Reflection Summary
Dr. Haifaa Younis
Dr. Younis, board-certified OB/GYN physician and founder of Jannah Institute, an Islamic education platform for women.
A hadith on drawing close to Allah through fulfilling obligations reframes motherhood: a child’s needs aren’t extra kindness, they’re rights owed, like a signed contract.
Choosing a spouse who will raise children on the same spiritual page matters enormously; misalignment, like disagreeing over waking kids for Fajr prayer, becomes a lasting struggle.
She points to the child’s name as one of the responsibilities parents should take seriously, referring to Prophetic guidance in making that point.
You can’t hand a child a tablet and cartoons and call it religious education. Children absorb faith by watching it lived, not by being told.
Honoring your own parents with excellence, even when they are difficult, unfair, or favor a sibling, is a duty owed regardless of how you’re treated.
Dr. Younis builds her talk around a single hadith: nothing brings a servant closer to Allah than fulfilling the obligations He has made binding. She asks a room of mothers what their obligation to their children actually is, and pushes past the expected answers — love, teaching them about Allah — to something more structural. A child has rights, she says, the way a signed contract has terms. Fulfilling those rights isn’t generosity a mother is choosing to extend; it’s an obligation, and treating it as anything less changes how seriously it gets taken.
From there, she highlights several responsibilities surrounding a child’s upbringing, beginning even before birth with the choice of spouse and continuing through naming the child and teaching the faith. The first is who you marry: raising children who love and obey Allah is far easier when both parents are aligned, and she points to a common struggle she sees, where one parent wants children raised around the five daily prayers and the other doesn’t. She also points to the child’s name as one of the responsibilities parents should take seriously, referring to Prophetic guidance in making that point. The third, and the one she spends the most time on, is teaching the faith itself — and her point is blunt: you don’t teach a child Islam by handing them a tablet and letting them watch cartoons. Faith has to be modeled, in the ordinary hours of a normal day.
She makes that concrete with two vivid examples. A mother who tells her child to say “I’m on my way” on the phone while still standing in the house has just taught that child, wordlessly and effectively, that lying is fine when it’s convenient. A mother who is tired and turns on something inappropriate on TV while her child watches beside her has taught the same lesson about anything she claims is off-limits. “Walk the talk” isn’t a slogan in this talk; it’s the entire mechanism by which children actually learn what their parents believe.
Dr. Younis then widens the lens from obligations to Allah, to obligations toward people — starting with parents. She’s direct about how hard this can be: aging parents who become short-tempered, demanding, or difficult; a mother who, without necessarily meaning to, favored a sibling for years. None of that changes the obligation, she says. The Quranic instruction she highlights is to avoid disrespectful speech and instead address parents with honorable, tender words. She’s careful to separate this from erasing what happened: parents will be asked about how they treated their children, but that is between them and Allah. A child’s own obligation is to honor them with excellence regardless.
She closes by emphasizing that drawing close to Allah begins with faithfully fulfilling the obligations already placed before us — being a present mother, being a patient daughter — rather than overlooking them while pursuing additional devotional acts.
Notice one thing you did or said this week that your child was watching, and ask what it actually taught them.
Have an honest conversation about whether you and your spouse are on the same page about faith practices at home, such as prayer times or routines.
Replace one cartoon or tablet session this week with actively teaching or modeling something about faith together.
Even if the relationship is strained, choose one small act of honor or kindness toward a parent this week.
Pick a daily task you do for your child, like patience or presence, and consciously reframe it as fulfilling their right rather than an inconvenience.
There are no right or wrong answers here, just space to think about your own family.
What does your daily routine already teach your children about faith and honesty, without a single word?
Are you and your spouse aligned on how you want to raise your children spiritually? Where do you differ?
Where might you be substituting a screen for the modeling or teaching your child actually needs from you?
Is there a parent in your life you find difficult to honor with excellence right now? What would one small step toward that look like?
What is one ordinary daily obligation in your life, as a parent or as a child, that this talk reframed for you as a path to closeness with Allah?
Every family is different. If you’ve tried something that made a difference in your family, we’d love to hear about it.
More reflections that may help you think about this from another angle.
