<![CDATA[Purpose – This article reconstructs riyāḍah from an individual spiritual discipline into a relational ethics of Muslim parenting. It examines how devotional practice may form the parent before becoming pedagogically meaningful in the child’s everyday world, without presuming that parental piety directly determines moral or religious outcomes.Design/methods/approach – The study uses constructive conceptual analysis of six primary works by Al-Ghazālī in dialogue with ethical subject formation, relational spirituality, care ethics, child agency, and developmental research on parental regulation and parent-child co-regulation. The purposively assembled corpus was analysed through semantic clarification, limited conceptual genealogy, immanent critique, theoretical dialogue, constructive synthesis, and boundary testing.Findings – Parenting as riyāḍah is defined as the sustained ethical-spiritual formation through which parents examine intention, regulate affective and possessive impulses, cultivate moral dispositions, and embody them within accountable relations of care. The framework identifies moral-spiritual resonance as an indirect and reciprocal pedagogical process through which children encounter values in embodied example, emotional attunement, relational repetition, dialogue, and co-regulation. Children remain active interpreters, while developmental outcomes remain open and contextually mediated.Research implications/limitations – The framework is conceptual and normative; it does not demonstrate causal effects of devotional practice on parenting or child development. Its propositions require examination through phenomenological, ethnographic, dyadic, observational, comparative, and longitudinal studies across diverse Muslim family settings.Practical implications – Muslim parenting education and early childhood institutions should assess religious formation not only through ritual instruction or behavioural compliance, but also through parental self-regulation, developmentally informed care, relational repair, non-violent discipline, equitable caregiving, and appropriate professional support. Originality/value – The article shifts the analytical centre of religious parenting from the production of the child to the ethical formation of parental authority. It brings Ghazālian self-formation into critical dialogue with global scholarship on care, spirituality, development, gender justice, and child agency, while establishing relational and ethical conditions that prevent riyāḍah from legitimising control, humiliation, or parental self-erasure.Paper type Conceptual paper ]]>
