image: "/blog/fathers-day-daughter-couldnt-find-herself-on-shelf-hero.webp" title: "What Father's Day Means When Your Daughter Can't Find Herself on the Shelf" description: "A Muslim dad watches his daughter search every store for hijabi sticker books and finds nothing. So they built Salam Lanterns together." date: "2026-06-12" slug: "fathers-day-daughter-couldnt-find-herself-on-shelf" category: "Our Story" tags:
- Father's Day
- Muslim girls
- hijabi sticker books
- representation
- Muslim parents
The gift that didn't exist
Father's Day is this Sunday. I've been thinking about what it actually means to show up for your kid — not the greeting card version, but the real thing.
Last year my daughter Blair wanted to buy sticker books as gifts for her friends at the masjid. Not a big ask. Sticker books are everywhere. Dollar stores have them. Bookstores have walls of them. Amazon has thousands.
She couldn't find a single one with hijabi characters.
Not one book where a girl wearing hijab was the hero of the adventure. Not one where modest fashion was the style. Blair searched Etsy, specialty shops, Islamic bookstores online. She and Catherine spent days looking. The answer was the same everywhere: this product does not exist.
What that moment felt like
Blair came to me frustrated. Not the usual kid frustration about something being out of stock. This was different. She was asking a question I couldn't answer with "let me check another store."
The question underneath was: why doesn't anyone think Muslim girls matter enough to make something for them?
I didn't have a good answer. I still don't, really. The toy industry is a $100 billion market. Muslim families spend billions on children's products every year. And somehow nobody had thought to put a hijabi character on a sticker sheet.
You can find princesses, superheroes, anime characters, realistic fashion dolls, fantasy warriors. You can find branded sticker books for every cartoon on television. But a girl in hijab, doing normal kid stuff — going to the park, reading a book, hanging out with friends? Nothing.
What a dad actually does
Here's the thing about being a parent. When your kid hits a wall, you have two choices. You can explain why the wall is there — the market economics, the lack of representation data, the slow pace of change in the toy industry. Or you can help them climb over it.
Catherine said the thing that started everything: "Let's make them ourselves."
So we did. Catherine, Blair, and I spent months figuring out how to produce sticker books from scratch. None of us had toy industry experience. We didn't know a manufacturer from a distributor. What we had was a clear picture of what was missing and a kid who refused to accept that the gap was permanent.
Blair had opinions about the characters. She wanted them to look like her friends — different skin tones, different hijab styles, different personalities. She wanted Little Hijabi Adventures to feel like a real afternoon at the park, not a diversity checklist. She wanted Beautiful Hijabi to let every girl design a face that looked like hers.
She was right about all of it.
The books we built
We ended up with three sticker books, each for a different age:
Little Hijabi Adventures (ages 3+) — 50+ stickers of hijabi characters doing everyday things. Going to the library. Playing outside. Eating with family. The stuff of actual childhood.
Beautiful Hijabi (ages 5+) — Face creation stickers where girls pick skin tones, eye shapes, hijab wraps, and accessories. Blair's favorite. She spent an entire weekend designing characters she said "actually look like Amira and Nour."
Modest Hijabi Fashion (ages 8+) — Fashion-forward outfits that prove modesty and style are not opposites. This one is for the tweens who are figuring out who they want to be.
Then we built the Beautiful Hijabi App — $2.99, no ads, no subscriptions, 100+ digital stickers. Because not every family can afford a physical book, and because girls carry their creativity on their phones.
You can grab any of them on our get started page, or bundle them and save.
What I learned about showing up
I'm not going to pretend building a company with your kid is all inspirational. There were late nights arguing about sticker sizes. There were manufacturing delays that made Blair cry. There was a week where every sample we got back looked wrong — wrong colors, wrong paper weight, wrong everything.
But here's what I know now that I didn't know before.
When your kid identifies a problem that shouldn't exist, and you help them fix it, you're not just being a good parent. You're showing them that the world is something they can change. Not through a motivational poster. Not through a lecture about resilience. Through actual work, together, until the thing that was missing exists.
Blair held the first finished copy of Little Hijabi Adventures in her hands and said, "Now my friends have something." That sentence is worth every late night.
This Father's Day
If you're a Muslim dad reading this on Sunday — or any day, honestly — I want you to know something. The gap in the toy aisle isn't your imagination. Your daughter's frustration when she can't find a doll that looks like her, or a sticker book where the characters dress like her family, is real. It's not small. It's not "just toys."
Play is how kids figure out who they are. When the entire play industry tells a girl she doesn't exist in its world, that lands somewhere. It lands in the way she talks about her hijab, or doesn't. It lands in whether she sees her culture as something to celebrate or something to shrink.
We built Salam Lanterns because Blair refused to accept that her friends were invisible. Father's Day, for me, is about the fact that she didn't have to accept it. She had people around her who said, "You're right, this is wrong. Let's fix it."
That's the version of fatherhood I want to keep showing up for. Not perfect. Not always patient. But willing to build something alongside my kid when the world hasn't built it yet.
Happy Father's Day to every dad doing that work — whether it's sticker books, bedtime stories in Arabic, or just making sure your daughter knows the gap isn't her fault.
Looking for hijabi sticker books for the Muslim girl in your life? Browse our collection →
