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Child is a gift. It's actually the ownership of Allah, not the ownership of you,

but rather, Allah's given you temporary custody or temporary ownership, not ultimate ownership.

When a person passes away, we say,

Inna to Allahi, we belong to Allah. We've never said we belong to our fathers, we belong to

our mothers, and we've been to return to our mothers. No, although we say that's my child,

Allah says, hang on, I've just given you this child for a short period of time to test you

and to give you an opportunity to earn paradise by looking after the child

before we take the child away. We may take the child away in infancy, in the teenage years or in adulthood before you or after you.

It's up to Allah. So rather let them play, let them make their mistakes, correct them with happiness, you know, correct them in a beautiful way, let them come through as they grow a little bit older. Like I said, encourage them, don't belittle them, offer them some respect. Don't say cutting words because at that phase, many young men and women or boys and girls sometimes don't even like the way they look

and if you're going to pick on how you look and how you're this and that you know about their

features and so on they're helpless sometimes and that belittlement is something you pay a price for

firstly it's sinful so you get a sin for it, and secondly, you may

lose the child. You may actually cause failure without realizing that it was you who did this.

And this is why the empowerment of these children is very, very important. Sometimes we push religion

to the degree that they begin to hate religion.

And this is a difficulty we face.

So like I said, lead by example, be exemplary.

You fulfill your Salah and so on.

From a young age we were supposed to let them see what we do.

And from the age of seven, we actually begin to tell them,

come, let's pray. And we should be smiling when we're praying and when we're worshipping Allah,

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