The nine-year-old girl turned into a young mother, and another girl, who is under eleven years of age, became a clever housewife!
The two children, by means of fate, went through a unique experience. The first had to care for her sister, aged one year and a few months, due to the absence of her mother. After the working mother had tried to take her young girl to the workplace, she found herself faced with two options: either to do her work, or to care for her young child. She also found that temperature changes were harmful to the girl who was to leave the thick duvets for the severe coldness of winter, or tolerate the scorching heat of summer. The mother's workmates suggested that she leave the young girl with her elder sister. She tried it, and it worked. The elder sister gained reasonable experience in caring for the baby as well as changing her clothes and playing with her sister.
As for the other girl, her mother had to travel for family reasons. Therefore, she left her with her younger brothers and sisters giving her the broad tasks of managing the household affairs during her absence. She would communicate with her regularly to make sure that everything was in order. The young child took her mother's place willingly and in a manner that would impress anyone who knew how old she was.
On the other hand, there are mothers who ask their girls to do something once. If the girls carry out her orders, then it is fine. However, if they refrain and defer, the mother finds it easier to do it herself, thus saving herself the trouble of repetition and deferring. Hence, the girls realize this weak point in their mother, the girls take advantage of it; later on in life, the mother becomes exasperated with the carelessness of her daughters and their incompetence to shoulder responsibility. The mother does not realize that her indecisive attitude and lack of insistence on her daughter doing what she is asked to do, and her not encouraging a positive attitude toward her chores are the causes of the girls’ current suffering. A girl like this grows up, gets married and becomes responsible for an entire household. She stumbles, fails, rebels and the disagreements with her husband are aggravated. She gets divorced and the mother is filled with regret when she realizes the reason, but by then it is too late.
We have two situations: children who are overburdened, and others who lead a luxurious life and grumble for having to raise their feet off the floor so that the mother can clean.
These two extreme situations are both far from the moderation of Islam. We are not required to deny our children the rights of their childhood and the requirements of their age, and burden them with responsibilities that we ourselves sometimes find overburdening. Also, it is illogical to pamper them to the extent of looseness, and find it easier that we do what we asked them to do just because they are too slack to do it.
We need to understand how to raise our children to shoulder responsibilities, to understand the characteristics of each age group and the extent of responsibilities that the children can bear. We need to be more daring in delegating some of our chores to our little ones, while we monitor their work from afar, overlook their casual mistakes, encourage their small achievements and not make them feel any inability or negligence.
We need to be more patient with our children's slackening response when we ask them to do something and find ourselves compelled to repeat our request more than once. We have to ask them in different ways and with different expressions on our faces, like an encouraging smile, a blaming glance, or a frown.
We also need to suppress our anger when our children provoke us by not taking our requests seriously and not implementing them immediately.
We should overlook their annoying conduct that indicates their inability to shoulder responsibility and to magnify any conduct, no matter how simple, that reflects a spirit of initiative and achievement.
Those who fail in their marriage because of their inability to assume responsibility are the victims of an “irresponsible” upbringing, while those who overburden themselves because of the negligence of those around them are also victims. Is it logical to expect a good Islamic society to emerge while we are part of a state that is witness to the fact that many of its people are victims?