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Key #6: Respect | Keys to Prophetic Parenting

March 8, 2021Sh. Ibrahim Hindy

Allah is the source of all mercy upon us, and He decreed that the first touch of mercy we feel is from our parents.

Being undutiful towards our parents is one of the greatest sins in our religion. We all want our children to gain Allah's pleasure and go to Jannah. It is our responsibility as parents to help them be obedient to us - by showing respect to our own parents and mercy to our children. Sh. Ibrahim Hindy shares 3 steps we can take to help our children learn respect.

Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
The Greatest Obligation Upon A Child Is To Be Pious, To Be Dutiful And Respectful To Their Parents Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala Says, Waqadaa rabbuka alla ta'budu illa iyaa Your Lord has decreed that you worship none other than Him. Wabil waridayni ihsana And to have excellent, beautiful treatment of your parents. Allah says, Wa'abudu Allaha wa la tushrikoo bihi shay'a wa bilwaridayni ihsana Worship Allah, associate none with Him in worship, and be excellent, show excellence and beauty to your parents. Look at how in both verses Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala paired together two meanings. One, His right as Lord and Creator over the creation, which is His right to be worshipped alone without partners. And two, the rights of the parents over their children. As beings, as humans, we would not have existed without Allah. We would not have been created, or breathed a single breath, or tasted a single pleasure, or lived a single luxury without the blessing of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, the provision of Allah, the sustenance of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. God is the primary cause of our existence. And Allah chose our parents as the path to our coming into existence. Allah is the source of all the mercy we experienced in our lives. He decreed the first touch of mercy you experienced came from your parents. And so if a person is ungrateful to their parents, how can they not be ungrateful to Allah? If they are dismissive of their parents, how can they not be considered dismissive of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala? Because of this Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says, اَنِشْكُرُ لِي وَلِي وَالِيْدَيْكُ Be grateful to me and to your parents. Ibn Abbas commented on this verse, he said, فَمَنْ شَكَرَ اللَّهَ وَلَمْ يَشْكُرُ لِي وَالِيْدَيْهِ لَمْ يُقْبَلْ مِنْهُ Whoever is grateful to Allah but not grateful to their parents, it will not be accepted from them. We are impious to the first place of Allah's blessings upon us.
How can we then imagine that we are being pious to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala? And because of this being undutiful to our parents is one of the greatest sins in our religion. The Prophet said, رِضَى الْرَبِّ فِي رِضَى الْوَارِدِ وَسَخَطِ الْرَبِّ فِي سَخَطِ الْوَارِدِ The pleasure of your Lord lies in the pleasure of your parents and the anger of your Lord lies in the anger of your parents. The Prophet ﷺ said, أَكْبَرُ الْكَبَائِرُ الْإِشْرَاكُ بِاللَّهِ وَعَقُوقِ الْوَالِدَيْنِ وَشَهَادَةِ زُورِ He said the greatest of all the great sins is one associating in worship with Allah, being abusive to one's parents, and giving false testimony. And there's many other hadith which carry this meaning, a warning against abuse or impiety directed towards one's parents. Being good to our parents is foundationally important in our religion. So how should that fact then affect our parenting? Some parents use these ayat and these hadith almost like a trump card. You have to listen to me because of this hadith. They might use it to shut down conversation, to exert dominance in a situation. But we want our kids to go to Jannah. We want them to be good to us. But we want our kids to go to Jannah. And them being good to us is essentially important for them to enter Jannah. The pleasure of Allah is found in the pleasure of the parent, as we mentioned in the previous hadith. So we have an obligation to help our kids be good to us. How can this be achieved? What can we do to help our children be respectful to us? How do we help them honor us? How do we help them treat us with respect and duty and honor? Number one, what is our relationship to our parents? We spoke in a previous video about the idea of modeling. How children will model their own behavior according to yours. They interpret what we do as being normal. If we eat our meals at the dinner table, they consider that to be normal. If you wear your seatbelt in the car, they consider that to be normal. That's just the way that kids are. If we pray, if we fast, they consider that to be normal. This is how they learn to be humans in the world.
