Getting a head start will benefit you exponentially.

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.

Smoking weed in Jamaica..

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.

I tried renting a car 2 weeks ago, but I couldn’t rent it because the window was left open and it got rained in.

Why was it left open? Probably because of the smell right as we sat down inside...

Weed.

I went to Target the other day, and it smelled like weed about 20 feet from the front entrance.

Went to a hotel on Saturday for a wedding, and the lobby caught someone smoking weed in the bathroom.

Subhan Allah.

Weak people will lead to a weak society.

Your kids are exposed to this, even if they’re homeschooled, just from going outside and interacting with the world.

Now imagine your child in school. He or she is not only exposed to this, but they might think it’s OK.

All it takes is an influencer online to highlight the health benefits.

From a phone you gave them without any guidance.

But how many of our children have heard this verse to counteract the supposed “health benefits?”

They ask you ˹O Prophet˺ about intoxicants and gambling. Say, “There is great evil in both, as well as some benefit for people—but the evil outweighs the benefit.” They ˹also˺ ask you ˹O Prophet˺ what they should donate. Say, “Whatever you can spare.” This is how Allah makes His revelations clear to you ˹believers˺, so perhaps you may reflect.

Quran (2:219)

It’s not enough to just get high anymore.

It has to be quick, just like everything else in today’s fast paced and low-attention span society.

You can’t wait to light a blunt anymore.

You need highly concentrated whiffs to get you that high now.

Whiffs so strong that one mother described it as almost destroying her daughter’s brain.

“The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t.”

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.

Taylor Swift’s sweat.

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!

Your “love” is weakness.

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?"

Teens being constantly online.

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?

8 hours to learn, and then another hour to actually learn.

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…

Don’t starve your soul.

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.

How to make your kids love learning about Islam.

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!

Teacher quits because of excessive cell phone use in schools.

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.

“Just do it,” doesn’t do it.

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.

What happens when you have an absent father?

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.

They are not kids anymore..

Muslim parents need to realize that when your child hits that 12-13 year old mark, they are more than likely at a stage where they are accountable for their actions.

They are not kids anymore.

To treat them as such is a disservice to them.

If they die as a teenager, they have probably hit puberty, which means they will be held accountable just like any adult on the Day of Judgment.

The definition of a teenager.

Officially sanctioned definition:

teen·​ag·​er (ˈtēn-ˌā-jər) - someone who is between 13 and 19 years old

Actual definition:

teen·​ag·​er (ˈtēn-ˌā-jər) - a made up construct that just delays maturity for young adults by another 7 years.

I am “just” a mother…

“I am just a mother.”

Do you see anything wrong with that sentence?

The word "just" is in the wrong spot.

Do you see how the word "just" brings about a negative connotation, as if being a mother was some stupid thing to be?

Or how being a mother is not really much work, and you need a real job?

To all the stay-at-home moms out there, you're not "just" a mother:

You are a just mother.

You see the difference?

Let that sink in for a moment, and realize the blessing and responsibility that has been put on your shoulders.

You are someone who will raise the future generations that will carry this religion اِن شاء الله .

You are raising someone who will اِن شاء الله  be a form of Sadaqa Jariya for you.

In multiple ways:

Abu Qatadah reported: The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said,

“The best of what a man leaves behind are three:

1. A righteous child who supplicates for him,

2. Ongoing charity the reward of which reaches him,

3. Knowledge that is acted upon after him.”

Source: Sunan Ibn Majah 237

As a mother, you can benefit from all 3 of these methods!

Your child can be a righteous child that will pray for you.

Your child can give charity and give to the Ummah because you taught them to.

Your child can act upon the knowledge of Islam that you taught them.

You are giving your children the nourishment and time that they need, especially at that young age.

Those critical years where most of a child’s understanding of the world is formed and solidified.

So no, you’re not “just” a mother.

You are a “just” mother.

TikTok will ban “kids” from signing up to their platform due to mental health issues.

The Guardian:

Under-18s will, in the coming weeks, be blocked from artificially making their eyes bigger, plumping their lips and smoothing or changing their skin tone.

The restrictions will apply to filters – such as “Bold Glamour” – that change children’s features in a way that makeup cannot. Comic filters that add bunny ears or dog noses will be unaffected. The billion-user social media company announced the changes during a safety forum at its European headquarters in Dublin.

The effectiveness of the restrictions will depend on people using the platform under their real age, which is not always the case.

Why ban it for those under 18 only? Do you think older women can handle the anxiety and depression or need that anxiety and depression?

If you are 13 years old or less, you will be banned from signing up at all:

TikTok also announced it was tightening its systems to block users under 13 from the platform, which could mean that thousands of British children are turfed off the platform. Before the end of the year, it will launch a trial of new automated systems that use machine learning to detect people cheating its age restrictions.

How effective are these systems that currently enforce the age limit?

…the effectiveness of TikTok’s age restriction enforcement is “yet to be established”. It is due to start strictly enforcing over-13 age limits for social media users next summer, requiring “highly effective” age checks.

I wonder how many parents talk to their kids about the harms of social media and how fake it is. TikTok is just one of the plethora of platforms where unrealistic beauty is championed and promoted.

An impossible standard.

The irony of it all is stress and anxiety caused by social media can affect your skin, leading to acne, rashes, etc., further compounding the problem because now you need more concealer and makeup to keep that smooth skin!

This will harm not only our daughters, but our sons as well.

Boys who are addicted to seeing a standard of beauty that doesn’t exist, and girls who are used to seeing a standard of beauty that they can’t achieve.

This is the kind of behavior that will further the marriage crisis that we have.

