Narrated by Hazrat Anas bin Malik - may Allah be pleased with him: "Said the Holy Prophet of Allah (peace of Allah be on him and His blessings): Respect your children and cultivate in them the best of manners." (Ibn Maja)
By Hazrat Mirza Bashir Ahmad, may Allah be pleased with him.
Explanatory note: Islam has defined the rights of parents over children and vice versa. On the other hand, it emphasizes service and respectful behavior to parents, and on the other, commands parents to treat their children with due understanding and regard and to handle them in such a way as engenders in them feelings of dignity and self-respect and to attend to their education and training in particular. So that when they grow up, they may observe, with due propriety, their duties to God and to His servants and become pioneers of national progress.
The truth is that no nation can make any progress, nay, no nation can escape degeneration, if its members do not leave behind their children, in circumstances better than their own. If every father was to see it, that he will leave his children better off than himself, both in knowledge and in practice, the nation must gain from strength to strength and Will, by the grace of God remain immune to the danger of decline. But it is a pity that most of the parents disregard this golden principle with the result that many children, far from being better off than their parents, are brought up, in such a condition as gives the impression of a dead baby having been born to a live person. Such parents feed and dress their children well and to some extent also mind their secular education, as it provides them with means of economic well-being, but they generally disregard their moral discipline as if it were something unimportant. On the contrary, moral training or discipline in infinitely more important than secular education and certainly has a greater moral value and status. An educationally less qualified but morally better disciplined person endowed with qualities of industry, truthfulness, honesty, self-sacrifice and pleasing manners is far superior to the man carrying the donkey-load of knowledge but totally bereft of qualities of moral excellence. In the Holy Quran, the injunction "Slay not your children" hints at the truth, that if you ignore inculcation of good moral qualities among your children and neglect their educational equipment, you will be virtually committing their murder.
The other portion of this hadis, the one relating to respect to children, is of all the religious codes the distinctive feature of Islam; for, no other religion of the world has appreciated the point that without showing a proper measure of respect to children, high moral qualities could not be cultivated among them. Some foolish parents, in spite of loving their children, treat them evidently in such a low and vulgar manner, frequently indulging in abusive language, that their feelings of dignity, self-respect, and self-estimation slowly freeze to death. This injunction of our Master (may my soul be dedicated to his service) is worthy of being written in gold letters. It enjoins that "children should be treated with consideration" so as to equip them with dignity, self-respect and high moral qualities.
Would that they valued this wise teaching!