Muhammad Alshareef – Raising Children With Strong Identity

			Let's, let's unpack what the parents often say with that first, because I hear that a lot, what are
your values? Or Islamic values? Yes, personal. What do you mean by that? And when you say everything
in the Quran, that's actually not what we mean by value, right? Because that's simply that's content
that you you say you believe in. Right? But when you say that, I believe in Allah, you're not
actually specifying any mode of conduct that is desirable, which is what a value has to be about,
right? Or if you say, I believe in angels, it's like, well, what does that mean for how you live
your life every single day. So in the absence of having a way to actualize a belief, right, then
		

			it's really not a value. The second thing to talk about before I get into this is that parents do
say, well, we want to have Hispanic values. And so before we can talk about
		

			any particular value, I want to be very clear that we all have a value system, which is where I
really, really want to start this conversation, because to ask people, let me give examples of
values, we say, okay, integrity is a valid, right, I want to be an honest person, right? That is a
valid because honesty is a belief that telling the truth is what we want to do. And also, it's
practicing it every single day, right? I prefer to be honest, rather than to say a lie, regardless
of the advantages, possibly of saying that line this moment in time. But the truth of the matter is
that we have all these different values within us. So we value for instance, maybe living a
		

			comfortable life, which requires making money, right, and so now you might have situation and my
point is, as these values stack up within a person, well, I value freedom, I value obedience, right?
I value honesty, and you say all these good things, what really matters is where they lie from at
the very, very top of your value system to the very, very bottom of your system. Because even the
person who's not very honest and trustworthy, would still say, like, I value integrity, it's just so
far down the line, because everything else is more important. And so for the believer, and for a
Muslim parent, we need to be very explicit when we say we want a value based way of raising our kids
		

			in order a value based version of giving them an identity, we need to be clear on what do we mean by
that? And also saying, I have identified for myself as a parent, what are the most important values
because you can't have like 1000 values and live them all every single day? Right? It's just gonna
get lost. Your kids are gonna say, Well, what am I trying to receive here? So I just wanted to give
it that like value system as many values we want to be clear about making sure the ones that our
most important rice at the top