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