The Importance of Salat in Combating Childhood Anxiety

This article is by Guest Blogger, Humera Malik who is an author. Read her bio below. Here she talks about how praying can help ease your child's anxiety.

The main character in my new book is a Muslim boy named Zain, who becomes very frustrated and anxious due to a series of mishaps during the week. He then learns how prayer can help set things right. I was inspired to write this due in part to my own experience with using prayer to combat anxiety. 

Questions on Getting Children to Pray

Below are some common questions that you might be asking about your child and praying. The answers might help you. If you have any other questions be sure to put it in the comment.

Question: How to connect my child to Allah to want to pray instead of praying out of fear?

How to Teach Children to Love to Pray

 

Praying to Allah is the second most important act of worship for Muslims (the first being the declaration of  faith). Since it is so important, we must be mindful that we are doing it properly and that we instill it in our children to want and love to pray to Allah. 

How do we do that? Most parents of pre-adolescents and adolescents leave it too late when they find their child dragging their feet, or flat out refuse to pray or does it with a lot of nagging on the parent's side and a lot of complaints from their kids. This is not what we want. We want our kids to self-regulate and be able to pray when it's time without our prompting. We want our kids to look forward to praying. We want our kids to love praying to Allah.

Cherishing Childhood: A Guide to Parenting in Islam

 

Title: Cherishing Childhood: A Guide to Parenting in Islam

Author: Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari

Publisher: Ta-Ha Publishers

Published: Revised 2015

Recommended for: First time parents

Our children are the greatest assets that Allah has entrusted us with. We owe it to Allah and to our children, therefore, to invest our time and efforts into being the best parents we can be. Cherishing Childhood is a parent-to-parent handbook that outlines how to tackle the challenges (and reap the rewards of parenting children from birth to pre-adolescence within an Islamic ethos in a pluralist society.