How to live your life so your children can be successful.
Surah Kahf has so many hidden gems inside of it, and the one that really stuck with me today was about the righteous father who left behind two orphan boys.
This father who passed away, he did two important things:
Will your kids resent you?
If you don’t teach your kids about Islam, and make it a part of their life, they might resent you. Of course there should always be respect and good manners towards parents, but sometimes thoughts still creep in and if a parent deprives their child of sound Islamic knowledge, that child will always feel behind once they start practicing Islam.
Not only that, but it can lead to families bickering and even splitting apart, especially if they are on different wavelengths in terms of following the religion.
If you practice, and you teach your kids to practice, your relationship in sha Allah will be fruitful, blessed, and strong.
Unfortunately, there are probably a lot of people like this sister here asking this question.
Generative AI and “nudify” apps
Matt Burgess, from Wired.com (on arstechnica):
Major technology companies, including Google, Apple, and Discord, have been enabling people to quickly sign up to harmful “undress” websites, which use AI to remove clothes from real photos to make victims appear to be “nude” without their consent. More than a dozen of these deepfake websites have been using login buttons from the tech companies for months.
You’re not wasting time if you’re doing stuff with your kids.
Yesterday, I had a plan.
I was going to workout after work, no matter what.
I just had to.
It has been a few days and I knew I needed the workout.
Did I want to do it? Of course not.
But it has to be done..
Reaching the delegation point in your family life.
You need to prepare for your kids Islamic lesson, but you also need to buy groceries.
What do you do??
The earlier you start, the better.
The earlier you start something, the quicker you will get better at it.
This is especially true with homeschooling.
When you have just one child, it is very easy to homeschool them, and you can accelerate their learning since the teacher to student ratio is 1:1.
Or even 2:1 if both parents get involved!
Just like you adjusted your time and priorities when you got married, and again after having your first child, you can adjust once again by homeschooling them.
When child #2 comes along, you can adjust again, and prioritize your time differently.
It is a gradual process and you will notice how much you can actually accomplish.
You will even look back at when you only had one child, and how “busy” you thought you were with just one brain to feed 😅.
If you already have 3 kids that are in public schools, and now decide to start homeschooling them, it can still be done, no doubt about it, but the challenges and initial shock will be much more difficult.
This is what keeps people from even getting started, until it gets far too long in the tooth and the opportunity has passed you by.
How boys and girls think differently about money.
The other day, my daughter comes up to me, very nonchalantly, and just tells me,
“Papa, I think I lost my money.”
There was no emotion or panic in her tone whatsoever. I was more in shock of how calm she was because I knew she had a decent chunk of change for a 12 year old (about $500 from gifts and Eid money).
So naturally I asked her, “how much money? Do you mean your purse?” Her purse usually has like $20-$40.
I was like there was no way she lost ALL her money.
She replies again in her casual voice, “No. I lost all my money.”
So now I’m a bit concerned and freaking out a bit inside, and we go on a mission to backtrack her steps and search her room, and eventually she finds it fairly quickly.
Once she finds it, it’s just a, “Oh there it is.” and there’s just the tiniest sign of relief on her face.
After this ordeal, I was just taken aback by her attitude and how losing the money didn’t make her freak out. When I thought about it more, it didn't really surprise me.
We have been homeschooling them since the beginning, and we have been teaching them proper Islamic principles, including how a household is run, who is in charge of what, and who brings home the “dough,” and who cooks the dough.
It’s a system that Alhumdulilah works amazingly well, and brings benefit to everyone.
My wife doesn’t have to worry about money, and naturally, my daughter has picked that up from her. Having a lot of money isn’t a priority for my daughter, and being thrifty with money is one of her qualities.
Frankly, it should be a quality for all of us.
Her carelessness with money isn’t spending too much, but just misplacing it in her room 😂.
My son, on the other hand, is the opposite. He is much more meticulous with money, always trying to find ways to earn money, mainly because he tends to spend more money. If he had lost his wad of cash, he would have turned the whole house upside down trying to find it. He would definitely have been in a more panicked state.
The way my son and daughter react emotionally to money is part of their fitra that is inside all of us as Muslims, and something that our house has reinforced:
Men are the providers of the household and have to worry about money and providing, while women are the maintainers of the household and have to worry about caretaking and maintaining. They are different roles for men and women, but in the eyes of Allah, they are noble and equitable positions that can take you to Jannah.
Someone who stays home isn’t a worse person because they take care of the home vs the one who has to go out and work.
If your kids grow up without the influence of social media, and without the influence of anti-Islamic lifestyles that they see all day and are fed through the school systems, they are more likely to grow up on the fitra and you will have to spend less time trying to detox their minds.
You will see the fitra flourish in the actions of your kids, from the obvious to the more subtle, like finances.
Authoritarian vs Authoritative Parenting
I discussed Permissive parenting in a previous post, but now I want to talk about Authoritarian Parenting. This is probably something many Muslims are familiar with, since it has the qualities that we grew up with, and by consequence, we have now inherited those same tactics for our own kids.
What is the best parenting style?
Abigail Shrier from her book, “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up,” regarding parenting styles:
“After studying the ways parents attempt to control the behavior of children, Baumrind discerned three general approaches: permissive, authoritative, and authoritarian.”