 think social media is really something that we can't escape and it's pretty much all around us and kids are engaging with it to a certain extent so it's good really to be prepared and to help guide our kids through it so like Siddhi Haroon said we also in our family did not our sons did not have smartphones in high school which you know they it was an agreement on understanding that we had and one of my sons said that in high school people used to be amazed by his flip phone because they didn't even know those existed anymore they would take pictures of his flip phone but when they graduated from high school they got an iPhone that was like our graduation gift to them so it wasn't something forever they knew that eventually it was coming but through the high school years they didn't have a smartphone my youngest isn't in high school now and he still doesn't have a smartphone he has an old smartphone that is at home on which he can what's up with relatives with the cousins but it doesn't have Wi-Fi access when he leaves the home once my our sons did get smartphones and they were on social media we had a discussion about it and one of the understandings we had in the beginning and this is not the case anymore my older two are in college they're independent we trust them to know the difference between right and wrong inshallah but in the beginning when they first started out on social media the understanding was that because we were paying for their phones and it was because we were paying for it that they had access to this technology that they had to agree to friend their mother on social media and also to to respect my husband isn't that much on social media I was on it more but the understanding I had with my sons and they agreed to it before they decided they were going to take on social media I we told them you can choose one at the time and they both decided to go for Instagram over Facebook and they agreed that if there was something that I didn't approve of of what they were posting or what they were clicking like on that they would respect their their mother's opinion on that topic so and then helping them figure it out because like when you're first getting on social media especially with young men you know clicking like on a girl's selfie they may think they're just being nice that okay somebody posted a selfie so I'm just gonna click like but then we would talk about the deeper layer discussion behind that that well what does it mean to click like on a girl's self-portrait right like would you be staring at a girl's face in real life and going you know I like the way you look or would you look away and have modesty and is it appropriate and also if any of their friends were posting about Haram things like friends from high school if they're posting about getting drunk or if people are posting pictures of themselves dressed really inappropriately is that something you want to be taking in on a daily basis that becomes your soba that becomes your companionship so having discussions about it at a spiritual level and getting them to think about how these things affect them but like I said my youngest is not on social media my older two do have Instagram and snapchat and we are not now monitoring how they use it it's there they're independent but in the beginning when they first started like right after they graduated from high school yeah there was oversight on our part so one of my sons was here actually at MCC and one of the uncles in the community approached him and he said I just recently became a parent and I tell me something that your parents did with you guys that you think was really really beneficial and my son was like I don't know I'm just a kid go ask my parents they're the ones again he was like no no no I want to hear from the kids perspective honestly just tell me the truth what do you think was one of the most beneficial things that your parents did for you while you were growing up and this uncle told me the the young dad told me that my son told him that honestly it was not allowing us to have internet enabled devices in the privacy of our bedrooms so that was probably the most beneficial thing that they did because I've actually personally witnessed what's going on with some of the people in my generation the addictions and the problems that they're suffering that their parents don't even know about so I thought you know it's interesting because at the time it might be painful and it might it's not fun and you might be the bad guy but inshallah inshallah one day your kids will thank you and hopefully you know they're gonna have all other issues they're gonna be dealing with with their own children but they're gonna see that you sometimes have to go against the grain of what everybody else is doing the other quick comment I comment I wanted to make was I wrote an article called how to protect your children from the P word I think I think that was the name of the article the editors chose the title so I sometimes have a hard time remembering titles of my own articles but how to protect your children from the P word and it's about pornography addiction and at the time when I wrote it I wrote it when my kids were still pretty little so a lot of the focus of the article was about prevention it was a lot of about you guys need to be aware about what's out there you guys need to be worried you need to protect your kids and the analogy I used in the article is that you have to treat the internet like a loaded weapon that the way you would treat a loaded weapon in your home is the way you treat the internet and you keep it under lock and key you don't leave kids alone with it you know where it is at all times anyway it made it onto a reddit thread and I once I was looking through the comments that people were leaving about the article and somebody left a comment saying this lady who wrote this article sounds like she's the worst parent in the world and what is she planning to do follow her kids to college and that kind of like took me aback and I you know there's a lot that we can learn even from our critics and I thought about why was that the reaction that this person had to the article and then there was a whole debate between the commenters and based on that person's criticism and what I realized was that that article so much of the focus was about prevention that it didn't at that time the focus because my kids weren't older wasn't really about how to navigate it once you are around it so those of you parents who are here whose kids are teens it's I think the time of like making sure they're not using the internet or don't have privacy with it is pretty much over it's really until age maybe 14 that you can you can even do that of the Hadith of Hazrat Ali Radi Allahu Anhu is just perfect where he said play with your children for the first seven years teach your children for the second seven years seven to 14 right and then be their friend for the third seven years so 14 to 21 and it's very true whatever you want to teach them you really have until age 14 after 14 it's pretty much maintenance you're just maintaining whatever you've taught them so what I was explaining about our kids when we gave them the smartphones when they graduated from high school at that point then it was just maintaining the above how to interact with one another on social media what's appropriate what's inappropriate what's not good for your heart to look at to be reflecting about what is it that my eyes are taking in and how is this affecting me and the last thing is I personally will admit that I have a social media addiction problem so I can lecture my kids all I want but I'm on my phone a lot looking at what's up looking at Facebook looking at Instagram so I personally recently made the decision to cut myself off from Facebook and Instagram for 40 days because I was told by a sheikh that anytime you want to make something part of your nature you do it for 40 days and if you can do it for 40 days it becomes part of your nature inshallah and I've been going through ups and downs I won't lie it's I'm an addict I'm an addict and I have to admit that and my kids are seeing me go through that process my my son was looking at his Instagram yesterday and I was like oh let me look over his shoulder and he's like no no no you you cannot be anywhere near this you're trying to quit this cold turkey you should not even be glancing at what I'm looking at but anyway you know our kids can also learn from our struggles to we sometimes focus so much on teaching them and lecturing to them about how they should be but we also have to look at ourselves too like what are we looking at all the time how are we keeping ourselves busy