Child training in digital age is biggest challenge
SOCIAL media, on the one hand, united the calves and, on the other hand, ended the life of many young people. Most of Pakistan’s population is illiterate and rural.
Unfortunately, the social media service is available to everyone, young and old, but there are very few parents who can monitor their children’s activities or put parental controls on their devices.
Parental controls are used to restrict access to any device (mobile, laptop, etc). They allow parents to prevent their children from accessing pornographic or harmful websites.
For example, you can prevent your children from accessing sites that you may find inappropriate. By God, most parents are not even aware of this option.
They hold their child’s Smartphone in their hands so that the child will learn something or “stay in touch with us” but within a few days the child will be caught in the devil’s clutches where from the world in which he has lived, he sees a very different world in which he is greeted by colourful designs and shapes, strange destinations and new experiences.
In this other world, where the child’s heart and mind are lost, the interest in knowing the mysterious events also increases.
For which he then starts using the search option and in the same way goes to a never-ending seemingly attractive but deadly world.
The issue surfaced after the recent global epidemic when all educational institutions were closed and students from schools, colleges, and universities were asked to study at home.
There have been cases where either the parents forcibly forbade the children from giving them mobiles and tabs or the “innocent” parents themselves were forced to hand over these things to their children.
It should be borne in mind that in this day and age, even the child of the poorest family will sooner or later be exposed to the digital world whether in the form of mobile or tablet or the form of computer and TV screen.
The point to consider is how to train the children of the present age so that when they take a digital device in their hands they know how to use it and what is good and what is bad in it.
What is it”? It is now up to the parents to train the child from the beginning in such a way that even if the child picks up a mobile phone at the age of five or seven, he will at least be able to escape from the “evil claws” of the internet world.
Use it only in a positive way. If parents can’t do that, then they need to install Parental Controls so they know what their children are doing on the device. We can never keep our children completely away from these devices. It will be difficult, though not impossible.
That is why we should take the responsibility of taking care of them in the best possible way and make them good capable children.
Who will be able to defend themselves, their religion, and their country in any field tomorrow? If parents show negligence today, then their children will fall into such gloomy darkness that it will not be possible to get out for a long time and in the meanwhile, they have suffered enormous losses.
Their harmful effects will keep them suffering for decades. The person who steps into this world without any purpose does not know his destination, or his path, and the result is only in the form of ruin.
—The writer is working as an Administrator in Federal Board of Revenue, Islamabad.
