<![CDATA[Purpose – Muslim minority families in Karo Regency, North Sumatra, Indonesia, raise children with limited and uneven access to external Islamic religious education institutions. This condition positions parents as the primary religious educators for children aged three to six years. Prior research on family-based Islamic education has largely examined Muslim-majority settings, where external institutions supplement parental instruction. This study instead examines how twelve Muslim minority parents construct early childhood religious education strategies under this condition of limited institutional access.Design/methods/approach – The study applied a transcendental phenomenology design following Moustakas (1994). Twelve parents were selected through purposive sampling, meaning deliberate selection based on set criteria. Data were collected from June through November 2024 through non-participant observation, two in-depth interview sessions per participant, and documentation review. The examination of the data followed four stages, namely epoché, the bracketing of the researcher’s prior assumptions, horizonalization, the equal weighting of every participant statement, thematic clustering, and synthesis of the essential structure of experience.Findings – Three themes emerged from the data. Parental exemplification functioned as the primary behavioral reference for Islamic conduct across all twelve families and took three forms, namely ritual worship modeling, daily moral conduct modeling, and cognitive-dialogical modeling. Contextual dialogue occurred through three types, namely reactive dialogue in eight families, anticipatory dialogue in seven families, and cultural dialogue in six families. Socio-religious integration appeared in ten of the twelve families, producing children who held Islamic identity and social competence as a single unified character.Research implications/limitations – The findings draw on twelve families from a single regency, which limits generalization to other Muslim minority regions in Indonesia. The data rest solely on parental accounts and do not include the perspectives of children, early childhood teachers, or local religious leaders. The six-month data collection period did not capture how parenting strategies evolve as children grow older.Practical implications – Muslim minority parents require parenting guidance tailored to their specific social environment. Curriculum developers should design instructional materials suited to religiously plural settings. Policymakers should consider expanding access to Islamic early childhood institutions in regions with small Muslim populations. Originality/value – This study introduces a three-type typology of contextual dialogue, comprising reactive, anticipatory, and cultural dialogue, as an analytical construct for early childhood Islamic education research. The typology offers a reading framework that may be tested in Muslim minority families with comparable ecological characteristics.Paper type Research paper ]]>
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