Like a lot of parents, I have mixed feelings about screens.
I don’t think every screen is evil. I don’t think every video is harmful. And I don’t think the answer for most families is to pretend YouTube, tablets, and online videos don’t exist.
Because they do.
And honestly... some of it is good.
There are things children can learn from videos that we would never be able to recreate at home every day.
They can learn about animals we don’t get to see in daily life. They can explore science in ways that make their eyes light up. They can listen to Qur’an recitation on repeat, and learn about the Seerah. They can watch stories that spark curiosity, imagination, and questions we didn’t even think they were ready to ask yet.
Sometimes, a good video is exactly what a tired parent needs to get through a chaotic evening.
But every parent also knows what happens next.
You open one “safe” video... and it doesn’t stay one video for long.
Somehow, one becomes five. A learning moment turns into noise. A child clicks something you didn’t choose. Something appears that you didn’t expect. And suddenly, the direction of the moment is no longer yours.
And then comes that familiar cycle.
You check. You skip. You pause. You take the device away. You give it back again. You feel guilty for giving it in the first place. Then guilty for taking it away.
What’s interesting is, it doesn’t feel like one big problem. It feels more like a hundred small decisions every single day.
Do I allow this video? Do I check what they’re watching? Do I trust it? Do I sit beside them again? Do I say no and deal with the meltdown? Do I say yes and deal with what comes next?
And most parents end up somewhere in the middle of two extremes:
And neither of those really feels like “it”.
What if the real issue isn’t screen time?
Most conversations about parenting and technology start with the same question: “How much screen time is okay?”
That question always feels incomplete because an hour is not just an hour.
An hour of calm and intentional screen time is not the same as an hour of endless autoplay, shifting thumbnails, and content you didn’t choose.
So the real questions actually become:
Who chose this? What happens next? What is shaping my child when I’m not actively watching? Am I still in control of what enters my home... or have I already handed that over without realising?
For Muslim families, there’s another layer
It’s not just about whether something is “appropriate.” It’s about what it is shaping in the home.
Because what children see often becomes what they talk about, what they repeat, and what feels normal to them.
Maybe what makes this harder than previous generations is that we’re not just handing children a device, but an environment we didn’t have a say in designing. An environment where the feed keeps refreshing, on and on.
We’re trying to parent with something that wasn’t built around our values, our routines, or the kind of children we’re trying to raise.
So we end up doing a strange kind of double work:
Living life... while also constantly managing what life is exposing our children to.
So...
Maybe the real question isn’t “How much screen time is too much?”
Maybe the real question is: Who decides what our children watch next?
It’s not just that our children are spending time on screens.
It’s that they are growing up inside systems that shape their attention, their patience, and even their sense of what “normal” feels like.
And most of us were never really shown how to think about that part.
We were just told to manage screen time.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. And I wonder how many of us are navigating the same tension without really knowing what to do about it.
I’ll go a little deeper into that in the next post, inshaAllah.
Salams, Abdul