GOOD PARENTING

 

 

Your parenting will be, very often, affected by your own parents.

 

Your raising of your children will be influenced by how you yourself were raised as a child.

 

Your relationship with your children will often reflect in some way your relationship with your parents.

 

So, make sure you sort out the issues from your own childhood, if you have any.

 

Address any pain you might have, buried deep down and long forgotten though it may be.

Confront head-on the demons from your own past, your own hurts, your hidden wounds sustained in your childhood or adolescence, as an adult and a parent.

 

Otherwise, you will bring all that unhealthy baggage into your present and pass it on to your precious, innocent children. You'll make your past issues a part of your children's future. And it may continue this way for generations, passed onto your grandchildren and great grandchildren.

 

The stakes are actually quite high. So don't be negligent or lazy or avoidant.

 

Be brave and honest with yourself.

 

The influence of our own childhood on our children's childhood doesn't always show up in the same way for everyone. Some people simply repeat EXACTLY what their own parents did to them because it's all they've ever known, while other people swing in the opposite direction, doing the *opposite* thing as their parents in an attempt to escape the past hurts.

 

Both can be harmful and destructive.

 

Some examples:

 

A mom who gives her children the silent treatment when she's angry or hurt...because her own mom gave her the silent treatment when she'd be angry or hurt.

 

A dad who shouts and yells angrily at his children for every small and big infraction...because his own dad shouted and yelled at him as a child for everything.

 

A father who spoils his children rotten with too many material things, money, gifts, gadgets, clothes, toys, technology...because he's overcompensating for his own childhood feelings of deprivation, poverty, or parental neglect. But now his own children are entitled and bratty.

 

A mother who doesn't teach her children any responsibility or assign them any chores or work around the house...because she hated how many chores and responsibilities, she was assigned by her own parents growing up. But now her own children are irresponsible and coddled.

 

A father who, on principle, refuses to discipline his children for anything, even for major misbehaviors...because he still remembers and suffers from the pain of the overly heavy-handed discipline meted out to him by his own father.

 

A mother who is aggressively rough, overly strict, and controlling with her children...because she always hated what she saw as meekness and spineless leniency in her own mother.

 

A father who is incapable of setting healthy boundaries or appropriate limits for his children even when it comes to haram things like drugs, alcohol, and zina...because of his own feelings of how overly strict, cold, and authoritarian his own father had been with him.

 

It is imperative for us, now that we are ourselves adults and parents, to fix whatever was broken in our personality or inner world during our childhood, so that we can limit the negative effects of our past on our children. We want to be healthy parents to healthy children in Sha Allah SWT.

 

It is not your fault what happened to you as a child.

But it IS your responsibility as an adult to address it and move through and past it, with the mercy of Allah. Don't allow yourself to wallow in endless self-pity, or to become too comfortable and cozy in your victim role, or to allow learned helplessness to paralyze you.

 

Change what needs to be changed and fix what needs to be fixed and have hope in Allah. Make du`a to Allah and work to improve your state.

 

May Allah SWT guide and give us the wisdom to take care of our offspring's to the right direction.

Aameen