Back in the 80s and 90s, we had less Islamic resources, but we also had less distractions.

Today, we have more Islamic resources Alhumdulilah, but we also have more distractions.

I honestly can’t decide which time was a better time to be in, and it really doesn’t matter.

The point is, Allah subhana wata'aalah put you and me at a specific time on this earth, and it is up to us to make the best out of it.

My wife and I were talking about homeschooling, and she mentioned to me how if she started homeschooling at our oldest's current grade (7th), it would be a lot harder since the subject intensity is just at another level.

When you start early from Pre-K, you can also learn the information along with your child, making it easier for you to digest the material and concepts.

Remember, you will only have to learn the material from scratch once.

Each subsequent child will learn the same subjects from you, but since you have already taught the subject before, it will come back fast.

The only thing that gets challenging is managing more kids.

The material is not the issue.

Start them while they're young, and while you have less of a hill to climb.

I didn't know what pot smelled like until 2014.

I was 32 years old in Jamaica on vacation, talking to some guy on the beach, asking for directions.

My kids know what weed smells like today.

This is crazy, and unacceptable.

More and more drugs are becoming legal or OK to use, and it will destroy this country.

It will destroy our children.

We would have people come to school to warn us about drugs, and now it's being turned into a cultural norm.

Read more

s. e. smith from The Verge (paywalled article):

Every few days, I open my inbox to an email from someone asking after an old article of mine that they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists, teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a link suddenly goes nowhere. They’re people who searched the internet and found references, but not the article itself, and are trying to track an idea down to its source. They’re readers trying to understand the throughlines of society and culture, ranging from peak feminist blogging of the 2010s to shifts in cultural attitudes about disability, but coming up empty.

This is not a problem unique to me: a recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish, as in the case of dozens of scientific journals and all the critical research they contained. This is especially acute for news: researchers at Northwestern University estimate we will lose one-third of local news sites by 2025, and the digital-first properties that have risen and fallen are nearly impossible to count. The internet has become a series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be. Sometimes it is me searching for that content, spending an hour reverse-engineering something in the Wayback Machine because I want to cite it, or read the whole article, not just a quote in another publication, an echo of an echo. It’s reached the point where I upload PDFs of my clips to my personal website in addition to linking to them to ensure they’ll remain accessible (until I stop paying my hosting fees, at least), thinking bitterly of the volume of work I’ve lost to shuttered websites, restructured links, hacks that were never repaired, servers disrupted, sometimes accompanied by false promises that an archive would be restored and maintained.

This is why I usually make a PDF of an article and link to that PDF versus the actual article. Not to mention the haram images that might be on there, which I can easily cover up.

FYI, the title quote also belongs to s. e. smith.

Did I get your attention with the title?

Good.

About a month ago, I was watching a clip on YouTube, where a lady was asking whether or not it was worth spending $2,500 for Taylor Swift tickets.

These were not front row seats, but they were nosebleed seats, essentially the furthest seats away from Taylor Swift. 

You would need binoculars to see her.

The host of the show was outraged that these nosebleed seats cost $2,500.

She said for that kind of money, I want some of the “Swifty sweat” to hit me.

(I need to be so close to her that her sweat hits me in the face.)

That same evening, we reached a point in the Seerah where an incident occurred, and the sahaba were gathering the leftover wudu water of the Prophet ﷺ to use for themselves. This went down a tangent where we discussed how the hair, the sweat, and even the saliva of the Prophet ﷺ was considered blessed.

So blessed to the point that they would take some of the sweat and put it in their perfume.

And it was narrated from Anas that Umm Sulaym used to put out a mat of leather for the Prophet ﷺ and he would take a nap in her house. When the Prophet ﷺ fell asleep, she took some of his sweat and hair and kept it in a bottle, then she put it in some sukk (perfume made of musk). He [Thumaamah ibn ‘Abd-Allah ibn Anas] said: When Anas ibn Maalik was dying, he left instructions that some of the sukk should be put in his hunoot (perfumes used in preparation of dead for burial). 

Narrated by al-Bukhaari (6281)

The sahaba would take these things and seek blessings from them, and there was nothing weird or wrong about it.

Naturally the kids thought it was kind of strange, but that is because they’re still kids, and don’t understand how the adult mind and body work…

And that is where we as parents have to bridge the gap, educate, and defend.

So what if the Sahaba sought blessings from the Prophet ﷺ’s sweat? This is something unanimously agreed upon, and the Prophet ﷺ himself approved of it.

As we can see from the Taylor Swift example, people seek some sort of “high" or blessings from other people’s bodily fluids to this day.

It sounds strange when you say it like that, but it’s the truth!

The “Swiftie sweat” is just an example, but it can be applied to many celebrities whose teeth, leftover tissues, and even used underwear sold for thousands of dollars.

I remember watching TV shows where during certain episodes, the main character would meet their favorite celebrity and after shaking their hand, they would say: 

“I’m never washing this hand again.” 

It is because now they have a part of that person on them, which makes them feel special.

Of course no man's sweat or saliva is worth anything today, and the only sweat or saliva that was blessed was that of the Prophet ﷺ.

Now when you talk to your kids about this, they will know how to educate and defend the sahaba and the Prophet ﷺ on this matter.

And most importantly, it will increase their Iman!

As a Muslim parent you don't go to concerts...

But your kids participate in concerts at school.

As a Muslim parent you don't go and dance with strangers...

But your kids participate in dances at school.

