The Atlantic released an article last week that was really eye popping, and the first paragraph really tells us a lot:
The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a pervasive refusal to hold children to high standards.
Test scores about reading levels:
Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000.
The distribution numbers also shows how the divide between the rich and the poor is only growing, and will continue to grow:
These learning losses are not distributed equally. Across grades and subjects, the NAEP results show that the top tenth of students are doing roughly as well as they always have, whereas those at the bottom are doing worse. From 2000 to 2007, the bottom tenth of fourth graders in reading ability showed substantial improvement, before stagnating. But by 2024, those gains had been erased. In 49 out of the 50 states (all except Mississippi), the gap between the top tenth and the bottom tenth grew. Nat Malkus, of the American Enterprise Institute, has pointed out that this surging inequality has grown faster in America than in other developed countries. The upshot is grim: The bottom tenth of 13-year-olds, according to NAEP’s long-term-trend data, are hitting lows in reading and math scores not seen since these tests began in 1971 and 1978, respectively.
The obvious problems such as smartphones, social media, and ill-spending are all going to be there, but the one critical component is always going to be how children learn to read:
A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them. In 2013, Mississippi enacted a law requiring that third graders pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the next grade. It didn’t just issue a mandate, though; it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-performing schools. Louisiana’s improvements came about after a similar policy cocktail was administered, starting in 2021. And this outperformance might continue in the future: The state recently reported that the number of kindergartners reading at grade level more than doubled in the past academic year—rising from 28 percent to 61 percent.
The “Mississippi miracle” should force a reckoning in less successful states and, ideally, a good deal of imitation. But for Democrats, who pride themselves on belonging to the party of education, these results may be awkward to process. Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their teachers are among the least unionized in the country. And these red states are leaning into phonics-based, “science of reading” approaches to teaching literacy, while Democratic-run states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have been painfully slow to adopt them, in some cases hanging on to other pedagogical approaches with little evidentiary basis. “The same people who are absolutely outraged about what” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “is doing on vaccines are untroubled by just ignoring science when it comes to literacy,” Andrew Rotherham, a co-founder of the education-focused nonprofit Bellwether, told me.
Phonics is the key to reading, and it works no matter the economic status of the family. It is a simple curriculum that any parent can teach their children from a young age. If a child’s reading isn’t established, every other aspect of their life will be deficient, and they will be at a huge disadvantage throughout their life.
This isn’t a joke.
The way we learn how to read Qur’an, such as Noorani Qaeda, is the exact way we need to use to learn English. For more detail information from a professional Muslim teacher, check out this video from Br. Michael Abraham.
The ease and luxury of how life is becoming and the lack of ambition and responsibility that people are avoiding makes it sound like people are really trying to turn this world into their Jannah.
A life of ease, no responsibilities, no children, no spouse, etc.
I can get all the pleasure I need in other ways.
It is all about me, and worrying only about myself.
You want to eat something in particular? A few clicks and you’ll have it in 30 minutes delivered to your doorstep.
You want to watch something? A few clicks and there you have it. Sometimes you don’t even need to do that because it shows up in your feed automatically because the algorithm knows what you like.
Doesn’t this remind you of Jannah, where you can think of any food or drink and it just shows up in your hand? Any pleasure you want to experience, and you can get it within seconds?
The algorithm and the conveniences of this world are making people weaker, and trying to turn this world into a Jannah is one of the biggest deceptions.
Your time in this world is just like a night followed by the day:
كَأَنَّهُمْ يَوْمَ يَرَوْنَهَا لَمْ يَلْبَثُوٓا۟ إِلَّا عَشِيَّةً أَوْ ضُحَىٰهَا ٤٦
On the Day they see it, it will be as if they had stayed ˹in the world˺ no more than one evening or its morning. (79:46)
This world is a mirage that will bite you back hard - when you realize the reality of the situation.
When Sunday night hits and you have work the next day.
Except it won’t be Sunday night. It will be your last night, and your soul will be leaving your throat.
“Do you inhale permanent markers?”
“Do you inhale Wite-Out?”
“Have you ever inhaled glue?”
“How often do you inhale these substances?”
I remember taking “youth risk” surveys when I was in school, where you’re asked a series of questions about your potential drug and sexual habits. Of course these surveys were anonymous, but I learned so much more illegal ways to harm myself through these surveys than before taking the survey.
How beneficial are these surveys? Who really knows, but I know kids would just mess around and lie just for laughs.
I used Wite-Out all the time in middle and high school, but it never came to me to vigorously inhale it for a sense of euphoria. But now, I was technically more prone to trying it since I knew about it.
I remember a similar experience in pharmacy school, where the students were taught about all the side effects of many controlled substances, such as Ketamine, LSD, and at the time, marijuana. The effects it has on your brain allows you to smell music, taste colors, and even experience “out-of-body” sensations where you can see yourself outside your body.
