Tarbiyaate Awlaad - Parents have a very big responsibility of bringing up their children in a Proper Manner

0-7 YEARS THE CHILD IS YOUR MASTER - let the child do what he wants to do. It’s the main age to gain the trust, love and attraction of your child

7-14 YOU ARE THE MASTER - usually if the first step is used successfully this step shouldn't be hard to follow. the child who has gained his parents trust in the first stage will automatically learn to obey his parents.

14 AND UP YOUR CHILD IS YOUR MINISTER. Ask advice from him; let him help you in making decisions. He is going to be like your best friend

THINGS TO DO WHEN A CHILD IS BORN

(taken from the majalis of Maulana Syed Muhammed Rizvi - recited on the wilaadat of Imam Hussein (a.s) 1424)

1. Wash the child

2. Give azan in the right ear and iqamah in the left (that is to protect the baby from shaitan, the first word baby should hear is the name of Allah)

3. Give a good name to the child

4. Do walima when the child is born (a feast of at least 10 people)

5. Do the aqiqa before or on the seventh day. Gather the hair, weight it and give the total weight in silver or gold or an equal amount of such in money to sadqa. Sacrifice a cow, camel goat or a sheep.( the animal should be older then 7 months ) . It is extremely makhru to eat the meat of the sacrifice animal for the parents.

6. Mother should try to breastfeed the child for at least 21 months.

MAKE OF YOUR CHILD A HUMBLE SERVANT OF ALLAH

A person can be good and do good to others but if he is proud of himself and lets everyone know how good of a person he is then his value diminishes in the eyes of Allah. Make of your child a humble servant of Allah. Make him realize that his actions maybe praiseworthy but are there because of the mercy of Allah.

A few things he should realize is if he is pious and when praised, his reaction should be as follows:

- He should pray to Allah not to put him, in account for the compliment received (that means he should be so humble that he should be afraid of taking the credit thinking what if he did no deserve it).

- Should always pray to Allah to make him better

- Should remind himself of all the bad things he has done and nobody knows about it and should ask forgiveness from Allah for it

- Always keep in mind that all good things that he does is only because of the mercy of Allah upon him

- Should remind himself that it might not be accepted by Allah It’s so funny to see that generally a human being is never satisfied, he wants more and more but when he does a good thing he feels really satisfied and feels like he is the best of the men on earth. Men should not be satisfied with his good deeds but should always feel like keeping it up and continue doing more of the good work. By doing good acts he should not feel like he has done a favour to Allah but instead he should be happy that Allah gave him the opportunity to do the good job.

When we help someone or do something for somebody, we expect from him appreciation and if we do not get it, we get so upset and say, “look at him - I did this and this for him but he never even thanked me.” Our children ‘s reaction will be the same if we react in this way or if we do not explain to them - Allah gives the best of his rewards to the one he wants and the action that was taken by you towards another, was for the pleasure of ALLAH, then why look for a “thank you” from someone else?

NOTES TAKEN FROM THE MAJLIS OF MASSUMA BAI (MULLA ASGHER’S DAUGHTER) SAFAR ASHRA MAJLIS 1425 (MARCH/APRIL 2004)

- Don’t play double standard games with your children. At namaz time you tell your children to go pray namaaz and yourself first finish some work or what ever you are doing before going to pray. What kind of example are you giving your children? Children learn from observing the adult. At namaaz time if you leave all your work and go first to pray namaaz your child will definitely follow your example. - Have often and long talks about religion or religious matters at home.

