Raising Teenagers: Some Practical Advice

Shaykh Yasir opens with a personal admission: more than 25 years ago, newly practicing and childless, he went looking through the books of fiqh for detailed Islamic instructions on raising children, expecting chapters as specific as those on marriage or inheritance. He found almost nothing. It took having his own children to understand why: raising children isn’t a science with a fixed formula, it’s an ongoing art that varies by child, culture, and era, which is exactly why the Quran and Sunnah offer generic principles rather than rigid rules. He points to a saying attributed to Ali ibn Abi Talib: don’t raise your children exactly as your parents raised you, because they were born for a different time. Shaykh Yasir notes this is doubly true now, in a generation where culture shifts every five to ten years and many immigrant families are, in effect, switching cultures between generations.

His first two points reset how parents should see a baligh teenager. Shaykh Yasir explains that Islamically, there is no teenager category, only children and adults, and that a young person who has reached puberty is treated as a young adult, accountable to Allah first rather than primarily to a parent. He points to Luqman’s conversation with his son in the Quran as the model: Luqman doesn’t threaten punishment, he teaches his son that every deed, however small or hidden, is known to Allah. From this follows his second point: parents must pull back from micromanaging as their children grow, choosing which battles genuinely matter (a messy room usually isn’t one of them) and allowing the privacy and responsibility a young adult needs to develop.

His third and fourth points address tone. He asks parents to privately audit their own ratio: what percentage of conversation with a teenager is reprimand, anger, or correction, versus genuine, positive connection? Too often, he says, praise is treated as costly and rebuke as free. His metaphor is food and salt: let there be abundant good, encouraging conversation, so that the occasional necessary correction actually lands, rather than being the entire diet. When correction is needed, he argues for coaching over yelling, since shouting at a 17-year-old accomplishes little they don’t already understand. He points to Ibrahim asking his son Ismail for his view before carrying out Allah’s command as a model of bringing a young person into the conversation, even in matters ultimately outside their control.

Points five through seven round out his practical advice. He warns against bribing teenagers into better behavior with the latest gadgets, arguing that simply giving teenagers everything they want doesn’t help them grow into responsible young adults, and recommends giving them opportunities to earn some of what they receive. He urges parents to deliberately widen a teenager’s world beyond their own problems, through soft, positive pressure to join family gatherings, without turning those gatherings into interrogations about grades or failures. And he recommends finding a mentor who isn’t a parent, someone in a field the teen is interested in or simply a trusted adult, since identical advice often lands differently coming from someone without parental baggage attached.

He closes with two generic principles, then something more personal. First: the best upbringing you can give begins with being a role model yourself. Second: make constant dua, because ultimately hearts are in Allah’s hands, not fully within a parent’s control. Drawing on the observations of a specialist with more than three decades of experience counseling teenagers, Shaykh Yasir discusses feelings of helplessness, depression, disappointment, and not feeling loved among young people today. He says these pressures can be especially complicated for children of immigrant families. He suggests this is worsened when a family’s main interaction is reprimand, and when parents, often raised in more formal households, rarely say “I love you” aloud. He then speaks directly to teenagers on parents’ behalf: that the harshness often comes from love and high hopes, not its absence; that parents may not express it well or often enough; and that the door for a real conversation, ideally started around a dinner table, needs to open now rather than later.