Othman Adel Al -Abbasi
In every Bahraini house, familiar scenes are always repeated: a father jumps in panic to keep his child away from the fire before she touches him, and a mother rushes to worrying steps to withdraw from the hand of her little girl with a sharp knife that almost hurt her, then they do not stop calling for advice and warnings. These daily scenes, in which we express the depth of our love and our keenness on our children, have become part of our unimaginable habits.
These scenes that express love and care, we see them repeat every day with a beautiful spontaneity between the walls of our homes, parents never tolerate the protection of their children from clear and direct dangers, because their duty as parents to monitor, advise, and protect.
But let’s stop a little to see a different scene inside the same house: when the parents enter their children’s room, and they find them calm, quietly sitting with phones in their hands. Here, no one rushes to stop something, but the father looks at the mother with a smile of satisfaction, so the mother responds to him with a similar smile, and the two feel deeply comfortable: “Praise be to God, the children are fine, busy and calm with their smartphones!”
The shocking paradox is that we are at the moment when we escape from the danger of fire or a knife, we do not see the greatest fire that these phones set in the minds of our children. We do not realize that what they see behind these screens, may be more dangerous than the things that we will get away from them. How many children have lost his innocence because of a random video he watched inadvertently, and how many girls have known to strangers with suspicious conversations in the world’s open worlds wide open.
Our extreme fear of our children made us close the doors of the house, for fear of meeting strangers in the street, while we forgot that we opened wide digital windows from which strangers enter themselves directly into the rooms of our children, without permission or permission.
Is it not strange that we hesitate to let our children go out to play in Al -Faraj like our old days, for fear of a possible danger, then simply we give them small devices that may carry them with dangers that our eyes cannot see? Yes, it is our duty to protect our children from fire and knife, but our responsibility today is much greater than that; It is the responsibility of protecting their minds and souls also from silent digital risks that may steal their childhood and innocence. Perhaps it is time to jump again, as we were jumping to save them from the fire and the knife, to save them from digital fire that we ignited ourselves, without knowing. To open our eyes well, watch these screens, and direct them with love and awareness, as we always did in a beautiful time, in which the screen was not the one who raised our children.
* Technical expert
