Would you please advise me as to how to deal with my children when they make mistakes?

Question: I have four children. I am retired and I cannot tolerate seeing their mistakes. Would you please advise me as to how to deal with them when they make mistakes?

The answer: The mistakes may be intentional or may not be, as when they are committed because of the lack of full experience or immaturity. A successful father has to distinguish between these two kinds of mistakes and react accordingly. In any case, the father should strengthen his children’s personalities by injecting knowledge and intellect in them on every occasion and should make his children understand the consequences of committing mistakes and the suffering of regret. The father should instruct his children in a lenient way full of love and kindness and away from coercion and compulsion. The father has to make friends with his children to gain their love, and then his advices will have a good influence on them.

If you want this, you have to be lenient in dealing with your children. You must give the mistaken one an opportunity to reflect and review his situation and must not attack him severely and in deliberately, for then you will cause him to respond in the same way, turn his back on you, and hate you forever. You should keep in mind that the mentality of the youth is like glass, which if broken, one will have to face many difficulties to mend. Therefore, it is very necessary for you to follow wise manners in advising and criticizing your children. When you want to make them understand that they have committed a mistake, you should talk with them leniently about the harms of mistakes and sins and teach them ways of giving up or avoiding mistakes and sins and the advantages of that. With such a quiet method of blaming, you will make them understand their responsibilities, and they will then give up erring.

If you follow these important points for a short period, you shall not find yourself in need of being angry at your children when they commit mistakes, especially when you remember that Allah becomes angry at you if you commit a sin intentionally, and He forgives you if you repent sincerely. Let your morals towards your children be like the morals of Allah towards sinners in both cases!

FOR A BETTER FUTURE