Makes you want to try it right?
At least in pharmacy school I was learning about drugs to help me identify what drug a patient might have overdosed on, but do our kids really need to discover every single way to experience euphoria?
And discover it through a survey that is looking to improve adolescent health?
The irony is insane.
1. Promote sexual freedom and women’s liberation from the household.
2. Have your children raised by daycare systems, making kids more distant from their parents physically and emotionally from birth.
3. Due to a lack of a dominant caretaker figure (the mother), kids never develop a secure attachment to the mother.
4. Child grows up with developmental problems and psychological issues due to said detachment.
5. All these issues are complex and parents don’t know why their kids are acting this way even thought the child has every gadget and toy possible, and so the child is medicated as a ”last resort.”
6. Medications that alter brain chemistry in young developing minds leads to worsening depression, anxiety, and leads to children acting more violent.
7. A general lack of purpose and lack of nourishment of the soul fuels all of the above.
8. School shootings become more and more prevalent.
9. Thinking the solution to this problem is to have less children and rely more and more on automation and robotics.
I recently went to a wedding with my kids, but didn’t attend any of the functions. Didn’t go to the Sangeet, and didn’t go to the wedding either. These events are like many “Muslim” weddings, filled with tabarruj, music, dancing, etc., which is my main reason for avoidance. Even though I didn’t go to the actual events, I was able to stay at the same hotel as everyone else, and meet with my family and chat over breakfast and throughout the day before and after the events.
It sounds counterintuitive to spend all this time and money and not go to the wedding, but there is a much deeper reason why one should go in such a manner.
The Prophet ﷺ said,
“Whoever would like his provision to be increased and his life to be extended, should uphold the ties of kinship.” (Narrated by Al-Bukhari, 5986 and Muslim, 2557)
Many people want to just be like everyone else, but you end up compromising your beliefs and principles. The reality is - you can uphold the ties of kinship, and you can avoid the haram.
My goal here isn’t to brag and think of myself as superior or as some holy, pious individual, but just to convey a simple message that will hopefully benefit many others in sha Allah.
It will cost you time and money to go and stay at the hotel and pay for your own meals while everyone is enjoying the festivities, but you will get much more time and wealth for your sacrifice.
Allah and His Messenger ﷺ are promising you more wealth and a longer lifespan!
What more could you ask for? Who doesn’t want those things?
That is literally everyone’s dream!
Remember, it’s tough to be the one who acts “weird” and is all alone, but every change for good has to start with one individual.
And that individual could be you.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
"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.
Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
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.
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.
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.
Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
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.
This one really irks me:
Your five-year-old son wanders around his kindergarten classroom distracting other kids. The teacher complains: he can't sit through her scintillating lessons on the two sounds made by the letter e. When the teacher invites all the kids to sit with her on the rug for a song, he stares out the window, watching a squirrel dance along a branch. She'd like you to take him to be evaluated.
And so you do. It's a good school, and you want the teacher and the administration to like you. You take him to a pediatrician, who tells you it sounds like ADHD. You feel relief. At least you finally know what's wrong. Commence the interventions, which will transform your son into the attentive student the teacher wants him to be.
The crazy thing is, this is normal behavior for a 5-year old, especially boys who mature later than girls, and are just more hyperactive compared to girls. To turn him into a docile robot is to do injustice to him if you ask me, especially when you consider the side effects of these drugs because once you have ADHD, you will be medicated.
The classroom has goals to meet, and if kids are making the teacher lose progress because they’re just being normal, they have to be “taken care of.”
It’s like kindergarten mafia, expect you don’t get whacked, you get drugged.
I remember a similar situation reading “The Collapse of Parenting,” where the author (Dr. Leonard Sax), would be surprised by how often parents were trying to find a fix for their teenager with medication, when the problem was the teen had a TV in his room and unlimited access to video games, making him play through the night and consequentially, sleepy and inattentive at school. The medicine did make him more attentive, but he lost that “glint in his eye.” Essentially, what the parents were saying was he lost that thing that made him human.
Sometimes people do have real issues like dyslexia, but don’t go shopping for diagnoses till you get the answer you want. Sounds a lot like fatwa shopping.
But l've also talked to parents who went diagnosis shopping-in one case, for a perfectly normal preschooler who wouldn't listen to his mother. Sometimes, the boy would lash out or hit her. It took him forever to put on his shoes. Several neuropsychologists conducted evaluations and decided he was "within normal range." But the parents kept searching, believing there must be some name for the child's recalcitrance. They never suspected that, by purchasing a diagnosis, they might also be saddling their son with a new, negative understanding of himself.
Quotes from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
Too much monitoring isn’t good for a child, but it is also necessary in situations where danger might be present. You have to be strategic where you want monitoring and when you don’t. For example, if the kids are playing out in the yard or at a skate park, let them do their thing and learn their own boundaries. Let them determine what is dangerous and what isn’t based on their environment and skill level. You and I grew up doing some crazy things, and we ended up just fine.
