Like millions of others, I have just finished the rather unsettling experience of watching Netflix’s Adolescence.
While there has been a great deal written about the technical aspects of the production, and the almost cliched but interesting contemporary themes such as the dark and tangled and impenetrable subtleties of teenage online life and what some critics have called “the impact of digital radicalisation”, as well as the more common and accessible anthems of the age: misogyny, toxic masculinity, bullying and each family’s almost internecine political complexities, there are other things to pay attention to in this fascinating series.
Almost new to me and perhaps other slightly more grizzled parents was the concept of “incel”–perhaps not an entirely new concept –involuntarily celebate is a state in which many adolescent boys find themselves, when genital development and appetite outgrows the slightly more tardy flowering of their emotional and confidence levels. However, the radicalisation that the digital world provides for these alienated kids is something new and scary.
It can be an almost mollifying, a soothing abdication of responsibility to think that our teenagers live in a foreign digital world to which we adults have no access or understanding. That adults are almost entirely excluded from the conventions or pressures of this brave new world that we all inhabit, a world of unprecedented and exponentially changing digital challenges. But whether these challenges are more extreme than, say, an 18 year old standing up to their knees in the fetid mud of the trenches of the Great War, or scappering in panic as a dragon-prowed warship hoves into view, is an interesting point.
One of the most significant differences between the dragon-ship world and the “blue and red pill” world is the lack of experience parents (and teachers) have in dealing with the latter and adults’ feeling of helpless incapability in mediating the digital world for our children. AI is rapidly becoming ubiquitous and indispensable –and this has only been since November 2022 –Chat GPT ironically informs me.
All parents have some experience of the slightly more leisurely changes to the worlds we and our teenagers inhabit. We are certainly all aware of the cognitive, hormonal psychological developmental changes our teenagers go through, as did we all. Parents, even the youngest ones, do not, however, have experience of the inexorable, ubiquitous and exponential changes in the digital world our children inhabit.
This bemused alienation from his son’s reality is superbly portrayed by Stephen Graham (Eddie Miller) whom Jamie (Owen Cooper), significantly chooses to be his “appropriate adult” a phrase that weeps irony. Eddie’s most considered adult response to the “nonce” vandalism is to stump about in his overly tight tee shirt with his arms aggressively akimbo and an expression of Neanderthal perplexity on his permanently furrowed brow, shaking the very teeth from the heads of the graffiti suspects and shouting like a berserk vandal at the security guard of the store where he bought paint to splash, toddler-like, in a tantrum of frustration and unevolved emotional incoherence and juvenile impotence. In the light of the role modeling by his chosen “most appropriate adult”: isolation, impotent rage and violent anger, it is not entirely surprising that Jamie’s response to the provocations of his online sexual frustrations are extreme and brutally murderous.
Some critics have expressed surprise at Jamie’s choice of his father and not his seemingly more emotionally available mother, Manda (Christine Tremarco). Perhaps, they argue Jamie is apprehensive of disappointing her (although how he imagines a world in which that will not happen is difficult to conceive of). Jamie’s mother is, however, also stunted in her understanding of her son and the world of darkness he inhabits. Manda is vague, ineffectual, judgemental and painfully stereotypical. The best advice she can find to give her daughter Lisa (Amelie Pease) is that she (Lisa) find a boyfriend “who can look after her”. If there is one line of dialogue that articulates parental abdication of responsibility, perhaps this is it.
For many viewers, the genre warping format of the series was disappointing, and while the captivating elements of the conventional “whodunit” are from the outset resolved, for parents and teachers or anyone who has to do with the young, Adolescence, is more of a documentary and guide on adult responsibility. Would Jamie have made the choices he did if his “appropriate adult” had been a figure of sagacity and calm and an anchor of stable, assured guidance, even if this adult didn’t quite get the subtleties of cryptic emoji language? Is the fundamental problem in Jamie’s life the fact that his significant adults were finding it tricky to make sense of the difference between a pink heart and a red heart, or the fact that they were alienated from both of their children and in their own ways, were no better than children themselves?
Our adolescents do inhabit a sometimes savage, unforgiving and unerasable digital world, with all the dangers so easily associated with Adolescence –toxic masculinity, misogyny, misanthropy, bullying and –perhaps most of all – the corrosive effects of social media. There are however some pearls for parents to take from this murderous disaster.
Parents do not have to be the impotent spectators of the disasters and mysteries of their children’s (online) lives. Not only do they have a right to be involved, they have a responsibility and their children, whether they express this or not, need them to be.
Adults may not entirely understand Snapchat Streaks (for example) and the overwhelming stress of teens’ omnipresent diligence in attending to the “social standings of the day”, but parents still have a role to play in mediating this world for their children. Not every father would necessarily understand his daughter’s devastation with a poor performance of her TikTok dance video, but most can understand disappointment, frustration and self judgement and be able to offer a rational and considered adult perspective to guide, encourage and support.
Few parents would allow their child, physically, to traverse an environment in which they knew swindlers, predators, sexual and abusive exploiters lurked. Yet with little or no mediation, regulation or monitoring, many of our young ones navigate this digital nightmare almost entirely by themselves.
The etymology of the word “adolescence” is an interesting one with the obvious Latin roots of adolescere “to grow up, come to maturity, ripen”. The significance of ad does need to be emphasised: “to be nourished”. This is not the time or place, digital or otherwise, to stop the nourishing and to let adolescents grow without the deep and secure roots which parents ought to provide.
At one point Jamie says it: “what you think is more important than what’s true?” and while he was talking primarily about perceptions of his digital persona, the sentiment rings true also for how supported teenagers feel by their parents.