I'm Learning Just Like They Are

What it takes to build a real relationship with your child.

The myth we need to let go of

There is a parenting myth that needs to retire and it goes something like this: your child needs to see you as someone who has it all together. Someone who is always calm, always right, always certain. Someone whose authority is never questioned because it is never cracked.

Many of us absorbed this without realizing it. It was in the way we were raised, in the culture we grew up in, in the unspoken understanding that parents are above the fray and children look up to them from below. To admit a mistake was to lose ground. To apologize was to hand over power you could never quite get back.

I believed a version of this for longer than I would like to admit. And then one day I lost my temper over something small, said something I immediately regretted, and watched my child’s face change in a way that stayed with me for days.

So I did something that felt genuinely terrifying at the time. I went back.

The apology that changed everything

I sat down with my child and I said something that felt counter-intuitive to say out loud. I told them I was wrong. Not “I’m sorry you felt upset.” Not “I was stressed and you need to understand that.” I said I was wrong, what I did was not okay, and I am going to try to do better.

And then I waited.

They looked at me for a moment. And then they forgave me. Completely, immediately and without conditions. And something shifted between us that I have never been able to fully put into words. But I felt it. And I have felt it every time since.

What I did not expect, and what has moved me more than almost anything in my parenting journey, is how consistently forgiving my children are. Not just in that first moment but across years of repair. They do not hold it over me. They do not keep score. They receive the apology and they move forward and they seem, if anything, to love me more for the humility of it.

I have thought about this a great deal. Why are they like that? Where did that generosity come from?

I think it came from watching repair happen in our home over and over again. They learned that when you hurt someone you love you go back. You say the specific thing. You make the promise. And then you try to keep it. Not perfectly. But genuinely. And over time, watching that happen consistently, it became part of who they are.

What your children are learning when you say sorry

Here is what your child absorbs when you apologize to them genuinely and specifically.

They learn that love does not require perfection. That the relationship between you is strong enough to survive you getting it wrong. That mistakes in your family do not end in shame, they end in repair. They learn that when you hurt someone you care about, you say so. And they learn all of this not from a lecture but from watching you live it.

Children do not learn values from what we tell them. They learn from what they see us do in the moments when it costs us something. An apology costs something. It costs ego. It costs the comfortable authority of the parent who is always right. And the child who watches their parent pay that cost, again and again across the years of their growing up, is learning something that will shape every relationship they will ever have.

The Prophet ﷺ said: “Every son of Adam makes mistakes, and the best of those who make mistakes are those who repent.”
[Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Hadith 2499]

This is not only about our relationship with Allah ﷻ. It is a model for how we move through every relationship we have, including the ones we have with our children.

The Prophet ﷺ himself modeled this. He accepted correction. He consulted others. He acknowledged the difference between his personal opinion and divine guidance. He did not perform infallibility. And the people around him loved him with a depth and loyalty that history has never forgotten. Not in spite of his humility. Because of it.

The question behind the question

There is something else that has made a profound difference in my relationships with my children, and it is this. I ask their opinions about things that actually matter.

Not what they want for dinner. Real things. Decisions I am working through. Situations I am not sure how to handle. Things going on in the world that I genuinely want to know what they think about. And I listen. Not waiting for my turn to speak. Actually listening, and sometimes changing my mind because of what they said.

The first time a child realizes that their parent changed their mind because of something they said, something opens inside them. A door. And once that door is open they will keep walking through it because they know there is someone on the other side who is actually there and actually interested.

What you are communicating when you ask your child’s opinion on something real is not just that you value their thoughts, though you do. You are saying something deeper than that. You are saying I see you as a person whose mind is worth something to me.

In Muslim households where hierarchy runs deep and children are often spoken to but rarely consulted, this can feel countercultural. But the Prophet ﷺ consulted everyone around him, including the young. He asked. He listened. He took counsel seriously regardless of where it came from. That is not weakness. That is the highest form of wisdom.

Finding what makes them laugh

And then there is laughter. I made a decision at some point to find something that makes each of my children laugh every single day. Not a group moment. Something specific to each of them. Because you cannot make someone laugh unless you truly know them. And knowing them is the whole job.

The Prophet ﷺ was playful. He raced with Aisha رضي الله عنها and she won, and he remembered it with joy. He stopped to ask a grieving child about his pet bird by name. That quality of noticing and delighting in the specific person in front of you is sunnah. And it costs nothing.

The parent who is still becoming

Here is the truth that sits underneath everything I have said.

I am still learning. I get it wrong regularly. I over-react and assume the worst and lose my patience at the worst possible moments. I am not the parent I want to be every day. Some days I am quite far from it.

But I go back. I make the apology. I make the promise. I try again. And my children, who are some of the most forgiving and understanding people I have ever known, meet me there every time.

I do not think that is a coincidence. I think it is a direct inheritance from the culture we tried to build in our home, imperfectly and inconsistently and over many years of trying. A culture where mistakes are survivable, repair is expected and being wrong is not the end of anything.

You do not need to be a perfect parent. You need to be a present one, an honest one and a willing one. Willing to go back. Willing to apologize sincerely. Willing to show your children, in the most concrete way possible, that they matter more to you than your ego does.

That is the whole thing. Not the perfect moment before the rupture. The going back after it.

I am still learning. Just like they are. And I think that might be the whole point.