In other situations such as a school environment, you don’t know the behavior patterns of other kids or teenagers, and in this situation, having more monitoring is a good thing. More monitoring can lead to more anxiety (remember that teacher that walks past your desk while working on an assignment?), but schools are also a cesspool of all kinds of insane behavior and habits, especially for practicing Muslims. More monitoring is needed, but it’s because of bad behavior. This is why I highly recommend homeschooling. You can set your own schedule, and you will be doing less monitoring by default.
The whole “surveillance state” is not the solution to problems, both societal and family. What is required is more God consciousness, which is the self-monitoring paradigm that we all need to live by. The more God conscious we are as Muslims and properly instill this in our children, the less they will have to be monitored.
They will be able to monitor themselves.
All Mason will eat is buttered noodles. Harper is afraid of dogs. Would you mind crating your dog during our visit? Or, from the therapist: Sounds like your kiddo has testing anxiety. I'll write her a note, so that the school gives her untimed tests. Sound familiar?
If we pamper kids beyond their diaper age, this is what happens to them. They will continue to be pampered until they have to face the real, and then they are doomed. They won’t know how to deal with life because they never knew the reality of life.
That life is nothing but trials and hardships, with some sprinkles of joy and fulfillment spread throughout.
There is a fine line between accommodating and pushing forward, but if a therapist steps in for you and gives you a golden pass to escape, then it must be OK….right?
Schools are no different with this approach:
School psychologists and counselors so often do the opposite: solidify a child's worry through affirmation and accommodation." They intervene with the teacher, ostensibly on a child's behalf, to lighten the homework load or to provide tailored assignments if the standard curriculum seems to cause too much stress. None of this encourages the development of a child's natural resources for coping with her worries or overcoming stressful situations.
We think as parents that we’re not doing this because we’re immigrant parents and we’re harsher as the stereotype goes, but we are doing this with the religion. How many times does your child not pray on time, or skip jummah because they’re in school?
Is that OK?
Are we accommodating the dunya more than the akhirah?
How many times do we wake up for Fajr, but we let our kids sleep in because they have a long exam today?
Let’s just take the example of Jummah prayer for instance.
The masajid are filled with students when Friday is some sort of holiday, but outside of that, where are the kids, specifically young men the rest of the week? I’ve seen parents who do bring their kids to Jummah, and their sons have been successful in graduating and going to college, so don’t tell me it will ruin their future prospects by taking them out of school every Friday, and it will “create a scene.” Nonsense.
Do you really think Allah subhana wata'aalah will not take care of you if you do what He says? What does He say at the end of Surah Jummah?
Say, “What is with Allah is far better than amusement and merchandise. And Allah is the Best Provider.”
Allah is the Best Provider.
You can read more from the book itself.
Quotes from Bad Therapy:
Hang around families with young children for an afternoon, and you'll hear parents check that their kids are enjoying their ice cream, excited about school the next day, that they had fun at the park. In so many ways, we signal to kids: your happiness is the ultimate goal; it's what we're all livin' for.
According to the best research, we have it all backward. If we wanted our kids to be happy, the last thing we would do is to communicate that happiness is the goal. The more vigorously you hunt happiness, the more likely you are to be disappointed. This is true irrespective of the objective conditions of your life.
This is so true in Islam. We are constantly reminded of how this world is a delusion, a fleeting moment that will only be like a night followed by the day:
On the Day they see it, it will seem they lingered [in this life] an evening [at most,] or its morning. (79:46)
Just look at social media. Everyone seems happy, except you, and it artificially makes you sad and depressed. If social media is doing this to adults, who have a more mature brain and life experience, how about teenagers and youngsters who are not as mature?
By insisting that happiness be their goal, we place kids in a crucible. On the one hand, "chasing positivity" tends to make them more depressed. Then feeling depressed gets socially rewarded.”
Here’s an anecdote from a high school kid regarding being known by your strengths vs being known for your struggles.
Cody, a senior at a public high school in Brooklyn, told me the same. A generation ago, kids might have identified with what Cody calls their "strengths": the jock, the popular kid, the math team member, the beauty queen. But today, that's verboten. "Identifying with your strengths now isn't seen as too cool because some people may manipulate you into thinking that you're privileged because of it."
What's wrong with identifying with your struggles? "Well, I see that they don't try to solve it."
Cody took pains to explain that he wasn't talking about the severely depressed —just the average kid. Once they get the validation from other students for their mental health crises, "they don't break out of that rut," he said.
In conclusion, if you pursue happiness, you will only be more depressed, which is praised and pampered by society, leaving you in that state since it makes you feel “accepted.”
Everlasting happiness is only in Jannah, and to get to Jannah requires struggle and sacrifice.