Advice & Tips on How to Raise Children in This Land

Shaykh Yasir opens by noting that the Quran and Sunnah deliberately avoid giving rigid, detailed rules for raising children, since so much changes across time, place, and culture. What they offer instead are broad principles, and he goes looking for ten of them in Surah Yusuf, a chapter that is, at its core, an extended family drama: father and son, sibling rivalry, deception, boycotting, and eventual reconciliation. The first lesson is the simplest and most foundational: an underlying current of genuine love holds Ya’qub’s family together throughout, even at its most strained moments, and Shaykh Yasir argues that empathy and love will keep a family together far more reliably than strictness or harshness ever could. The second lesson follows directly from the first: Yusuf is comfortable going to his father with a troubling, confusing dream, rather than keeping it to himself or turning to friends. That kind of trust, Shaykh Yasir stresses, doesn’t happen by accident. A child has to know, well before any crisis, that they can bring you something difficult and be met with steadiness rather than an explosion.

The third lesson addresses favoritism directly, and Shaykh Yasir calls it a major problem in modern Muslim culture: children can sense favoritism even when nothing concrete points to it, the way Yusuf’s brothers did. His practical instruction is specific — gifts, tuition, and opportunities should be kept roughly equal across children, adjusted only for real differences like age, not for private affection a parent can’t fully control. He cites the authentic hadith in which the Prophet refused to bear witness to a man’s unequal gift to one son, telling him plainly that he could not witness an act of unfairness toward the others. Left unaddressed, this kind of imbalance breeds a resentment that, as the story shows, can grow far more corrosive than parents expect.

The fourth and fifth lessons pair together. Shaykh Yasir cautions parents not to underestimate how perceptive and culturally savvy their children can become, especially as teenagers — Yusuf’s brothers out-strategize their father repeatedly, and today’s teenagers are, by his own admission, light years ahead of their parents when it comes to technology and social media. But that same intellectual outmaneuvering has a limit: Shaykh Yasir contrasts this with what he describes as parental intuition: Ya’qub could sense that something was wrong even when he could not identify exactly what his sons had done.

The sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth lessons all circle around how a family survives real harm. Even knowing his sons had done something terrible to Yusuf, Ya’qub never boycotted or expelled them — he stayed present, grieved, and kept hoping for their return, which is exactly what eventually happened. Shaykh Yasir is direct in applying this as a default for parents whose own children go astray: whatever a child has done, he says, it likely isn’t worse than what Yusuf’s brothers did, and yet the relationship wasn’t severed. He also points out that jealousy burns far hotter within families than toward strangers — nobody resents a stranger’s success the way they resent a sibling’s or a cousin’s — so family requires extra vigilance, not less. And when reconciliation does come, Shaykh Yasir emphasizes how readily Yusuf and Ya’qub move toward forgiveness when the brothers acknowledge their wrongdoing. He draws attention to Yusuf’s reference to Shaytan in recounting the conflict with his brothers, presenting this as a way of reframing family conflict that can make forgiveness easier.

The tenth and final lesson is the one Shaykh Yasir returns to as the most important: Ya’qub’s own character is ultimately what his children absorbed and followed, not his instructions. He closes by emphasizing parental example as one of the strongest influences parents can offer: before concentrating only on correcting a child, he urges parents to examine their own character, faith, and relationship with one another.