Answer
Wa `alaykum As-Salamu wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuh
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
To help your children read the be attached to the Quran, take note of the following:
1- Keep the children away from distractions.
2- Let the children feel the value of reading and loving the Quran.
3- Provide the children with fun, play and recreation.
Elaborating on the methods of encouraging children to recite the Quran at home and take that as habit, the late Muslim scholar, Sheikh Muhammad Al-Hanooti, Member of the North American Fiqh Council, states:
Parents should encourage their children to read and love reciting the Quran. This should be done in the best way and kind manners.
Firstly, we should know the distractions surrounding the child. One of the major distractions is TV and music. Both are becoming a style of life and they are a big window to further collapsing and disastrous activities that many children get involved in.
TV, for instance, lessens the interest of a child to read or focus. Many children have a problem with concentration because of the daydreams they borrow from movies and music.
Secondly, parents cannot make his/her child interested in doing anything unless he/she makes him weigh and feel the value of what is to be done. Partially, father or mother can use rational dialogue with their child for that purpose, but what is more important in communication is who he likes and respects and takes as a model more. If he sees that memorizing Quran is substantially doing a good image in the father and he likes his father, then that will be very helpful for a child to be interested in reading Quran.
Thirdly, it’s very important to provide the child with fun, play and recreation. After that, a child will be absolutely ready to accept any guidance or advice from the one who entertains him.
Almighty Allah knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.