So if we want our kids to learn to be dutiful to us, to be pious to us, to be respectful to us, it's pretty important we show them how to do that with our own parents. If we are flippant to our parents, if we don't care for their needs, if we don't maintain communication with them, if we don't call them and visit them often, guess what? Our kids are observing all of that. They can see it and they're learning from your actions. And there's a beautiful dua in the Quran which really ties together these meanings. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la mentions the dua, رَبِّ أَوْزِعْنِي أَنْ أَشْكُرَ نَعْمَتَكَ الَّتِي أَنْعَمْتُ عَلَيْي وَعَلَىٰ وَالِدَيْ وَأَنْ أَعْمَلَ صَالِحًا تَرْضَى وَأَصْلِحْنِي فِي ذُرْيَتِي My Lord, enable me to be grateful for your favor upon me and for my parents and to work upon righteousness, which you are pleased with and to make my children, my offspring righteous. Notice in this dua, you're saying, Oh Allah, allow me to be grateful to you and to be grateful to my parents and allow me to do good deeds and then and allow my children to be righteous. This dua is connecting the idea that your gratitude to your parents and the good deeds that you do in your life will directly impact the righteousness of your children. So if we want our kids to get to Jannah, to be dutiful to you as a parent, to be respectful to you as a parent, they need to see you being dutiful to your own parents. And even if your parents have passed away, they've left this world, they can still witness you honoring your parents. A man came to the Prophet ﷺ, he said, Oh Messenger of Allah, do I need to be dutiful to my parents even after their death? The Prophet said, Yes, and you can do so by praying for them, supplicating for their forgiveness, to fulfill their promises after their death, to maintain their ties of kinship, and to honor them and to honor their friends. So these are things that we can do even if our parents have passed away, to help our children witness and see that we are honoring our own parents, and in turn show them that they too should honor their own parents. The second point which is important to consider as well,
setting reasonable expectations for our children. Sometimes as parents we set really high expectations for our children, and that's because we want them to achieve a lot, we want them to be successful. So we load them with expectations of how they need to be in terms of behavior, how they need to be in terms of academics, in terms of religiosity, and so on and so forth. And when they fall short of these expectations, we get upset with them. Now generally speaking, it's not bad to have expectations for our children. In fact, it's far better to have, and preferable to have expectations than not to have expectations for them. But it's important also that the expectations we set upon our children are reasonable. If we are setting up unreasonable expectations for our kids, we're setting them up for failure. If the expectation is so high that no matter what the child achieves, we tell them, it's not good enough. Or anytime they make even the slightest or smallest mistake, we hold it over their heads. In a way, we're training our kids to give up on pleasing us. We're sending them a message that forget about pleasing us because it's actually impossible. Keeping this in mind, the Prophet ﷺ is recorded to have said in a hadith which is authentic in meaning, رحم الله ولدًا أعانى ولده على بره that God has mercy on a parent who aids their child, supports their child to be pious to them. What does it mean that you aid, you help your child to be pious, to be dutiful, to be respectful to you? In one narration, the Prophet ﷺ was asked, how does one help their child be dutiful to them? The Prophet ﷺ said, يقبل احسانه ويتجاوز عن اساءته that it's done by accepting their good and forgiving their errors. Some scholars comment on this hadith, they say that what it means is that when a child makes an error which is not a sin, it's not inherently sinful, that the parents should overlook some of these mistakes and errors. If every time your child makes a mistake and the mistake doesn't involve sinfulness, for instance, they make a mistake, they broke a plate, they left the lights on, they didn't study enough,
we can overlook and forgive some of these mistakes sometimes. If we can't overlook any of them, eventually the child will think, I can't please my parents, and they might decide to stop trying entirely. Instead, look at the example of the Prophet ﷺ with Anas ibn Malik رضي الله عنه who was a young boy whose mother wanted him to serve the Prophet in order for him to be close to the Prophet. He later said about his time growing up with the Prophet, he said, قَالَ خَدِمْتُ النَّبِي ﷺ عَشْرَ سِنِينَ He said, I served the Prophet for 10 years. فَمَا قَالَ لِي أُفٍ قَطْ He never said, he never expressed frustration to me not once. Not once did he blame me and say about something that I did and say, why did you do this? Not once did he say to me about something I didn't do, why didn't you do so? If Anas felt short, if he forgot to do something, if he forgot to bring something, the Prophet was forgiving, he would overlook some of these shortcomings. And this is different than sinfulness. If your child is falling into dishonesty or lewd behavior, of course we should be more strict. But in general, our expectations of our children should be reasonable and attainable and help them achieve their responsibility of being dutiful to you. May Allah سبحانه وتعالى allow our children to be dutiful to us and raise them upon dutifulness to their parents. Ameen.
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