- Don’t teach your child by scaring them. For example if he is not praying don’t scare him by telling him Allah will put you in the fire of hell, but instead explain him how much Allah loves him and that’s why he has given him the opportunity to pray to him and to ask for what he wants. If you tell a child are you lying? He will quickly say no but if you ask him nicely you are not being truthfull are you? He will tell you that he is not. It’s the same question but you got different answers from it. So apply a different approach towards your child. - Teach your child to say salaamun alaikum , to give dua to others instead of saying good morning or hi. The west is not telling you to change your religion but instead he wants you to change your lifestyle to match there’s. When you say good morning there is nothing interesting in there. Sometimes you have a bad morning but you still have to say good morning. But if you do salaam you are giving dua to everyone. “may peace be upon you”

General notes taken from different sources

- Muhammed Hussein Tabba Tabbai’s mother said that when she was pregnant, she stayed in wudhoo all the time and she never did qaza her namaze shab and that she used to recite Quran a lot and that she memorized 20 pages of the holy Quran. When her child was born she used to play Quran all the time. Whether the baby was asleep or awake. In result the child’s first words spoken were the words of Quran. And both parents started to make him memorize the Quran at a very young age.

- If your child is not smart, he is not bringing good marks in class make him recite Quran and make him memorize at least 10 ayaats of QUran and you’ll see the difference then.

- Explain your child that when a young boy or girl wakes up and recites namaaze shaab, Allah is so please with her or him. The angels are amazed that being so young he remembers Allah instead of going and partying as the usual youngsters do.

- Whenever we are in problems we always call imame zamana for help. We should explain to our children that imame zamana is always willing to help us not only when we are in need. When ever we come out of the house we should send salaam to our present imam “asalaamun alaikum yaa sahebu zamaan” and ask him to protect you from doing any sins while you are out and to protect you in general. We live in a country where sins are every part of it and we are attracted to it especially when we go to school and we are around our peers ect.. But if we ask imame zamana to help us he will surely do so.

- In this country where we live we need to ensure everything don’t we? We have to insure our car, our house so if any damage happens to them we don’t get into trouble. Have you thought about your imaan and your kids imaan? They need to be insure too for the here after. You can ensure your and your children’s imaan by gving it to Allah as amaanat :

“Ya Allahu Ya Rahmanu Ya rahim, yaa muqalibal Qulub sabith qalbi aa’la dinik”

- A way of keeping your child’s imaan safe is to give it to an imam especially the present imam and tell him that he is from now on your son please keep his imaaan safe.

- Teach your child that the best way to stay away from Gunnah is that whenever he or she is going to do or say something haram he should loudly say” (take his name ) allah is watching you” because usually we do harram things because we think nobody is watching us.

- It is not at all waajib for a women to cook, vacuum or clean the house but what is waajib for her is the tarbiyaate awlaad. She will be asked on the day of judgment of how she raised her kids because the majority of the habits are learned from the mother.

- The pillar of a community is its women and its youngsters. If the women and youngsters are educated ec..t its going to be a plus for the community that is why the enemy always attacks these two pillars

- Teach your children to always thank Allah for all the bounties he has showered on us. For that you will have to show him the worth of Allah by being always thankful and reminding our children that each and everything we have is because of his love and mercy on us. We have to be a model for the child who will follow us in what ever we do. For example when we finish praying salaat we bow our head in sajadah - how long do we take to do shukhr? Two seconds maybe? Althought this is the time when we are thanking Allah for all the blessings he has showered on. We should, in the least, take 10 minutes to thank him and to ask for our haajaat. By doing so we will teach the importance of thanking Allah to our children thus they will become from those who are shaakireen. Lets look at an example. Prophet Dawud once ask Allah to show him who is going to be with him in jannah. Allah sent him into a jungle and told him that the first person he sees there, will be the one who will be with him in jannah. Prophet Dawud went to the jungle as directed by Allah. He saw an old man, with thorn cloths; lifting wood on his head walking by. Prophet Dawud surprised; went to him, asked his name and walked with him until they reached the old men’s house. The men invited prophet Dawud for dinner with him. Prophet Dawud accepts the invitation and enters the old men’s house. The old men, takes out flour and makes out of it bread (roti) and then serves one for himself and one to the prophet. Before starting to eat, the old men raises his hands towards the sky and starts thanking Allah for creating the earth and with it creating wood, and with the wood, giving him strength to cut the wood, and with the strength, sending him a customer to purchase the wood. He continues to thank Allah, for the blessings of this earth, and the flour that he has created, so he can buy it and make food out of it. At the end, he asks Allah to give him the same for the following day. – This person was an ordinary person, not a ma’soom, prophet or imam, or from their family. He was a simple old man, who had the realization that everything that he has, comes from Allah, and Allah can take it away when ever he pleases. Therefore, he was thankful to Allah for giving him his Rizk and showering his blessings there in.

