Muslim Reflections on Leonard Sax’s The Collapse of Parenting
In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful and Compassionate
Leonard Sax, family physician, psychologist, and an insightful analyst of modern culture, has written an eye-opening book that can help us understand why we are not transferring our religious values to our children.
His argument is in the title of his book: “The Collapse of Parenting”. He argues that parenting has collapsed because parents no longer understand their role. Their role, he argues, is enculturation—to teach their children the customs and practices that will prepare them to be successful in their surrounding culture.
This has worked well in previous times all over the world. It is, in fact, why periods of childhood and adolescence in humans are markedly longer than in other animals—rabbits are weaned at two months and begin having their own children at six months, horses are weaned at six months and have their own children at 18 months, but human children are weaned at 2 years and don’t have children of their own until much, much later—16 years in previous ages, even later today. The role of parents in that prolonged period of childhood and adolescence is enculturation.
But that enculturation no longer happens because the surrounding culture today is what Sax calls a “culture of disrespect”. This modern culture is epitomized by T-shirt slogans such as, “Do I look like I care?” or, “I don’t need you, I have Wi-Fi” and by children’s rude retorts to their parents, their teachers, and even their peers. This culture is so pervasive—in movies, in sports, even in modern theories of parenting and education—that parents no longer understand their role.
And that is to our children’s detriment because—as Sax shows with statistics and anecdotes—it makes them fragile, depressed, unhealthy, and unsuccessful, not just in their academics, but in all aspects of their lives.
At the heart of the “culture of disrespect” is the belief that same-age peers matter more than parents. Instead of being enculturated into the culture of parents who love them unconditionally and who are passing down the collective wisdom and life-experience of previous generations, children are enculturated into the culture of their peers, who don’t truly love them at all and who not only prevent them from benefiting from their parents, but draw them into making decisions that harm them.
The Holy Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) taught a religious culture. Thousands of his Companions absorbed that culture and passed it down to their children, who passed it down to theirs, all the way down to our times. That religious culture works. It made saints like Ghazali, scholars like Razi, warriors like Salahuddin al-Ayyubi, administrators like Nizam al-Mulk, rulers like Suleyman the Magnificent, and millions and millions of normal people (like you and me) who were happy, resilient, healthy, prosperous, and spiritually fulfilled.
The challenges that we, as religious Muslim parents, face in passing down our culture to our children are similar the challenges that Leonard Sax describes in his book. Over the next couple of weeks, I will insha’Allah use Sax’s book to highlight some of those challenges and how we can benefit from his analysis and advice to enculturate our children into the religious culture that was taught by our Holy Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace).
I encourage all of you to buy the book, read it, follow along as I explain, and please ask your questions here. Every week, I will select one of your questions to answer in this message.
Hamza Karamali
