Adolescence is heartbreaking and brilliant. But it has one crucial flaw

Warning: This column contains spoilers.

It’s wonderful that the internet is lighting up over the new Netflix series Adolescence.

This intimate, incredibly moving series is filmmaking at its very best, artfully depicting the forces acting on teenagers and their families today. Everyone who watches it can feel deep empathy for the family and what happens to them. And it mirrors the real-life headlines we see almost every day.

Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller and Owen Cooper as his son Jamie in Adolescence.Credit: Netflix

Adolescence shows how one family’s lives spiral when 13-year-old Jamie is arrested and charged with the murder of a female classmate, Katie. Jamie’s father, Eddie, initially refuses to believe his son could have committed such a crime until he is shown CCTV footage of Jamie attacking Katie after a late-night argument.

There are positives – the brave way that fathers have stepped away from the violence they experienced in their own childhoods (and how hard that is without help).

Jamie’s dad deeply cares, even as he struggles with his own childhood trauma. The love and support, the absence of blame, between husband and wife, and daughter. But the negatives are made glaringly clear.

A whole episode is spent depicting the awfulness of some schools where there is so little proper engagement between young people and teachers beyond barely keeping order. (The filmmakers pointedly include a hapless and under-equipped male teacher, barely past his own adolescence).

And, of course, the harm inflicted on childhood and young love by the intrusion of ugly and violent pornography into the bedrooms of a generation. How can we expect kids to navigate early sexuality and romance when such a debased view of the opposite gender is flooded into their eyeballs and their hearts and minds?

Finally – the poisoned icing on the cake – the channelling of all this confusion and mistrust between boys and girls into tangible hate by opportunistic idiot influencers.

There is only one flaw I can find in the program, but it’s an important one. Its premise is “How could this happen in a loving family?” In fact, while what happens to Jamie is – just – plausible, it is very unlikely. The risk factors for young people who kill are well studied – and uppermost is that they have a violent home. And Jamie did not. And they have a mum who has so many struggles of her own emotionally that she does not bond with her child, so he has, in the jargon of today, “attachment issues”. He pathologically transfers these onto women or girls. Jamie had a loving mum, a dad and a sister who cared. His dad had a hard job that took him away for long hours, and he struggled with anger, but he never hit his children.

The only error Jamie’s fictional parents made was one made by a whole generation of parents, really, until we began to get a handle on this. I wrote about it from the early 2000s, though many academics were weak on it or even opposed it. Kids should not have online devices in bedrooms. The damage of pornography lies in the dosage. Occasionally seeing something is going to happen, but getting addicted and programmed into violent misogyny – requires daily access in privacy, and that is something that a parent can prevent. The same is true for online influencers. Jamie is 13: he should never have been cruising the darker alleyways of the internet.

The hope for turning this around lies in practices and programs that I have been writing about for years now. Schools where both good women and good men are deeply engaged with individual kids and the culture of boyhood and girlhood that develops in their school. Teachers must be fearless around discussing these topics and interacting, not preaching but eliciting empathy by offering it in the first place. Abandoning the idea of “visiting speakers” of dubious credentials who merely tick a box on consent education. Attitude change is a deep shift; it needs adults the child trusts in long-term programs to handle the transition to healthy manhood and womanhood.

Our best hope lies in what I have given a life’s work to – the emergence in the culture of safe and warm fathering. And it is happening. Fathers today want to be close to their kids. Bluey’s dad is not an impossible ideal; he is the furry face of modern parenthood.

Bluey’s father Bandit shows us how fatherhood should be.Credit: Ludo Studio

Hate-filled online influencers are certainly a large problem, but they simply step into the ground made fertile by the absence of better role models and the sheer loneliness of the adolescent boy (or adult male, for that matter).

Boyhood should not be spent in darkened rooms. Warmth and inclusion, community life, chances to meet and relate to real girls, and schools where teachers are relational rather than just information machines all help boys navigate the challenging world of relating happily and equally to girls and, one day, to women. Taken together, they mitigate against the awful outcomes depicted in Adolescence. But it starts with whose voices and attitudes we allow to be the loudest in our children’s lives.

Steve Biddulph is the author of Raising Boys, The New Manhood, and Wild Creature Mind.