Why are Muslim parents so weak, that they can't even opt-out of these dances and concerts?

Your kids will plead and beg, and you will give in out of love.

But that is not love. That is weakness on your part.

Whatever happened to your love for Allah first and foremost?

Whatever happened to, "We hear and we obey?"

Gaby Del Valle from The Verge:

Nearly half of US teens are “almost constantly” online, though the platforms they spend their time on vary significantly, according to a new Pew survey.

Notice how the apps that require you to read (X, Threads, Reddit) are less frequently used compared to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. Threads is relatively new, but, just a curious observation.

I wonder how this would compare to adults’ usage of social media.

Are we just as likely to watch instead of read?

This is why you have to homeschool.

If you can’t read, you can’t succeed.

Imagine 8 hours of schooling only to find out you need to spend an additional hour to teach your child how to read.

Working in the healthcare industry makes you realize how much of a blessing there is in Islam.

The illusion that the Western lifestyle is one of wealth and bliss is just a disguise of the rampant depression and addiction that wealth buys.

They feed only the body, but the soul is starving.

If you're not teaching your kids the Seerah, you're missing out.

And I don't mean some other teacher.

I mean you.

Your enthusiasm and personal teaching relationship with your family goes a long way.

Not just for the Seerah, but for anything.

It's the same reason why there might be 80 different people on YouTube who review a product, but you choose to watch one particular person because you like their style.

If you start early with your kids, they will like your style because you will not be nervous when teaching them, and you will be yourself.

You will not be putting on a charade.

There will be those "family quirks" that will be referenced while you teach your kids, and all of those quirks, plus your personality and relationship with them will make learning any subject more fun and engaging.

When they see that "genuineness" within you, they will not only listen to you, but they will enjoy what you have to say.

What do I use for the Seerah?

I use Yasir Qadhi's Seerah transcripts you can find here:

https://arqadhi.blogspot.com

Download them, annotate, and communicate!

NPR:

He was a high school biology teacher in Tucson, Ariz. and his students' near-constant smartphone use was taking a toll on his well-being. So when summer rolled around after his eleventh year in the classroom — he quit.

"I came to realize that the phone addiction that the students were struggling with was causing severe mental health problems for me, preventing me from being a good husband," Rutherford said.

During the 2023-2024 academic year, Rutherford says his students were significantly more disengaged. He felt like he wasn't making a difference.

"Most of the people in the class, they've got their headphones in, they've got their phones on. They're not actually listening," Rutherford said.

He says that as a teacher with ADHD, he fed off the energy of his class.

"I'm really aware of whether someone's listening to me or paying attention to me." Rutherford said. "And this year," he told NPR at the end of the 2023-2024 school year, "I was just like, 'I can't…They're not interested in what I have to say.' And that, frankly, is the reason that I had to leave."

To further compound children’s decreasing mental state, let’s hyperfocus on their emotional states, always reminding them of their “issues and problems,” leading to worsening symptoms:

In addition to the phone use, students were not interacting with each other, sometimes writing in journal entries that they were anxious, depressed and lonely — which made them burrow further into their devices, Rutherford said.

What happens to students if you have a partial phone ban? Another teacher in Minnesota describes the situation:

Right after it went into effect, she noticed students were more engaged and some admitted in feedback forms they appreciated it.

"[It] forced them to kind of learn how to socialize again, how to be entertained by each other, how to turn toward the learning, even in moments of silence, even in moments of boredom," Brisse said.

It's not a bell-to-bell policy — but Brisse is OK with that. Although they are on their phones during passing periods, she said "there's plenty of chatter in the hallways" as well.

What happens if you have a full ban, where students hand in their phones at the beginning of the day, and receive their phones near the end of the school day?

Since 2018, her school has collected students' phones every morning as they come into the building. The phones are returned during the last hour of the day.

"The students are focused. There's still definitely lots of chatting, lots of relationship building," Osborn said. "I've also found that students are more willing to work together in groups when they don't have their cell phones."

At the end of the day when the cell phone bin is delivered to class, Osborn says students crowd around it "like vultures."

Once the phones are passed back to students, she says they immediately look at them. In her view, that shows that "they don't have the self-control to be able to handle the demands of school and access to a cell phone."

They benefit from not having to think about their phones the entire day.

Having little to no phone exposure during class leads to increased productivity, better mental health, and less expenditure on mental health resources. These resources can then be used to actually develop productive programs instead of constantly funding the mental health conglomerate that is artificially induced by social media.

Hopefully more schools adopt the full ban.

Don’t just tell your kids to do something.

Provide them with a story from the Quran, the Sunnah, or the Seerah to inspire them to do that same thing.

It will have a much greater and longer lasting effect.

For example: don’t tell your kids to donate to charity. Tell them how the Prophet ﷺ used to donate and how he changed people’s hearts from how much he donated.

If you do that enough times with passion, they will give you money to donate on their behalf!

If you don’t have a story of Islamic reference, use a worldly example instead.

The point is, stories inspire people to take action.

Chaos.

What happens to boys?

1. Loss of purpose

2. Urgent need for guidance

3. Acting out and more likely to be violent

4. Desperate to fit into any social group that will take you in

5. Potential future school shooter

What happens to girls?

1. No male affirmation and attention from a respectable figure

2. More likely to seek male attention from strangers

3. More likely to be sexually exploited and indulge in salacious sexual behaviors

4. More likely to be single mothers

The cycle repeats itself.

Lives are ruined.