How To Practice Positive Parenting

You're tired of yelling at your children and you don't want to punish them all the time. There must be some way to raise them without resorting to being the mean parent. Well there is a parenting style that avoids punishing children and is much kinder and nurturing. It's called Positive Parenting.

Positive Parenting requires you to provide a positive environment, positive communications and positive discipline. See the chart below. For more on Positive Parenting read 'The Muslim Parent is a Positive Parent'.

3 Steps To Giving Advice

"Religion is nasihah (sincerity, advice)."

The above is a well known hadeeth that's part of the 40 Hadith collection of Imam an-Nawawi that most Muslims would have read and learnt. It's about giving advice and being sincere. 

Before we can understand how to give advice, we need to understand what an advice is and what it isn't. The dictionary meaning of advice is a guidance or recommendation offered with regard to prudent future action. Criticism, which is the opposite of advice, means the expression of disapproval of someone or something on the perceived faults or mistakes.

What Parents Can Learn From Luqman's Advice to His Son

Luqman's advice to his son are the things that we as parents should teach to our children. I'd realised this when I'd recently hosted a Quran Journaling Challenge on my Instagram account @muslim.parenting in which participants had to journal about the ayats relating to Luqman's advice to his son in the Quran (31:13-19). We had to read the tafsir of the ayats and then reflect on what it means to us and how we can apply it to our lives.

1. Teach Your Child Tawheed

O my son, do not associate anything with Allah. Indeed, associating partners with Allah is a great injustice. (Quran, Luqman 31:13)

The first thing that Luqman calls his son's attention to is to worship Allah only and not assign partners to Him. This is tawheed. This is the most important concept in Islam: that Allah is One. He has no partners. If partners are ascribed to Allah then it is called shirk, and shirk is the biggest sin that Allah does not forgive.

My Top 5 Parenting Blog Posts 2018

This year, my top 5 posts were about correction, connection and Ramadan. It tells me you wanted to read about the sunnah of parenting and connect more with your child. 

1. How Prophet Muhammad Corrected Children's Behaviour

2018 was finally the year that I had a viral post mashaAllah! It hit me by surprise when I saw the hundreds of shares on Facebook.