Zaynab Ansari – Happiness in the Home Q&A Session 3
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The speaker discusses the importance of trust in relationships with teenagers. They suggest that teenagers may have reasons for their actions, such as prayed, and that it's better to involve them in small groups of prayer instead of just individual small groups. The speaker also advises against accusations and finger pointing towards teenagers and suggests that sharing success in fostering trust with teenagers is key to success.
AI: Summary ©
Assalamu alaikum. I'm Zaynah Bansari, and thank you
for sending in this follow-up question for Happiness
in the Home Forum.
A really important question here on what happens
when,
trust is not established, especially in the relationship
between oneself and their their teenager.
So the questioner wants to know what happens
when you've got a teenager that says, say
I've prayed, and they haven't. Right? And that's
something as parents we run into, even with
smaller children. You know, they might, you know,
they become children are very smart, and they
have ways, for example,
you might tell your child go and make
wool doo, and they run to the bathroom
and they come back out a minute later.
And they might have, you know, put some
water on the towel, splash a little bit
of water on their arms or feet or
whatever, but they didn't actually really fully go
through the motions. So children have different reasons
for why they kind of come up with
these various stratagems.
I think when you're dealing with a teenager,
though,
it's it's a little bit trickier than when
you're dealing with a young child. Because with
a young child, a younger child, you can
sit down and say, hey. Look. You know,
mommy and dad, you know, we I wasn't
born yesterday. I know that maybe you didn't
make the fool will do it. Let's go
back in and try that again. With a
teenager,
you don't want your teenager to feel like
you don't trust him or her, so I
would definitely not take the approach of being
sort of accusatory
or kind of like calling them out,
right? So you have the issue of prayer.
They've said they've prayed, you feel they haven't.
Don't call them out. I would say in
the beginning just kind of go with it
and see if there's a pattern
of their telling you things where you know
they haven't done what you've asked them to
do.
And maybe try to dig a little bit
deeper.
What's going on with them right now? Are
they stressed out about something? Do they have
a really heavy homework load? Do they seem
like dejected about stuff? What kind of you
know, who are their friends? Who are they
hanging out with? You know, what's kind of
getting them down? And just kind of spend
some time with them where you're not focused
on the daily routine. This is not to
kinda like follow-up and see what they're doing
or not doing, but you just really wanna
spend time with them and see
how are they doing. Right?
And make sure that you involve them. If
you feel this is an issue, if a
prayer has become an issue, try to involve
them in group prayer as much as possible.
Give them the responsibility
when appropriate of leading the prayer.
Maybe even give them the responsibility of teaching
the prayer
to a younger sibling.
Try to have them take more ownership of
the situation. Right? But definitely avoid,
a situation of accusations and finger pointing because
that'll probably just make them kind of withdraw
and rebel even more. So may Allah, ta'ala,
give you success
in in in in in fostering that relationship
of trust with your teen. Thank you.