The Suhbah

Imagine a young couple who have just got married. They are happy, they are building a life together, and six months into their marriage they discover that they are going to have a baby. Suddenly, everyone around them is excited. The grandparents-to-be are delighted, their families are celebrating, their friends and colleagues are sending messages and making plans, and before long there is a baby shower, a growing collection of tiny clothes and blankets, and all the little things that come with preparing for a new arrival. Babies have a way of doing this. People love them before they have even met them, and there is something wonderful about the excitement that surrounds a new child entering the world.

But in the middle of all that excitement, I often wonder who sits the couple down and talks to them about becoming parents.

Not about what pram to buy or what to put in the hospital bag, but about what parenting is actually going to ask of them once the baby is no longer a baby shower and a much-anticipated arrival, but a real person who needs them every day.

Who talks to them about what it might feel like to come home after a difficult day at work, with bills to pay, a house to run and very little energy left, and still have a child who needs their attention? Who helps them think about what they will do when they are exhausted and their child is crying, when they are already late for work and their child is taking their own sweet time to get dressed, or when they have spent the entire day giving to everyone else and their child needs something from them one more time? Who asks them what they want their home to feel like, what values they want their children to encounter there, how they hope to introduce them to Islam, how they will nurture a love of the Qur'an, or what place the Sunnah will have in the everyday life of their family?

These are important questions, but there is another question that seems to me to be even more important, and it is one that we rarely think to ask before someone becomes a parent.

Who are you?

Not who do you hope to become as a parent, but who are you already?

What happens to you when you are under pressure? How do you respond when you are frustrated, tired or not getting your way? How much patience do you actually have? What happens when you feel that you are losing control? What is happening inside you when someone challenges you, disappoints you or simply does not do what you want them to do?

Because we all bring something with us into parenthood. We bring our personalities, our experiences and our habits, but we also bring the parts of ourselves that we may not have spent much time examining. We may carry impatience, pride, envy, insecurity, a need for control or a particular attachment to the dunya. We have our own struggles with the nafs, our own weaknesses and our own patterns of reacting to the world around us. None of us arrives at parenthood as a finished person.

And becoming a parent does not suddenly create a separate version of us.

There is not the person we are and then, alongside that person, the parent we become. There is only one person. The same person who becomes impatient in other parts of life brings that impatience into the parenting relationship. The same person who struggles with anger carries that struggle into the home. The same person who needs to be right, needs to be in control or finds it difficult to regulate their own emotions does not leave those things behind simply because they have become a parent.

We can learn what to say to our children. We can learn strategies and techniques. We can become very good at knowing what the books tell us we should do in a particular situation. But what is happening inside us will eventually find its way into the way we parent.

It comes through our reactions, our tone, our behaviour and the things we do without even realising that we are doing them. A child does not only experience the things we deliberately teach them. They experience how we behave when we are tired, how we speak when we are frustrated, how we treat people when we are under pressure, what happens to our patience when we are short of time, and what our priorities look like in ordinary moments when nobody is watching.

This is why I have become so interested in the space between what we say we value and what our children actually experience from us.

It is easy to tell a child to be patient while we are impatient with them. It is easy to speak about humility while our own need to be right is running the conversation. It is easy to tell a child to control their anger while our own anger is controlling us. The difficulty is that children live alongside the whole person, not just the part of us that we consciously decide to present to them.

This does not mean that we need to become perfect before we can become parents. I do not think such a person exists, and I certainly would not be suggesting that the answer to parenting is to spend our lives trying to become one.

It does mean, however, that there is something worth paying attention to.

If we want to think seriously about raising children within an Islamic tradition, then we cannot only ask what we should teach them. We have to ask what they are actually encountering in us. We have to become interested in our own character, our own habits, our own responses and the state of the nafs that we carry into our homes.

For me, this is where the conversation about parenting becomes much more interesting.

It is not just about producing well-behaved children, although behaviour matters. It is not only about finding the right strategy for the difficult moment, although sometimes we all need a strategy when everyone is tired and dinner is burning. It is about recognising that parenting is one of the places in which our own character becomes visible, often in ways we would rather it did not.

And perhaps that is why this conversation needs to begin before the baby arrives, or when the baby is still very small, or when the children are already teenagers and we find ourselves looking at our parenting with fresh questions. There is no particular age at which we suddenly become finished parents, because there is no particular age at which we become finished human beings.

Lady Rabi'a Academy begins from that understanding.

The child matters, of course. Their needs matter, their development matters, their relationship with Islam matters, and the way they experience their childhood matters. But the parent is not outside of that picture, standing separately from it and applying the right method to the child.

We are part of the environment in which our children are becoming who they are.

And so this suhbah is an invitation to turn some of that attention towards ourselves, not because we are failures as parents, but because we are human beings with the capacity to learn, to reflect, to recognise what needs attention and, in the process, to become a little more conscious of the parents we are becoming.

That is where I believe a different conversation about parenting can begin.