Raising Resilient Children
The Islamic Art of Sabr
One of the most critical skills parents can teach their children is how to handle life’s tests. Unfortunately, in our communities today, we often make the mistake of over-parenting, hindering their ability to develop toughness, resilience and face real-world challenges. This chapter focuses on resiliency, a key dimension of sabr, a fundamental Islamic quality that enables the next generation to endure and grow through life’s trials.
What is Resilience?
In English, resiliency is toughness, grit, or inner strength. The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and grow stronger through them and to emerge from trials better than before. In Islam, this is a core meaning of sabr, essential for navigating life’s inevitable tests.
Sheltering children is neither possible nor wise. Rather than shielding children from challenges, Muslim parents must raise a generation capable of handling anything life brings, as pandemics, loss, or unrest show that sheltering is not always possible. The question is: are we preparing our children to face both the good and the bad of life?
Why Resiliency Matters
Allah has made life a test. Allah declares in Surah Al-Baqarah:
“We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits but give good tidings to those who are resilient.”[1]
The verse uses emphatic Arabic (emphasize “lam”-beginning and “nun”-ending) to stress that every human, including our children, will face trials that are inevitable. Resilience is therefore not optional; it is essential. No parent can fully shield their child from these tests, making resiliency necessary. Without it, emotional weakness can break a child during trials, while sabr builds strength, trials become opportunities for growth.
Every Prophet was trained by Allah to be resilient. The story of Yusuf exemplifies resiliency training: abandoned in a well, sold into slavery, imprisoned unjustly, yet these trials shaped him into a great leader.[2] Trials reveal our potential, like levelling up in a video game, unlocking skills we didn’t know we had, the harder life gets the more need to level up.
Prophet Muhammad ﷺ faced rejection, persecution, the Year of Sorrow, and the stoning at Ta’if, but he never gave up on his mission. Their lives show us that tests are not punishments; they are training grounds that bring out the best in us.
Parenting Mistakes That Hinder Resiliency
Several common parenting mistakes prevent children from developing resiliency:
1. Overparenting:
Helicopter parenting prevents growth by preventing children from making mistakes or facing challenges. Examples include parents attending job interviews with their 25-year-old children or demanding higher grades from teachers simply to protect their child’s feelings. Overparenting harms children and society by fostering dependency.
At some point, you have to let a child experience life: to make mistakes, learn from them, experience failure and sadness, and ultimately grow through it. You cannot remain their shield forever. Overparenting is harmful to you, harmful to your child, and harmful to society.
It has even reached the point where some companies send out circulars warning interviewers that if an applicant’s mother shows up with them, the candidate should not be hired. That is how common and problematic this has become.
To give a personal example: while grading a second-year university exam, I once gave a student 60%. Shortly after, his mother emailed me, saying I had “hurt her child’s feelings” and demanded that I raise the grade to 80% so her son would not feel upset. The “child” in question was a 23-year-old man.
This is overparenting. At some point, you have to let go. Children need space to live, to make mistakes, to fail, to feel sadness, and to grow stronger through those experiences. Otherwise, they will never develop independence. Overparenting is bad for parents, bad for children, and bad for society.
2. Lack of Honesty About Life:
The other thing we do that harms our children’s resiliency is that we are not honest with them about life. Some parents, for example, don’t teach their children about death, they simply say, “Grandma’s gone overseas; we won’t see her anymore.” But you have to be honest about this.
We are born, we die, and we don’t know when our time will come. In between, we must live a life that is pleasing to Allah. Children need this explained to them as soon as they are able to understand, because if you were to pass away suddenly and your child doesn’t even know what death is, how do you think they will process that? There is no benefit in lying to children about death.
3. Neglecting Islamic Upbringing:
A third mistake that parents make is neglecting their child’s Islamic upbringing. We do not teach them that life is a test, or the true purpose of life. We do not instil sabr (patience) or shukr (gratitude). Instead, we raise our children for only two things: to get good grades and to secure a good job.
We fail to teach them to be sincere servants of Allah. We fail to prepare them to be good husbands and wives, or to raise the next generation with wisdom and faith. We fail to nurture them as responsible citizens of the ummah. As long as they have straight A’s and a promising career path, many parents are satisfied. Yet Islam calls us to be far more holistic in our approach. Parenting must encompass every aspect of life, not just worldly success.
Teaching Sabr: Four Dimensions
One of the most important things we can teach our children that will help them overcome the tests of life and grow with resiliency is the concept of sabr.
What is sabr?
Even as adults, people reduce it to simply “being patient,” sitting quietly, waiting for Allah to change things. But if you open the dictionary of the Qur’an and Sunnah, you’ll find sabr has far richer meanings. It has many layers. I want to focus on four dimensions of sabr that we can apply in our own lives and that we must teach our children:
Patience with the Uncontrollable:
This is accepting fate for things beyond our control, like death or chronic illness, and moving forward. At such moments, sabr means to accept what Allah has decreed, to say inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji‘un, and to move forward without resentment.
This is not passive waiting. It is an active trust in Allah’s wisdom. Teaching our children this dimension of sabr gives them the grounding to face life’s hardest realities with dignity and faith.
