Encourage kids to share their “trauma.”

"Really good trauma-informed work does not mean that you get people to talk about it," physician and mental health specialist Richard Byng told me. "Quite the opposite."

Byng helps ex-convicts in Plymouth, England, habituate to life on the outside. Many of these former prisoners endured unspeakable abuse as children and young adults. And yet, Byng says, the solution for them often includes not talking about their traumas.

One of the most significant failings of psychotherapy, Byng says, is its refusal to acknowledge that not everyone is helped by talking about their problems. Many patients, he says, are harmed by it.

"If you know that someone's been traumatized, what I tend to do is just acknowledge it very lightly," Byng told me. "Very lightly just acknowledge that, yeah, part of why you're like this is because some bad stuff’s happened. And we'll put it aside. But I'm trying to talk about what's going on in the present."

Not every kid who's experienced serious adversity will be helped by "sharing" their traumas? The act of talking about your past pain does not necessarily relieve it? Discussing a traumatic experience, even with a trained therapist, can sometimes increase suffering? This is my shocked face.

If only schools knew the reality of true counseling and dealing with trauma:

But many teachers, counselors, and therapists today presume the opposite: Kids cannot possibly get on with their lives until they have thoroughly examined and disgorged their pain. In the Academy Award-winning film Good Will Hunting, the protagonist (played by Matt Damon) can escape his traumatic past and get the girl only after he has thoroughly explored his history of child abuse with his therapist (played by Robin Williams).

In packed theaters across the country, hearts swelled, tears rained down, and the American mind renewed its faith in the curative miracle of talk therapy. Outside of Hollywood, rehashing sad memories often creates more problems than it solves.

There are therapies, like dialectical behavior therapy, that take a better approach than the model that insists that you can only be cured if you are compelled to "talk about it." This better approach, in Byng's view, involves "accepting you've been harmed and acknowledging that only you can make a difference," without pressing people to talk about their pain. But he admits "that's quite difficult to pull off."

And yet it's often what's best for patients. A dose of repression again appears to be a fairly useful psychological tool for getting on with life— even for the significantly traumatized among us.

Rarely do we grant kids that allowance. Instead, we demand that they locate any dark feelings and share them. We may already be seeing the fruits: a generation of kids who can never ignore any pain, no matter how trivial.

There is a huge example of this type of mentality in the Seerah of the Prophet ﷺ, specifically the incident of Ta’if. This was one of the worst incidents of the Prophet’s life ﷺ, yet he downplayed what happened to him. He didn’t want to make a spectacle of all the trouble and physical and emotional abuse he went through, but he simply stated to Ayesha RA that the leaders of Ta’if didn’t respond to him the way he would have liked. He didn’t go through every traumatic detail, seeking pity from Ayesha RA or any of the sahaba.

Even in this narration, the Prophet ﷺ is only discussing it because his wife is asking him in private, and even then he keeps it vague.

The experts say, “accept you have been harmed and acknowledge that only you can make a difference” is the way forward, but we can modify that slightly:

“Accept you have been harmed, and acknowledge that you can make a difference by asking Allah for assistance, and putting in the effort.”

The Prophet ﷺ accepted that he was harmed, but he made a very long du’a to Allah to complain in humility, and also to gain Allah’s help and forgiveness.

Do we teach our kids, or do we ourselves go to Allah when we are in tough situations? Once again, not everything needs to be discussed with people, but you can always tell your griefs to Allah and make du’a for His help and strength to get you through any situation.

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Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up

The ties of kinship are being severed right under your nose.

When you read about how a baby needs years to develop a close relationship with the mother yet mothers hopelessly hand off their kids to daycare institutions, it brings a whole new meaning to the Islamic concept of cutting ties of kinship.

Mothers that don’t provide that emotional bonding and security and feel disconnected with their children because of their deluded perception that they belong in the workplace are literally severing the bonds with their children.

There is a whole sequence of hormones and social learning that happens with a mother and child that are dedicated to each other, and that is being systematically torn apart by society leading to emotionally unstable children that act out and are aggressive.

