Advice for Raising Steadfast Children in Times of Fitnah

Shaykha Umm Jamaal opens with an important reframe: the risk of children drifting away from their faith has always existed, even a generation or two ago. What’s different now, she says, is that today’s pressures are finally waking parents up to how much weight their own approach carries. She speaks as a mother of five, mostly grown now, and shares six pieces of advice drawn from raising her own children through exactly these fears.

The first is guarding your intention. Your first and clearest goal as a parent, she says, should be raising a righteous child — not letting career, convenience, or busyness quietly take that place instead. She ties this to the Quranic reminder that wealth and children are themselves a trial, meant to test whether we treat them as the blessing they are, and urges parents to think through the long-term impact of everything they introduce to a child, using a young child given unrestricted phone access as her example.

The second is nurturing the heart before enforcing the rules. She singles out ages five to seven as especially important for building a child’s warm, positive connection to Allah and the Quran — not just correct practice. Teaching the Quran “with explanation,” not just recitation, is what she says actually protects children as they get older. And she’s direct about a risk she’s seen firsthand: parents so afraid of outside influences that they swing into harshness and rigidity, which can push a child away entirely. She points to the Prophet Muhammad’s (peace be upon him) teaching that gentleness beautifies everything it touches, and its absence makes things ugly, alongside a saying attributed to one of the early generations of Muslims: play with your child for seven years, teach them for the next seven, then become their friend for the seven after that.

The third thread is modeling and closeness. Children absorb far more from what they watch a parent do than from what they’re told, she says, and the atmosphere of the home itself — calm, warm, consistent with what’s taught — communicates as much as any lesson. When she’s asked to speak to a teenager who’s pulled away from prayer or hijab, she’s candid that the honest first question is usually about the relationship itself, not the teenager’s faith — and she actively encourages parents to seek out Muslim psychologists and counselors for help navigating that, rather than treating it as a last resort.

Her final piece of advice is community: taking children to the masjid regularly, and giving them real relationships with trusted adults — the “auntie” and “uncle” figures who fill in what an extended family or village once provided. She closes by returning to sincerity and dua rather than technique alone — remaining vigilant about real risks, without letting fear curdle into despair, and trusting that ultimately, as she puts it, success comes from Allah.