The child should be allowed to hold certain small amounts of...

The child should be allowed to hold certain small amounts of money for regular sadakaat under the supervision of the parents. Certain cases of sadakaat can be arranged through the hands of the child physically. A child belongs to where his child- hood memories linger. Giving sadakaat becomes a part of his memories linking his parents after they are deceased. Portions However Small.

When making donations to charitable or religious institutions, some portions, how- ever small, of the donations are paid in the name of the child and the receipts in his name are handed over to him. He may want to show them off to his friends or the children in the neighbourhood in the beginning when this tradition is first put into practice.

A conducive environment cannot be created for the child to learn to be charitable if it is a tradition of the family to be charitable to others generally but absolutely not to their house-servants, whose welfare is the religious responsibility of the employer. A portrayal of such an inexplicable contradiction to the child undermines the effect of the whole exercise. A worse example for the child is to see one parent reproving the other for giving alms or meeting the needs of others in charity.

Even still worse as an example is for a parent to stereotype (generalise) alms seekers as pretenders or fake or raise doubts about their eligibility for alms. A person who stretches out his hands for charity or financial aid is already a victim of a humiliating loss of self-respect, The holy Prophet wants us not to suffer him a further humiliation by spurning those hands.

The child will surely ponder positively if the parents are charitable enough to him to explain the strings of humiliation suffered by the needy -to cultivate sympathy for them, Allah's Wrath.