The report that always gets produced

Anybody who raises this subject in a Muslim setting knows what comes back. There is a report about children and prayer that mentions striking at ten, and it gets produced as though it settled the question of hitting children in general.

Here is what this platform is going to say about it, and it is short.

The report is not weak, and pretending it is would be dishonest. How it should be read is genuinely contested, and scholars have written on its scope, its conditions and its limits at length and have not all landed in the same place. This platform is not going to adjudicate that, because a course is not a mufti and this is exactly the kind of question where a page on the internet does damage. If it matters to you, take it to a scholar you trust, once, and take the answer.

What we can do is decline to build a lesson on a contested reading, and teach instead from the material about mercy that nobody is arguing about. There is a great deal of it, and it is stronger than most people realise.