Guiding Your Young Children

Assalamualaikum! Lately we have been busy interviewing applicants and their parents for admission into our school. Our school is an integrated Religious Tahfiz school complete with academic subjects and co-curriculum. It is a full boarding school (www.mtaqsa.com)
We are happy to note that many young parents now are concerned about their childrens' future. Hence they come to seek our advice even when their children are still very young. So we give them some counselling on how to prepare their young children to be chanelled into a school like ours. We consider this as part of our dakwah so that each family will at least have one Al hafiz (person who memorises and recites the Al Quran)
For your information our school accepts students who have passed their UPSR with 4 and 5 As. For those with lesser As, they have to show their other strength example, exellent PSRA results or very proficient in Al Quran reading etc.
So far we have accepted a number of exellent students for the new intake. However there are some parents who are keen to send their children to our school, but we could not accept them due to 3 reasons. Firstly, there are cases where children scored 4 or 5 As and able to read Al Quran, but upon interviewing, they showed no interest in the Al Quran. Secondly the chilren have good academic results but not much exposure with the Al Quran, as such they could not read Al Quran well.Thirdly, the children are very poor in acdemic and we consider them not able to carry the heavy load of this kind of integrated education.
So if you are a young parent and you do want your children to be educated religiously, well versed with the knowledge of the Al Quran, you must expose them young to Al Quran the religious education. You must keep telling them what you would like them to be when they grow up and why its good to be as such. The love for Al Quran and the religious practices like doing the solat must be well ingrained at an early age. You must also encourage them at a young age to pick up an ambition to be a somebody or something but you must not force them. Let them say what they want to be and allow them to change their ambition as they grow. When you see their interest and talent in certain area, you support them by giving encouragement with good words and related books and toys!
We have 9 children and all of them have achieved their ambition or along the right path walking towards their ambition. None of them has the ambitions forced upon them! As a young parent, we did give the our children some minimum religious education. However we did not realize the importance of religious education until we were given the 'Hidayah ' that our children had to be educated in the religious subjects and Al Quran in depth.
Alhamdulillah we managed to steer the course of their education starting with the 5th child Lia who is doing Medicine in Jordan,6th child Yanna who is doing religious studies and Arabic in Cairo, 7th child Aly InshaAllah will be joining Yana in Cairo to do Al Quran studies, 8th child has talent in music playing the saxaphone and has great love for animals (so you can guess what he will be), 9th child youngest daughter Husna has achieved 5As in UPSR and a Mumtaz (exellent) in PSRA recently and of course she'll be joining our school! I am just writing this to share with you my experience and to show the importance of guiding the children at a young age. May Allah grant you the wisdom of guiding your children along the right straight path! Ameen!