Children · a Light

He greeted children first and kept doing it

Anas ibn Malik used to pass groups of boys and give them the greeting of peace, and he told people he did it because the Prophet ﷺ used to do it. That is the whole report. An adult of standing initiating the greeting to children ran against the convention, which sends the greeting upward from the lesser to the greater. He reversed the direction. Elsewhere he is described stopping for children in the street, carrying them, joking with a small boy about a pet bird that had died, and cutting his own prayer short because he heard an infant crying at the back of the mosque. The pattern is consistent enough that his companions treated greeting children as a practice to copy rather than a personal quirk.

Anas ibn Malik · Madinah

Source · Bukhari 6247, Muslim 2168