My father was cold and distant, and I feel myself becoming the same with my own kids. Am I just destined to repeat what I was given?

The fact that you notice this, and that it troubles you, is not a small thing. A man who was truly cold would feel nothing at all. What you are feeling is where a different kind of father begins, so take it as a reason for work rather than for despair.

You were given a certain manner in your home, and manners are learned things, habits absorbed from the air we breathe as children, not sentences written against us. What is learned can, by Allah’s mercy, be unlearned and something else put in its place. Your father passed on what he himself had received; he had probably never been shown enough warmth to know how to give it. That is not a chain of fate around your neck. It is a lamp that was never lit in his house, and it has now been handed to you to light.

There is a principle Allah has set down in His Book, spoken there of the condition of a whole people, that our outward state follows what we tend within us:

“Indeed, Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.”

Qur’an, Ar-Ra’d 13:11 · meaning

A warning is folded in beside that verse, about a people who let slip the good that was within them and so find their good state slipping away as well. The teaching is that the outward trails the inward, that our condition follows what we tend in the heart. And if Allah has arranged the affairs of whole nations on that principle, then the softening of one father’s heart is no small matter in His sight either. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said:

“The best of you are those best in character.”

The Prophet (peace be upon him), Jami’ at-Tirmidhi (1975) · meaning

Good character is not only for those born with it. It is acquired, learned like a language, gathered like water drop by drop. Our teachers, Imam al-Ghazali among them, said it plainly: if character could not be changed, then all counsel, all training, all patient discipline would be empty things, and the Prophet, peace be upon him, would not have been sent to perfect what people carry. It is because akhlaq can be built that we are invited to build it. Look at the lives around you and you will see it happen, a father raising in his own home a warmth he was never handed, and his children growing up in a safety he had to learn from the beginning. Love is a skill too, and it comes slowly, through a smile, a kind hand, an unhurried look. What we might be tempted to call a discovery, our faith has always called the mercy of the Turner of hearts, who does not leave a sincere seeker where he began.

One small step: Tonight, when you see your child, kneel to their level and say one warm sentence with a smile, “I’m so glad you’re here,” and let that single lamp begin to light the house.