Persistence in Good Deeds:
The second dimension of sabr is persistence. No matter how tough life gets or even how easy, it should not cause us to give up on our good deeds. Maintaining ibadah and waking up for Fajr on time requires sabr. Persisting in salah, Qur’an recitation, or acts of charity regardless of wealth, comfort, or fatigue requires sabr.
In worldly terms too, persistence builds resilience. If our children have goals, they will face obstacles along the way. Raising them to persist in their pursuits, while holding onto their ibadah, is one of the greatest gifts we can give.
Self-Control:
The third dimension of sabr is self-control which is the ability to restrain oneself when temptation is directly in front of you, which means resisting haram temptations. As Yusuf did when refusing seduction.[3] When Yusuf was alone with a woman who tried to seduce him, he refused. That is sabr. It was perhaps the greatest demonstration of self-control in human history.
Parents must raise children with this strength. Parents must teach children to lower their gaze and manage urges, especially near puberty. Teach them to avoid harmful websites and content. To recognize and control their nafs as they approach puberty? These conversations are vital.
Psychologists illustrate the importance of self-control with the “marshmallow test.” Children who resisted immediate gratification, waiting for a second marshmallow instead of eating the first, were found to be more successful later in life.
The Marshmallow Test is a famous psychological experiment designed by Walter Mischel to measure a child’s ability to delay gratification, or self-control. In the classic version, children are offered one treat immediately or a larger, more desirable treat if they can wait for a researcher to return.
Later follow-up studies in the 1970s linked the ability to delay gratification in the test to better life outcomes, such as higher academic achievement and healthier lifestyles. And those children who ate it grew up to be people without self-control. Islam has taught us this lesson centuries earlier through sabr.
Resiliency:
The fourth dimension of sabr is resiliency means never giving up. Never giving up on pleasing Allah, as shown by the Prophet ﷺ during the Year of Sorrow, when he lost his beloved wife Khadijah and his protecting uncle Abu Talib yet persisted in his mission. He was rejected in Makkah, stoned in Ta’if, and yet he never abandoned his mission. That is sabr. That is resilience.
Life will not spare our children from trials. Have we prepared them for the toughness of life’s challenges? Have we equipped them with the tools to remain firm, to never give up on pleasing Allah, even when life feels unbearable? That is the resilience sabr builds. That resiliency prepares children for trials at any age. The Prophet ﷺ said that whatever happens to the believer is good for them: if ease comes, they show gratitude and it is good; if difficulty comes, they show sabr and it is good. Raising children with sabr is raising children with resilience, balance, and faith.
Practical Tips for Building Resiliency
To foster resiliency, parents can apply these strategies:
Be Honest About Life: Discuss mortality, trials, and qadar early, preparing children for inevitable challenges.
Educate on Sabr: Teach sabr’s four dimensions from a young age, using stories like Yusuf عليه السلام and the Prophet’s ﷺ life, the seerah.
Embrace Failure:
Allow children to fail and learn. Failure builds wisdom and growth. This is one of the biggest mistakes parents make: we don’t want a child to fail because we don’t want their feelings to get hurt. In fact, one of the greatest parenting mistakes of the past twenty years has been the habit of giving out participation trophies even for coming last. By doing this, we teach children that they will never truly experience failure, that no matter how poorly they perform, they will still be rewarded.
But that’s not how life works. Once school ends, the real world doesn’t hand out participation trophies for effort. Your employer isn’t going to give you a medal for being the worst employee, they will simply fire you. By shielding children from failure, we are not preparing them for the realities of adulthood.
Children need space to fail. More importantly, they need to be taught how to work through failure. We must change our attitude toward it. Failure is not the end of the world; failure is how you grow. It is how you learn, how you gain wisdom, and how you develop experience.
When a child makes a mistake and learns from it, they grow through that experience. But if we never allow them to make mistakes, we rob them of the chance to grow. Instead of losing our temper every time they slip up, we should have an honest conversation.
Teach them to embrace failure as a step toward success. In every field, success comes after many failures. Each time you fail and learn from your mistakes, you move one step closer to achieving your goals. As children grow, especially post-puberty, assign responsibilities (e.g., household tasks) and allow space for mistakes, fostering independence. Treat teenagers as young adults at puberty, shifting to a mentor role. That is the mindset we must instil.
We end this chapter with a beautiful hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ taught his young cousin Ibn Abbas about life, faith, and resiliency:
“O young man, I shall teach you some words of advice: Be mindful of Allah and Allah will protect you. Be mindful of Allah and you will find Him in front of you. If you ask, then ask Allah; and if you seek help, then seek help from Allah. And know that if the nation were to gather together to benefit you with anything, they would not benefit you except with what Allah had already prescribed for you. And if they were to gather together to harm you with anything, they would not harm you except with what Allah had already prescribed against you. The pens have been lifted and the pages have dried.”[4]
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[1] Qur’an 2:155
[2] Qur’an 12:4–56
[3] Qur’an 12:23–24
[4] Tirmidhi 2516, Grade: Hasan