Nobody wants to hear the real solution which is to be more engaged with your children and dedicate time to them even if it means taking things slow.

Everyone wants a quick fix.

Medicate the child to make it do what I want it to do.

Congratulations, you’ve begun the process of zombifying your kid, making them feel like they can’t do anything without medication, and you’ve destroyed their ability to thrive or deal with life’s problems since you denied them the basic emotional stability from the start.

Leadership.

Don’t judge your leadership abilities based on how you lead a team at work.

Judge your leadership based on how you lead your family.

Bad Therapy Step 7: Drug ‘Em.

First comes diagnose, then comes medicate. But if Lexapro, Ritalin, and Adderall were the solution, the decline in youth mental health would have ended decades ago.

Altering your child's brain chemistry is about as profound a decision as you'll ever make as a parent. But for many child psychiatrists and far too many pediatricians, it involves little more than a pro forma signature and tearing off a sheet gummed to a prescription pad.

Steven Hollon holds a named professorship in psychology at Vanderbilt University, where he studies the etiology and treatment of depres-sion. "You want to be very careful starting children and adolescents on antidepressants," he told me. He's even more adamant about antianxiety medicines like Xanax and Klonopin. "Anything that makes you feel better within thirty minutes is going to be at least psychologically and physiologically addictive, and it probably is going to be both."

If you read “The Collapse of Parenting,” by Leonard Sax, a real physician, he describes the same issue, where parents are looking for a quick fix for their child and are just seeking a prescription to solve the problem. The real problem is exactly what the title of his book is - The Collapse of Parenting.

When you don’t put your trust in Allah, you will feel empty inside, and you will never be able to deal with what life throws at you. Whatever happened to saying "Bismillahi, tawakkaltu 'alallah, wa la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah," which translates to "In the name of Allah, I place my trust in Allah, and there is no power or might except with Allah?"

I used to dispense these medications on a daily basis to many young teenagers, and each prescription comes with a mandatory handout describing all of the risks of many antidepressants, with a lot of side effects ironically being the exact opposite of what the drug is meant to cure. The number one problem to look out for with antidepressants?

A black box warning that tells you - an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, particularly in children and adolescents.

Even if your child doesn’t experience this side effect, the damage that can happen can last a lifetime:

But possibly the grimmest risk of antidepressants, antianxiety meds, and stimulants is the primary effect of the drugs themselves: placing a young person in a medicated state while he's still getting used to the feel and fit of his own skin. Making him feel less like himself, blocking him from ever feeling the thrill of unmediated cognitive sharpness, the sting of righteous fury, an animal urge to spot an opportunity—a romance, a position, a place on the team-and leap for it. Compelling him to play remote spectator in his own life.

Many adults, accustomed to popping a Xanax to get through a rough patch, are tempted to extend that same accommodation to their suffering teen. But the impact of starting a child on psychotropic medication is incomparably different. Every experience of a child's life—so many "firsts" —will now be mediated by this chemical chaperone: every triumph, every pang of desire and remorse. When you start a child on meds, you risk numbing him to life at the very moment he's learning to calibrate risks and handle life's ups and downs. When you anesthetize a child to the vicissitudes of success and failure and love and loss and disappointment when he's meeting these for the first time, you're depriving him of the emotional musculature he'll need as an adult. Once on meds, he's likely to believe that he can't handle life at full strength — and thanks to an adolescence spent on them, he may even be right.

If you can relieve your child's anxiety, depression, or hyperactivity without starting her on meds, it's worth turning your life upside down to do so.

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Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up

The Amish.

Back in my jahiliyah days, I would consider the Amish as weird and nonconforming.

"Why do they isolate themselves and not want to be like everyone else?"

"Why do they restrict themselves and make life harder for themselves?”

I don't believe in their religious beliefs, but I have much respect for them standing up for what they believe in, and there's many lessons we as Muslims can learn from their ability to establish thriving communities among themselves who hold onto their values.