The greatest obligation on a child is to be pious, dutiful and respectful to their parents. Allah has commanded this on all of us.

Allah has told us that we worship only Him but after that he said that we should treat our parents in the most excellent way. We would not have existed without Allah as humans. Allah chose our parents as the path of that coming into existence.

If a person is not respectful to their parents how can they be respectful to Allah? If children are dismissive of their parents, how can they not be dismissive of Allah? Allah told us to be grateful to Him and to be grateful to our parents.

Being undutiful to our parents is one of the greatest sins in Islam. Being good to our parents is foundationally important in our religion.

Some parents use the Quran verses or hadiths as a trump card. They shut down any kind of conversation with their children. We want our kids to go to Jannah so we have an obligation to help our children be good to us.

How do we help our children be respectful to us and honour us? First of all we should model a good relationship with our own parents. Children copy us so if we are good and respectful to our parents, they will copy that behaviour towards us.

We should also set reasonable expectations for our children. Sometimes we set these expectations too high because we want our children to be successful. If they fail to meet these expectations, we get upset with them. When we set the expectations too high we are training our kids to not please us. They will think nothing is good enough for the parents. We have to accept their good and forgive their errors.