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 Nine: 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.