Majalis by Sheikh Abbas Jaffer on parenting

7th Muharram 1426-Feb 15th 2005

In Surah number 66 and aayat 6, Allah’s (s.w.t) says:

“Oh you who believe save yourselves and your family from the fire of hell”

When interpreting this Aayat we see that Allah is referring to amrabilmaaruf and nahianilmunkar in the family. To have a strong community it begins from tarbiyaat (proper upbringing of your children) at home.

Parenting plays a vital role.

Imam Sajjad says in risaalat-e-huqooq (the teachings of rights)

The right of the children is that you have to know he emerged from you in this world and everything right he does and everything wrong he does is attributed to you. You are responsible for his teaching, training and guiding him to his lord Almighty Allah and assiting him in obedience. Therefore be sure if you do a favour for your child, you will obtain the goodness of it. But if you act viciously against him that too will come back to you. In ensuring success of the community and in assurance that nahianilmunkar and amrabilmaaruf prevails in the community, we have to practice good parenting at home. There is no doubt that in all kinds of job you can think of, parenting is the only kind of job you can embark on without training. For example if you want to examin an eye, you have to go for training for 5 years or more!! Any other job you want to do, it always requires prior training before you can actually do it. But to become parents, anybody can become parents. It does not need any licence or previous training which is in one hand the beauty of it and on the other side the downfall of it. Anybody can be parents - that doesn’t mean that anybody can be good parents. Many parents despite having no training become alhamdullilah, very good parents. It is as we commonly refer to as, “on the job training.”
When we look at kids who have gone wrong and we look at their background, we see a certain pattern of emotions. These are patterns that young parents; parents of kids who are turning into teenagers, should know about. They should go to the library and look at the statistics, read up about kids just like yours who ended up in crime, juvenal institutions, drugs etc.. These kids started up as innocent as all our kids did, then how did they turn into this? You will see that there is a definite pattern of involvement or lack of it on the part of the parents. These things do not manufacture themselves.

Here are some points to ponder upon:

What has been found in kids who have gone wrong is always the quality of parenting either it is fully or partly responsible. In fact in many of these children it was found that it was not that it was lack of discipline at home and infact many of them were frequently punished by their parents, even physically punished by their parents. Despite the frequency of this and the punishment over a time, these punishments became meaning-less. These parents, as I refer to them are “do as I say” parents, not “do as I do” parents. Kids are not silly they pick up very very fast on the vices at home. There is a group of parents who would like to say ”Have you prayed your nammaz?” “no?”, “go pray your namaaz”. But the kid very well knows that its just 5 minutes gone into namaaz time so you have not prayed either. Parents tend to ask: “ have you done your Quran today? “, “go do your Quran”. The kid will do it but, they know that you have not done it yourself. They will again ask to the child: “Have you done your room?” and he comes to your room and its a mess. How long will it take him to ask you: “Have you seen your room lately?” He might not dare asling you directly but it’s happening in his mind.

And then he slowly starts loosing respect for you. He realizes that this person has faults, and amongs the faults, one is that he likes to tell others to do stuff that he himself has not done it.

There comes a very delicate time in the life of the child where he first realizes that mom and dad are not god, they are not invincible, they are weak, they are just like regular people. When this happens, then it is a very critical time for the family, and for the future of the family. The day your child begins to loose respect for you is the day that you should break because it is then the beginning of the slippery slop which is then very hard to bring them back.

