The Muslim prayer, also called Salat or Namaz, is obligatory in Islam. Muslims pray five times in a day, which has been made irremissible and unpardonable.
Pillar of Islam:
Salat is one of the main "five pillars" of Islam. While Muslims are to be awarded for offering prayers, missing prayer would lead to incur God's wrath upon them, and the punishment is emplacement in Hell. In my childhood, I was always stories about severe punishments for abandoning or neglecting the 'prayer'. :Like, someone who misses the Asr (Third Prayer of the day) is as if he has been robbed of his family and his wealth. There are several stories associated with leaving prayers and are meant to inflict pain onto the mind.
Prayer for Children
Children in the Islamic Communities are told and taught to offer prayer, and this act is encouraged by narrating stories of hell-fire in case they'd miss prayer and other shuddery bullshit: Allah, the sadist God, pours fire with embers upon the ones who leave prayer; children are no exception.
Indoctrination:
From the time children are very young, Islam like all other religions is instilled in the young, tender minds of children. It is the result of this indoctrination that children are not able to scrutinize and think objectively when they grow up; rather, they become extremists who seek to defend their religion and faith by cursing. swearing and threat-calling the ones who expose religion rationally.
The worst case scenario is they join Terrorist organizations that train them to annihilate people who oppose their ideas - the iconoclasts, atheists, agnostics and the like have no place in the world in their unsightly view of the world. Their perspectives have no shred of humanity for people holding opposing views.
Islam urges parents to teach the young children its Prayer (The Salat) when the child is seven of age. At age ten, the Islamic Law constitutes physically forcing, even beating the child to offer prayer.
In other words, parents may legally resort to hit their children in aspects related to prayer.
Islam, as reported by Muslims themselves, offers freedom of volition, discretion and freewill. In the case of Prayer, all that becomes invalid and nullifies the freedom of actions, and free discretion becomes violable, causing to incur Allah's rage which would inflict punishment on the Muslims for having disobeyed his commandments.
I have a problem with the whole case of prayer. Salat demands subjugation of freewill and prostration to the supposedly Almighty God, and it represents subservience of a person to Allah. Where the heck is freewill in that? If a person is supposed to prostrate and lay down/bow down before him without considering his own willingness, as it is made obligatory by the religion, the person has no say in the matter at all. He is just doing the bidding of his God, which is subjugation, and not discretion.
Children have young, immature minds and do what they're told, believe what they're taught. If children were taught to reason, the world would be better and there would be more intelligent people rather than belligerent assholes.
The not-so-free-to-act religion Islam offers no freedom of will; it is just delusional to think it does. And the obligatory prayer is a compulsion on children. A child will learn what he is taught; he will learn to offer prayer, not because he has freewill in choosing to offer prayer, but only because the religion demands prayer offering unquestionably and uncritically.
It's high time people realized that prayer is a compulsion, a forceful obligation and there is a story of eternal punishment in hell associated to instruct people better. People lose the ability to think clearly in the face of fear, and thus, they "choose" to be suppressed rather than coming out in the open and facing truth.
Children should be taught to reason first, before holding any faiths or convictions. They should have freewill to choose for themselves. The world would progress faster if people just realize the importance of freewill and coexistence.
