A New Parenting Course, Live This August
Four Thursday evenings on Zoom, beginning August 13
One of my shabāb (the young men I sit with) asked me whether I would teach a course on parenting—something like Rijāl, our men’s formation group, but turned toward raising children. We went back and forth for a while about what such a thing would even be about, and somewhere inside that back-and-forth I decided I would give it a try.
What we kept circling back to was this. So much of our exhaustion as parents comes from treating the child like a machine to be engineered—the right inputs, the right sequence, a guaranteed result at the end—and then wondering why the child in front of us keeps refusing to behave like a project.
But a child was never a project. A child is an amānah (a trust), a provision placed in your hands. A garden is tended; it is not engineered. You water, you shade, you pull the weeds, you wait through the seasons. The harvest was never yours to guarantee — it belongs to the One who gave you the seed. You are asked for the tending. Never the harvest.
I first tried to put words to all of this in an earlier piece, Parenting: Gardening, not Engineering. What I could not do on the page was sit with you in it—and that is what this course is. For four unhurried Thursday evenings, beginning August 13, I would like to sit with you in that reorientation—from controlling toward tending, from anxiety toward tawakkul (reliance upon Allah). We will move gently through what a child is, the seasons of childhood, the daily work of tending, and the village and the long road.
The details
Four Thursdays · 8–10pm ET · from August 13, 2026
Live on Zoom, in a group kept small on purpose
$125 for the four weeks — one fee covers a couple attending together
If cost is ever a barrier, there is a pay-what-you-can place; no one is turned away, InshaAllah.
Register at suhbaconsulting.com/gardening.
It began as one young man’s question. I am glad he asked.
Ultimately, with Allah is all success.