Abdur Rahman ibn Yusuf Mangera – Children and Social Media

So the question

is about

restriction or,

you can say,

responsible use of social media. That's a very,

very

difficult thing that many, many parents are challenged

by. Many individuals are challenged by that, and

they don't know what to do, and I

don't have any magic for it either.

Right? I'm just praying to Allah subhanahu wa

ta'ala

that something happens to make this clearer, because

what happens is parents understand,

so they try to restrict

their children.

The children start feeling like the parents are

killjoys,

which basically means that they don't want us

to do anything fun. They just don't want

us to play. You just don't want me

to play. I've heard children saying that.

So initially, children just don't understand what the

harm is because they've just not seen the

other side, or they've not seen the harm.

They've not seen it in retrospect.

Then when the children get a bit older,

and they start reading things, and then

other things start filtering through from other places

that say, look, there is a harm in

here, and it is very addictive, and this

is what it'll do to you, and so

on, then they start realizing that they just

can't get rid of the addiction.

I've known of children, I know children who

are like, I know I've got an issue,

I can't help it. So

there's a few things that, if you're at

that stage where the children doesn't believe the

parent,

then tell somebody else to explain to the

children so that it doesn't

sound bias coming from the parent.

One thing you can do is, on social

media itself,

there's quite a few nice

articles

or presentations on YouTube, etcetera, that show the

harms of these things from experts.

So look, you don't believe me? Listen to

this guy. He's on YouTube.

So find something like that and let them

listen to that.

Again, it's just very difficult, because we're talking

about addiction here.

So then, the other thing that we do

is that we regulate,

especially for the younger children and

as far as possible for the older children,

we regulate how they use it. So number

1, you need to have a parental lock

on it as far as

possible so that it shuts off. I mean,

I know some parents with their children, the

phone, the internet will shut off at 10

o'clock. You can't use it after that. You

might still have the phone, but you can't

use it. For example,

likewise, the internet.

Then

there needs to be

what kind of sites they can go to,

that needs to be governed, so the parents

basically need to learn how to do that.

Otherwise,

the children

are sometimes a lot more savvy about these

things, so you have to be

a step ahead in some cases.

And

make a to Allah, and

just keep reinforcing, just keep reinforcing,

and inshallah,

Allah protect them and protect all of us.

But there's no magic to this. It's something

so many parents are struggling with,

and sometimes the society

is not helping at all.

In one family, the child goes to a

very specific college, a very good college, and

they pride themselves of being paperless,

paper free,

so they give everybody an iPad

for free to use,

And then they're complaining to the

the family that, you know, your son who's

at school, he's falling asleep in class,

not doing his work properly, so the parent

just said, this is your fault.

We have kept them away from too many

gadgets, they can only play in the weekend,

but with your thing, he's playing at night,

he's on it at night. And

the problem with that particular iPad I was

given, you can't even put a software on

there, so you can't even put parental lock.

So this is what's happening.

Oh, no, we're a paper free school, so

we, you know, but I'm going to take

the feed feedback.

It's just you can't win with some of

these things. It's like they thrust it on

you.

Schools, if they want to give ipads, there

should be very specific ipads that can only

do certain things, that are related to education.

But we live in a free world, a

very, very, very, very free world,

which unfortunately is just too free sometimes.

And may Allah

help us.

Here for listening. May Allah,

bless you. And if you're finding this useful,

you

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