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SHAH ALAM – A child's role model used to be someone they encountered in everyday life: a parent at the dinner table, a teacher at the front of the class, a neighbour who always had time to say hello.
Today, that person might be someone on a screen they have never met and never will.
For Warisan Ummah Ikhlas Foundation (WUIF) founder Datuk Hussamuddin Yaacub, that shift keeps him up at night.
"In the past, our influencers were our teachers, Quran teachers and lecturers.
“Today, it is people on YouTube and social media who influence our children and grandchildren. That is something I worry about," he said during an exclusive interview at the Karangkraf Complex.
His concern was not with technology itself, but with something quieter and harder to fix, the values children were absorbing from the people they watched, followed and admired every single day, often without their parents realising it.
He believed Malaysia needed to ask itself a straightforward but uncomfortable question: who are we allowing to raise the next generation?
Popularity, Hussamuddin said, was not the same as integrity. A child needed more than someone entertaining to look up to, they needed someone worth becoming.
"If we want to prepare the country for the next 30 years, we have to start now," he said.
The numbers made the urgency plain.
A child born today would be 30 years old when Malaysia marks its 100th year of independence in 2057, old enough to be a manager, a parent, a policymaker, someone whose decisions would shape the lives of others.
"We have to prepare them for that future," Hussamuddin added.
But preparation, he argued, could not happen through education policy or government initiatives alone. It had to begin somewhere more personal, in the home, in the habits families built together, in the conversations parents chose to have or chose to avoid.
What worried him most was not that children were online. It was what they were seeing when they got there.
He pointed to the tone of public life on social media, the insults traded between strangers, the attacks on public figures, the quiet normalisation of cruelty dressed up as opinion.
"If you look at social media today, people are constantly insulting and attacking each other, even people they do not know."
"Children watched all of it, and children learned," he said.
If they grew up surrounded by adults who tolerated dishonesty and rewarded hostility, Hussamuddin feared they would simply inherit those behaviours, not out of malice, but because no one had shown them anything different.
"If someone lacks integrity, they should feel ashamed because everyone around them values it," he said.
That was the culture he wanted #Malaysia100 to help rebuild, not through slogans or campaigns, but through a genuine, collective decision to take values seriously again.
The initiative, which looks towards Malaysia's centenary in 2057, was a call for Malaysians to stop waiting for someone else to fix the future and start with what was already in their hands.
"As parents, we have a responsibility to shape the character and future of our children. At the very least, we can start the conversation," he said.
For Hussamuddin, Malaysia's future was not going to be decided in parliament or written into a policy document.
It was going to be decided tonight, in what a child watched before bed, in who they decided to admire, and in what kind of person they quietly, slowly, chose to become.
"We need to go back to our values and virtues," he said.
By the time that child turns 30, Malaysia's next chapter will already be in their hands.
The question is what we choose to place in them today.
