“My Lord, enable me to be grateful for Your favor which You have bestowed upon me and upon my parents, and to work righteousness of which You will approve, and make righteous for me my offspring.”

And We have enjoined upon man, to his parents, good treatment. His mother carried him with hardship and gave birth to him with hardship, and his gestation and weaning period is thirty months. He grows until, when he reaches maturity and reaches the age of forty years, he says, "My Lord, enable me to be grateful for Your favor which You have bestowed upon me and upon my parents and to work righteousness of which You will approve and make righteous for me my offspring. Indeed, I have repented to You, and indeed, I am of the Muslims."

The verse gives this prayer an age. It is placed in the mouth of someone who has reached forty — after the passage describing what a mother carried through pregnancy, birth and weaning. So the words belong to a person old enough to be a parent himself, looking in both directions at once: asking to be able to thank for what he was given as a child, and asking that his own children be put right.