Answer
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
Parents should have patience and calmness. They must raise the child in the best way. Making duaa against the child does not benefit the child. Perhaps, what is stated against the child may be recorded and the parent will not benefit at all from it.
In his response to the question, the well-known Saudi scholar Sheikh Abdullah Ibn Jibreen states:
Taking care of children in Islam
Islam has ordered parents to take care of their children and to bring them up according to Islamic manners.
Allah Almighty has entrusted parents with their children. Parents bear the responsibility to raise their children in the Islamic way. If they do that, they will be blessed in this life and in the Hereafter, and if they don’t, they will get a bad result during their life and in the Hereafter.
The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) is reported to have said: “All of you are guardians and all of you are responsible for things under your guardianship. The ruler is a guardian (managing his state’s affairs) and he is responsible for things under his care; the man is a guardian over his family and responsible for them; the woman is a guardian of her husband’s house and she is responsible for it. All of you are guardians and responsible for things under your control groups.” (Al-Bukhari and Muslim)
Parents should be patient when children make mistakes
I advise parents to be forgiving and control themselves when their children, while young, have shortcomings. They should be patient with respect to the words and harm they may receive from their children.
Children are not completely mature, so it is always the case that they make mistakes in their speech and actions. The father can be compassionate and forgiving and can teach his child with compassion and gentleness and advise him so that the child accepts that from him and is changed by it.
Making duaa against children
However, some parents fall into a greater mistake and supplicate against their children by asking for death, illness, misery and so forth to come to them. They continue making such supplications and make them often.
However, after their anger is over, they realize their mistake and recognize that they don’t want their supplications to be answered, nor do they want any of that to happen to their children, due to their compassion and mercy for them. What led them to make such duaa was their extreme anger. Allah forgives such duaa, as Allah has stated,
{If Allah were to hasten on for men the ill (that they have earned ) as they would hasten on the good, their respite would already have expired…} (Yunus 10:11)
Parents should have patience and calmness. They must raise the child in the best way. Making duaa against the child does not benefit the child. Perhaps, what is stated against the child may be recorded and the parent will not benefit at all from it.
Almighty Allah knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.