Ten years, and not one why did you do that

Sit with the last one for a moment, because people read past it.

Ten years is not an anecdote about a good mood. It is a boy in daily household service across a decade, in a busy house, in difficult years, doing what boys do, which includes forgetting things and breaking things and not doing what he was asked.

That is not our embellishment of it. The fuller narration is below and Anas says it himself: every work that I did was not according to the desire of my master. And still he was never told fie, and was never asked why did you do this, or why did you not do this.

Not never a correction, and not never a standard. Never that particular move, the one that starts with why did you, which every parent recognises because it is the first three words of most of what we say when we are annoyed.

If a standard exists in the Sunnah for how a person in authority speaks to a child in their house, that is where it sits. Nobody meets it. That is not the point of a standard.