Lessons from "Adolescence"
The village has been replaced by village idiots. Dangerous ones.
Between the Trump administration’s ongoing destruction of American democracy, the Trump administration’s ongoing destruction of the American economy, the measles outbreak (thanks to the Trump administration), Chappell Roan’s comments, the release of the Minecraft movie, and more, we parents have a lot going on right now.
So I apologize in advance for talking about Adolescence.
You probably know already, but here’s a quick primer anyway: Adolescence is a four-episode Netflix series about a 13-year-old boy’s involvement in a violent crime.
The first episode focuses on the boy’s arrest, slowly revealing — to both the audience and his family — the crime at the center of the case (it’s the UK, so it’s a stabbing instead of a shooting). The second follows the investigating officers as they visit his high school to look for answers, the third takes place at the juvenile detention center where a psychologist interviews the boy, and episode four centers on his family in the aftermath of these events.
The series has been racking up superlatives (despite most content on Netflix being disposable), so I convinced Mom and Buried to watch it with me, even as I warned her that the subject matter might be harrowing.
Through two episodes, I wasn’t sure “harrowing” was the right term. Adolescence had proven riveting, but it wasn’t as intense as I’d expected. After watching the final two installments, “harrowing” felt more than appropriate, and “scary” might be even more apt. As a parent to two boys, one of whom is scarcely older than the subject of the show and already has his phone in his hand more than we’d like, “close to home” feels most accurate of all.
I’m not a particularly emotional guy, but this series packs a punch, and I can’t remember the last time I finished a TV show and immediately sought out my kids just to give them each a hug.
The show isn’t a procedural or a mystery. It’s not lurid and sensational; we hardly even see the crime. There’s no twist. It’s more like social commentary disguised as true crime, and while there are a few beats that reminded me of an afterschool special from my youth, it’s generally far more subtle, and the acting and craft on display are miles above Helen Hunt jumping through a window after taking a hit of angel dust.
The context of the crime casts a harsh light on the susceptibility of young boys to the dangers of the internet, social media, and the “manosphere.” None of this was exactly news to me (I touched on toxic masculinity and the “manosphere” — and my efforts to protect my teenager from its insidious influence — in this space over a year ago), but that doesn’t make the show any less relevant or impactful.
The third episode is the most celebrated, for the young star’s acting and the startling revelations, but the fourth episode hit me the hardest. It focuses on his family, primarily the boy’s parents, and their own role, unwitting or not, in the crime. It doesn’t ask any new questions – how do we protect our kids in today’s world, how do we manage and monitor their screen time and use of technology, how do we filter the content they’re exposed to, etc. There isn’t a parent alive in 2025 who hasn’t thought about these things. Not an engaged parent, at least.
Of course, there wasn’t a parent alive in 1995 (or 1985 or 1965) who didn’t have similar concerns about their kids’ wellbeing, well before smart phones and social media and the ubiquity of the internet. We’ve always been concerned about the safety of our children, we’ve always questioned our own ability to raise them to be decent, kind, and well-adjusted, we’ve always wondered where the balance is between independence and protection, we’ve always feared for their futures.
We don’t raise our kids in a vacuum, we raise them in the real world, and as such there are and will forever be external influences that make a parent’s job difficult, but it lately it increasingly feels like we’re losing that battle.
It’s not easy to be up on everything your kids are doing when both parents are working, sometimes multiple jobs. When I was growing up, we were often left to our own devices, but those devices were Nintendo and GI Joe, not iPhones, the Internet, and YouTube. If someone mentioned a rabbit hole, we got on our bikes and went looking for a rabbit, we didn’t log onto Spotify for four hours of Joe Rogan shit-talking vaccines and pushing alpha-male nonsense! (I would much rather my kid play Zelda or Genshin Impact than mainline “brainrot” videos or scroll through the “related videos” tab on YouTube.)
Any parent that isn’t worried about their kids’ (or their own!) reliance on their phones and tablets, or isn’t concerned about easy access to crackpots and racists and the prevalence of pornography (and the misogyny that goes hand in hand with it), or isn’t aware of the insidious influence of online personalities like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson and the far-right pipeline that is but a skip and a jump away from the manosphere, is probably a parent that isn’t paying enough attention.
The very best thing Adolescence does is put those specific topics in your face — in an extreme, and extremely powerful, way. What it ultimately reinforced for me is the lack of control we parents have, and how we’re surrendering so much of it to these once-external influences that, thanks to technology, have suddenly become borderline internal and much more integral to our kids’ lives than they used to be.
The show touches on how hard it’s become to always be on top of what our kids are doing and on how overwhelming all of this, for parents and also for teachers and others that we used to count on to help carry the load. That mythical village is long gone. I’m no sociologist, but I think we can all acknowledge that for all the improvements in technology, it’s largely proven to separate and fragment and even isolate us from each other. Gone is the safety net and support of community that we — and our children — used to rely on.
Parents today are left to do this impossible job alone, and, as ever, we’re left to hope that the foundations we’ve laid, and the values we’ve instilled, and the common sense we’ve imparted, will win out against the myriad influences that are working against us and against our kids.
So go ahead and add robust parental controls and heavy screen restrictions to their devices. We may never get the village back, but we can make damn sure YouTube and social media aren’t taking its place.
Social Media Round-up
I have to say I'm so glad my daughter is grown and I don't have to worry about her screen time. At least not in the same way. I have warned friends with younger kids, and my brother, about the dangers of the manosphere. Good luck!