Homeschool Curriculum Quick Review: The Good and the Beautiful

We have been using "The Good and the Beautiful" curriculum for 7 years now. Here are some pros and cons from both parents and students:

Pros from PARENTS:

1. Very structured and easy to follow.

2. Covers phonics, writing, reading, grammar and punctuation, spelling, literature, geography, art.

3. Faith based curriculum - it’s based off Christianity, but you can easily talk about interfaith and discuss what we believe vs what Christians believe.

4. There is organically less parent involvement as the grades get higher giving the kids more independence and parents freed up time.

5. Older grades have answer keys.

Pros from KIDS:

1. Fun and Easy - explained to me as challenging and fun by my son.

2. Younger kids like the independent practice by themselves. Gives them a dose of freedom.

3. You get to draw even in the older aged grades.

Cons:

1. The spiral binding falls apart slowly over time. The less aggressive the child handles the book, the longer it will last.

Another “con” from my 12 yr old:

1. "Too many essays as you get older, and too many reports."

Started since 1st grade with our now 7th grader. The best thing is when you stick to one curriculum, you don't have to reinvent the wheel when younger siblings go through the same books.

What Surah Kahf says about the relationship between parents and children - Part 3

The incident after Khidr kills the boy takes us directly to the next scene, where Musa and Khidr have been traveling for a long time, and they reach a town and ask for some food and assistance but they get denied.

In that same area, there is a wall that is collapsing, and Khidr helps the townspeople put the wall back up.

Why did Khidr help them without payment or food, even though they were rude and inhospitable to him?

Khidr helped them because underneath that wall was a treasure that belonged to two orphan boys, and at this stage, the orphan boys would have been taken advantage of and the treasurer would have been stolen from them since they have no authority or strength.

Allah inspired Khidr to rebuild the wall in order to keep the treasure hidden until the boys grew up and were strong enough to retrieve the treasure themselves.

But there’s another important factor in this story:

The father. 

Allah mentions it in the Qur’an directly:

وَأَمَّا الْجِدَارُ فَكَانَ لِغُلَامَيْنِ يَتِيمَيْنِ فِي الْمَدِينَةِ وَكَانَ تَحْتَهُ كَنزٌ لَّهُمَا وَكَانَ أَبُوهُمَا صَالِحًا فَأَرَادَ رَبُّكَ أَن يَبْلُغَا أَشُدَّهُمَا وَيَسْتَخْرِجَا كَنزَهُمَا رَحْمَةً مِّن رَّبِّكَ وَمَا فَعَلْتُهُ عَنْ أَمْرِي ذَٰلِكَ تَأْوِيلُ مَا لَمْ تَسْطِع عَّلَيْهِ صَبْرًا

And as for the wall, it belonged to two orphan boys in the city, and under the wall was a treasure that belonged to them, and their father had been a righteous man. So your Lord willed that these children should come of age and retrieve their treasure, as a mercy from your Lord. I did not do it ˹all˺ on my own. This is the explanation of what you could not bear patiently.

Surah al Kahf 18:82

What did Allah say about the father?

The father was a righteous man.

Because of his righteousness, Allah willed the father’s hidden treasure to reach his two boys at a later time.

This is an important lesson not in just being righteous and having taqwa, but also in taking action.

This righteous father didn’t just sit in the masjid and pray all day.

This father was a provider, and not only did he provide, he made sure he left something substantial for his family. 

He put his trust in Allah, and tied his camel.

He put his trust in Allah, and also put in the work, the effort.

You probably heard this phrase before, but it comes from a famous Hadith about belief and action:

Anas ibn Malik reported: A man said, “O Messenger of Allah, should I tie my camel and trust in Allah, or should I leave her untied and trust in Allah?” The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Tie her and trust in Allah.”

Sunan al-Tirmidhi 2517

We can’t just keep making dua and not take the next steps in our lives. 

If you want results, you have to do your part while putting your trust in Allah.

Getting arrested for letting your child walk alone??

NBC News:

A Georgia woman was arrested and accused of allegedly endangering her son — all because the unsupervised 10-year-old walked less than a mile away from home, officials said.

Brittany Patterson, 41, had taken another son to a doctor on Oct. 30, and she became mildly annoyed — but not at all worried — when the Fannin County Sheriff's Department called to say her son Soren had wandered from their rural home in Mineral Bluff and into town.

"It's not a super dangerous or even dangerous-at-all stretch of road," Patterson told NBC News in an interview that aired Wednesday. "I wasn't terrified for him or scared for his safety."

Deputies drove Soren, now 11, home and that was that, or so Patterson thought.

But then hours later, the sheriff's department went back to the family's home near the North Carolina border, where Patterson was handcuffed, arrested, booked on suspicion of reckless conduct and forced to post $500 bail.

"It was anger and frustration, of course, because my children were having to witness that all," she said. "They asked me to put my hands behind my back and all that stuff, and I realized what was going on."

The laws in each state differ when it comes to leaving children alone outside. Just as an example, here are the laws in Georgia, and here are the laws in Texas.

The more “blue” your state, the more restrictive the law is against what parents can do.

Your kids can't even walk outside anymore without being supervised all the time.

Or else you go to jail.

And then people wonder why these future adults are still momma's boys and act like children when they're 30.

Make sure you recognize them..

As parents, we will continue to make mistakes.

You cannot avoid them.

After all, we are imperfect creatures.

The solution though, is not to make mistakes.

The solution is to recognize them.

If you don’t recognize a mistake, how can you fix it?

If you are knee-deep in ignorance, how can you even know you’re doing something wrong?

Allah subhana wata'aalah told us with His first command to the Prophet ﷺ that we do not have the luxury to be ignorant.

What was the first command revealed in the Qur’an?

It was captivated in a single word:

Iqra!

Read!

Learn about your religion, so you can recognize your mistakes, and correct them before it’s too late.