Parenting Through Storytelling pdf download

Parenting Through Storytelling

PARENTING THROUGH STORYTELLING

Book’s Foreword

This book, which we have been thinking about for many years, has by Allah’s grace finally become a reality.

The need for this book became apparent to us over the past several years.

In our first book, Meeting the Challenge of Parenting in the West: An Islamic Perspective, we advised parents to use storytelling as a method for tarbiyah, as Allah models this for us in the Qur’ an and the Prophet saaw models it for us in the Seerah.

We discussed the effectiveness of this technique, having used it ourselves and seen how well it works.

Throughout the following years, while we were traveling to different communities to deliver our parenting workshops, we often received questions from concerned parents about different problem behaviors that their young children were doing again and again.

They wanted to know how to deal with the behavior. Oftentimes, our answer was “use stories as one of the methods to deal with the problem.” Many parents replied that they could not tell their children stories about their misbehaviour because they couldn’t invent stories.

And so, for years we have been hoping to write a collection of stories for common misbehaviors. Earlier this year, we proposed the idea to our daughter Hoda and urged her to take on the project.

 We held several discussions and collaborated with her on the ideas in this book, letting her take the literary lead.

We are very happy with the final product and enjoyed listening to story after story as Hoda told them to us.

The stories in this book are an invaluable tool for any parent to use to correct specific behaviors and instill important Islamic concepts and beliefs in their children.

 They are also interesting and amusing, easily keeping the listener’s attention.

Another great benefit to be taken from the stories in this book is the modeled behavior for parents.

Many of the parenting concepts and techniques that are presented to parents sometimes remain abstract or theoretical.

Through these stories, we have the rare ability to demonstrate the parenting strategies in detail.

The stories provide you with the unique experience of “watching” as other parents model the recommended parenting behaviors.

The modeling is expanded on in the section after each story, where the modeled behavior is pointed out explicitly so parents can look to it and apply it with their own children.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our daughter Hoda for stepping up to the plate and taking on this important project to fill a huge gap in our Islamic library.

We also want to congratulate her for doing such a wonderful job. For sure, it will be a great joy for us to use these stories with our own grandchildren.

We are hopeful that insha’ a Allah, this book will be of great benefit to you and that you and your children will enjoy the stories as much as we did and learn from them in as many ways as possible.

May Allah swt bless your efforts and ease your struggles. Wasalaamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakaatuh. – Dr. Ekram Beshir & Dr. Mohamed Rida Beshir