How to Raise Muslim Children: Happiness Is NOT the Goal

Parents, be your child’s parents and not your child’s friend. Your child can have many friends, but your child only has ONE set of parents.

Love your child, give him attention, affection, time, energy, conversation, eye contact, and genuine support. Be a loving and gentle parent.

But this doesn’t mean letting your child walk all over you, or manipulate you, or get away with bad behavior.

Along with your love, give your child discipline, boundaries, and consistency. Children need rules and thrive with structure.

Some parents think that if they enforce rules, the child won’t be happy. And the parent’s entire aim is to keep the child happy.

Do not make your child’s happiness in the moment your highest goal.

Instead, your highest goal should be your child’s deen, character, good health, stable personality, overall wellbeing, long-term happiness.

Making the child’s short-term happiness your biggest goal actually guarantees misery and poor behavior for a child. This is how children become spoiled, pampered, irresponsible, and entitled. And those children grow into weak-willed, incompetent adults with delusions that everyone in the world will cater to them like their parents did. And the world will give them a massive, painful reality check.

If all you as a parent focus on is your child’s momentary happiness, you are doing your child a huge disservice.

Out of their own childhood wounds, some parents buy their kids EVERYTHING the kids demand, all the toys, gadgets, games, clothes, shoes, technology at any store. The parents allow the kids to eat candy and junk food in unlimited amounts, unable to say no to the kids’ wishes. The parents let the young children, even as young as a toddler, watch hours of screen time, with their own personal TV or iPad or tablet or smartphone.

No checks or limits.

It destroys the kids’ mental, physical, and psychological health. But the parents imagine that the kids are “happy.”

What makes it complicated is that, sometimes, some parents spoil their children out of their own childhood trauma, where their own parents didn’t show them enough love when they were young. The sting of that feeling of being unloved remains and sometimes causes some parents to blindly over-compensate, swinging wildly in the direction of the opposite extreme.

It’s a vicious cycle when parents lack self-awareness. When parents are blind to the root causes of their parenting decisions: their own unresolved childhood issues.
Too little love, too much love.

Neither is healthy.

May Allah aid us in raising strong, balanced children, ameen.