When the kids who have gone wrong were asked what kind of parents they had, they would say that their parents would ask them to do stuff that they themselves wouldn’t do it, they would make promises that they never kept, they would threaten us with stuff that they never did and the kids realized that it was just words.

Your children are hungry for love. They are very aware of the difference between these almost guilty act of love that a parent would do after not having payed attention to his child for a whole two weeks and then suddenly comes home with a bike, spend ten minutes with them to make up by presenting the bike. That might work for children for a while, but what kids need is to be shown that everyday you are with them. You don’t need to give them a bike or anything else, you can also tell them off, but if they are confident that my parents love me, they will stand behind me no matter what, they show me on daily basis that they care for me by constantly being with me then that’s what they need and that is great !!!

The interesting thing is the kids who have gone wrong come from a rich family, from parents who are very well educated and now they are in delinquent homes. They have expensive habits and drugs is one of them. Their parents have got millions and yet you wonder how they brought up their children!!! The kids are just hungry for love. They would rather feel truly valued and loved then having nice cloths and expensive things at home.

A very interesting story states that there was a man who used to come to his home and in his path find a very tiny little weed. He would just pass by it. Then slowly that weed started growing and became bigger and bigger. The man would just pass by it. One day came when that weed had become so big and bushy that to pass through it , he had to part it and pass. One day he said to himself that this was crazy and he should do something about it. The man tried to pull it out but could not do it because it was so firm in the ground that this weed who was very little once was very much entranched to the ground and if he would pull it out he would ruin the whole path going to his home. Finally he decided to use another path to go to his house. That means that when you have kids who are young, they are like a fertail ground and you can mold it at will. They are also in a very delicate stage so you can harm them too. If this tarbiyat, which means drip drip kind of instruction, is done gradually and deliberately, it will foster the child. However if you are one of those people who every so often feel guilty and want to spend a little bit of time with their kids or at a crucial age then its not going to work.

Parents who work will have to work harder in instructing their children. When they get home. It is doable, they have to be even more mindfull that now the child will need more time from them , more effort from them, otherwise they will find that they grow up as strangers to their child.

The child needs to rise just alittle higer then you , and then they are taller and bigger then you and will not listen to what you say because they will not have been trained to respect you.

We have to take the responsibilities for our own kids. Sometimes in madressa we get kids who come up to us and we see things badly wrong with them. We try what we can to help him but how many hours do we have them for 2or 3? These kids when they grow up they become a burden to the society and when we talk to their parents, they say that they have been failed by the society and the madressa system. The madressa is not a substitute for parents!! You have to take the responsibility for what you have brought in this world. The madressa and all the other institutions are just there as a supplement. Even if they were not present we should be able to bring up the children in the right way. Passing off of responsibility makes us feel good. It makes us feel as it was never us who had done anything wrong. If this kid has gone off the rail it’s not because of us but because of the community. We often hear things like when we were in Mombasa, the community used to take good care of our kids and the environment was good but here in Canada or London or any other western country, there is not a good environment that’s why my kids turned out to be like that. This can happen, but very rarely if the parents were alert at the right time.

We need to acknowledge that the fault in our kids may actually be due to us, or maybe due to something we did wrong! It is never too late. You can start even when you realize that things are beginning to deteriorate at home. It is never too late. You can read up. You cannot find all the answers in your own head. To get them you have to read up, talk to experts in this field, go to the libraries. There is lots of information out there. You just need to care.

You have to take the responsibilities to make your child well rounded human beings. You have to make sure that they become good Muslims. Teach them things that when they are in grow up they say for example my father used to say to always read Quran. Teach them the right values so that they remember you and say that this was from my father. Have a good legacy and leave behind kids who are assets for the community and not a burden. Have reasonable standards at home. If we treat children even when we are mad with a certain dignity, and we never argue in a way that they see that mom and dad are really in a disagreement here in front of them. They will learn that this is a sacred institution and they learn to respect their parents.