Parenting in Islam: How the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم Treated Children

Parenting in Islam takes its model from the Prophet ﷺ, who treated children with warmth, play and real attention to the things they loved. He gave a small boy named Abu Umair an honorific nickname and asked him about his pet bird every time they met (Sahih al-Bukhari 6129 and 6203). Here is that hadith, what scholars drew from it, and how to bring it home tonight.

In short

It is dinner, and your youngest is explaining something at great length. A game, a friend, a creature with a complicated name.

You say "mm-hmm" twice while you finish reading a message. They notice. Children always notice.

Now picture a house in Madinah, and a small boy with a pet bird. The most important man in the city walks in, and he asks about the bird.

Abu Umair was a small child in Madinah, the younger brother of Anas ibn Malik through their mother, Umm Sulaym. Anas describes him as newly weaned, so he was very young.

He had a pet: a nughair, a small bird. Translators render it as a sparrow or a nightingale. What matters in the story is that the boy loved it and played with it.

Every time the boy was brought to him, the Prophet ﷺ asked him about his bird. Anas reports:

A longer version adds that it happened "whenever" the boy was brought to him, and that the boy used to play with the bird (Sahih al-Bukhari 6203, sahih). That version's translation spells the name "Abu `Umar"; the boy is usually known as Abu Umair.

In Arabic the line rhymes: ya Aba Umair, ma fa'al an-nughair? It was a small joke built for one child, and he repeated it every visit.

A kunya is a name of honour in the form "father of" or "mother of", the way grown men and women were respectfully addressed. Calling a toddler "Abu Umair" treated him as someone worth honouring.

Imam al-Bukhari placed this hadith under a chapter titled "A child may be given Al-Kunyah and one may be given Al-Kunyah before children." So al-Bukhari read it as more than a sweet moment. He took a ruling from it: a child may be honoured with a dignified name.

Al-Bukhari also placed the shorter report under a second chapter, "To be cheerful with the people." Playfulness with a small child counted, for him, as part of good character.

The jurist Ibn al-Qass, a Shafi'i scholar of the tenth century, wrote a whole book on this hadith, Fawa'id Hadith Abi 'Umair, and drew more than sixty lessons from it, according to the Federal Territory Mufti's office in Malaysia.

Sixty lessons from four lines tells you how seriously the scholars took the way the Prophet ﷺ spoke to a toddler. According to the same summary, they cover rulings, manners and wisdom.

The one that reaches a parent first is the simplest of all: the Prophet ﷺ asked about the thing the child cared about. He did not quiz the boy on his manners or test what he had memorised. He asked about the bird, every time.

Children measure our love by our attention, and they measure our attention by what we remember. The name of the dinosaur, the friend who was unkind at lunch, the drawing from Tuesday.

When you ask about those things by name, and ask again tomorrow, a child hears that they matter to you. A speech about how much you love them cannot say it as clearly.

This was the Prophet's ﷺ way with children all through his life. Anas, who served him from childhood, said: "I served the Prophet (ﷺ) for ten years, and he never said to me, 'Uf' (a minor harsh word denoting impatience) and never blamed me by saying, 'Why did you do so or why didn't you do so?'" (Sahih al-Bukhari 6038, sahih).

For more on correcting children gently, see Before We Correct: The Sunnah of Mercy in Parenting. For the harder moments, when an old tone comes out of your own mouth, see Raising Kids in Islam: When Your Father's Voice Comes Out of Your Mouth.

No children at home? The same habit works with a niece, a nephew or a neighbour's child: the one with the football, or the new bike.

The man everyone in Madinah wanted to speak to made time, every visit, for a small boy's bird. That is a standard any parent can meet tonight, one question at a time.

The Prophet ﷺ treated children with warmth, playfulness and attention. He joked with little Abu Umair, gave him a name of honour, asked about his pet bird, and never spoke harshly to Anas, who served him from childhood for ten years (Sahih al-Bukhari 6038, 6129, 6203).

Yes. The Prophet ﷺ called a toddler "Abu Umair", and Imam al-Bukhari titled the chapter "A child may be given Al-Kunyah" (Sahih al-Bukhari 6203).

Yes. His greeting to Abu Umair, "What did the little bird do?", rhymes in Arabic and was a gentle joke he repeated on every visit. Al-Bukhari placed it under the chapter "To be cheerful with the people" (Sahih al-Bukhari 6129).

A nughair is a small bird, the pet that Abu Umair played with. Translators render it as a sparrow or a nightingale. The word is a diminutive, so "little bird" is a fair translation.