Abdur Rahman ibn Yusuf Mangera – Children and Social Media
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses the difficulty of restriction of social media use and the harm it can cause parents to restrict children. They also mention regulation on sites and websites related to online activities, including the use of apps and websites for schooling. The speaker emphasizes the importance of reinforcing parents' policies to avoid the harm.
AI: Summary ©
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
know,
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