The War on Kids in the Modern Muslim Family

Sheikh Mohammad Elshinawy opens with a question that reframes everything after it: people have been parenting successfully across time, cultures, and civilizations, even the animal kingdom manages to groom its young toward survival, so why does it suddenly feel like nothing works? His answer isn’t a diagnosis of worse parents. It’s a diagnosis of a broken system, and he argues that studying the history behind it is genuinely liberating.

Sheikh Elshinawy traces part of this shift to industrialization and urbanization, which he says weakened village and extended-family structures. He also points to changes in household and labor patterns during the twentieth century as further altering the environment in which children were raised. The result, he says, is that the house stayed standing but the home didn’t: a house is brick and mortar, a home is where the warmth is. With that shift, the natural vertical flow of values, elders passing wisdom down to the young, was severed.

Drawing on the concept of peer orientation discussed by Gordon Neufeld in Hold On to Your Kids, Sheikh Elshinawy describes what filled the vacuum: children now orient primarily to other children their own age. He calls this a doubly bad trade, because peers are equally inexperienced and equally insecure, and their attempts to compensate for that insecurity, selfishness included, end up shaping each other more than any wiser adult does. Social media and 40 hours a week of school only deepen this pull. His proposed fix has two parts: rebuild something like the village, through a masjid community that people actually want to be part of, and restore warmth and compassion at home. But above everything, he argues, parents need to focus on the relationship itself before any technique, because a child’s attachment and orientation strongly shape whose guidance they are receptive to.

From there, Sheikh Elshinawy turns to examples from the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and from Quranic accounts of other prophets to illustrate warmth and attentiveness toward children. The first piece is affectionate words: he recalls the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ taking time, despite his busyness, to comfort the young Abu Umayr after the loss of his pet bird, and points separately to Prophet Ya’qub’s attentiveness when his young son Yusuf came to him with a dream. He also notes that the Quran repeatedly uses endearing language like “ya bunayya,” my dear son, rather than flat address, and that the Prophet prayed by name, “Oh Allah, I love these two, so love them,” over his grandson and the son of a freed slave in his household. The second piece is affectionate touch. When a Bedouin man boasted that he had ten sons and had never kissed a single one of them, insisting that’s how you raise tough men, the Prophet’s reply was direct: “How can I possibly help you if Allah has plucked the compassion from your heart?” He extended this to a man whose heart felt hardened, advising him to caress the heads of orphans among other things.

The remaining two pieces are reasonable expectations and early belief. Instructing children to start praying at seven is described as a mercy in both directions: not so early that a child is expected to hold a humility they can’t yet manage, and not so late that faith has to be switched on overnight in the teenage years. Recognizing that children have different strengths, rather than holding them all to one narrow definition of success, is named as part of the same mercy. Sheikh Elshinawy closes by pointing to the Prophet’s words about his grandson Hasan and the future role he would play in reconciling two groups of Muslims, as an example of affirming a child’s potential early.