The Two Problems With Netflix’s “Adolescence”

Despite the shiny wrapper of prestige television, Netflix’s four-episode series, Adolescence, embodies what’s wrong in our parenting culture: pervasive fear and a lack of trust in our children. As the author of a book promoting less anxiety in parenting and more autonomy for children, I found the show deeply troubling in how it amplifies the very fears that contribute to anxious parenting behaviors already plaguing modern parenting.

The Problem With the Series: “Be Very Afraid”

There’s no ambiguity around the show’s take-home message: What your teens are doing online alone in their rooms could make them kill someone. This message is unavoidable, especially because the four one-hour episodes leave more questions than answers about the why of the crime. Experiencing cyberbullying and having contact with the toxic “manosphere” could reasonably create conditions for aggressive behavior, but they are not sufficient explanations for a gruesome murder. I kept waiting for more back story that never came.

My husband is a forensic psychologist who specializes in juvenile justice and has spent his career working with juvenile offenders, conducting court-ordered evaluations and risk assessments. He has been the psychologist in the room in episode three. After watching the show, he shared his expert opinion: although not impossible, it is highly atypical for a teen with Jamie’s history and background to so suddenly progress to the most violent of crimes.

Because the show does not satisfactorily answer what led this baby-faced 13-year-old to homicidal violence, that vacuum leads us to believe that it could happen to any baby-faced 13-year-old. Including our own child.

Yet, no matter how improbable the storyline, the fear seed has been planted. The stunning performances help us feel what it would be like for our child to have murdered another child. The final scene of the parents’ reckoning with their guilt, admitting they didn’t know what their son was doing online all those hours alone in his room and that they should have “done more,” wrecked me. It’s truly every parent’s worst fear, and the show played on that by design.

Some parents do need to pay more attention to their children, and a shot of fear that their kid could commit murder may work to motivate better oversight. However, parents who are already worried about their children’s digital lives do not need this level of hyperbolic fear. In fact, there’s evidence that parents’ stress and guilt about their child’s tech use predicts more problems in the parent-child relationship than the technology use itself.

For the sake of our relationships and our children’s well-being, parenting guidance needs a more nuanced view of how to approach parenting and technology. This show worked against that nuance and instead fed the ravenous beast of fear in parenting.

The Problem With Episode 2: Teenism

My other main gripe about this critically hailed series is how it represents teenagers, which has ramifications for how we treat them. Whether show creators intended to or not, whether viewers consciously noticed or not, the second episode waved a red flag that teenagers cannot be trusted to be autonomous.

The entire hour was shot at Jamie’s school, following the detectives through a maze of classrooms, one-on-one interviews with students, and even a chaotic fire drill that ended with a girl violently beating a boy while others cheered (this attack had a connection to the murder, but this story line went nowhere beyond this eruption of violence, of note committed by a Black girl). Throughout this school-centered episode, teens yelled at teachers, ran away from authority figures, and blatantly defied rules like a mob overthrowing public order.

Awestruck at the way the kids were portrayed, my husband and I wondered aloud, “Is this a school for troubled kids?” This is not how most teenagers go through the world.

The scenes illustrated the worst stereotypes of teenagers as out-of-control, disrespectful, and in need of adults to keep them in line. I caught at least two instances in the background of a teacher admonishing a student to “put away your phone”– a subtle hint at the source of the problem: Phones are making teens feral, to the point of violence and anarchy.

In her groundbreaking book, The Breakthrough Years, veteran child development researcher, Ellen Galinsky, shares evidence from her large-scale study that society unfairly stereotypes adolescents — and they feel it. She brands this phenomenon “teenism,” citing the top negative judgments of teens as moody/overly emotional, selfish/self-centered, awkward, lazy, and wild/impulsive. Not only are teens aware of being -ismed by adults, this stereotyping converts into discrimination, which has negative effects on their physical and psychological health.

Netflix’s Adolescence furthers many of these stereotypes that teens are already struggling to overcome — stereotypes that bring parents back to the natural conclusion that our teens need us to be more controlling. The message that teens need adults to be more controlling is not only false but harmful.

Autonomy Over Control

Instead of latching onto a vision of the modern teenager as a wild, rebellious, phone-addicted, anxious mess incapable of agency and independence, we need to expand the lens to see the whole of this generation – their struggle and their strengths. It’s harder to do this when a massively watched hit show encourages the exact opposite. The research shows consistently negative outcomes for children when parents have more controlling approaches, which undermine agency and autonomy.

As I document throughout my book, Autonomy-Supportive Parenting, decades of science rooted in self-determination theory make clear that when parents support their child’s autonomy, the child experiences an array of positive outcomes. Galinsky similarly emphasizes the science of supporting teens’ autonomy as a central component of raising thriving teens as part of her research in The Breakthrough Years. In yet another recent book, The Disengaged Teen, authors Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson, examine the current crisis of teens’ disengagement from learning and education. They integrate a wealth of robust science with real-life anecdotes to show a consistent solution to the disengagement problem: increasing teens’ agency and autonomy.

Constructive Concern

I came to the viewing experience with a lens filtered by my immersion in the current media landscape of fear in parenting, especially surrounding technology and phones. My antennae are finely tuned to the vibrations of this fear messaging.

If watching the show has caused you more anxiety and tech vigilance, and if that has come along with more conflict with your child, I hope this analysis can be a helpful re-frame to talk you off the ledge. If you weren’t really concerned about cyberbullying and the manosphere, maybe this show did its job by activating you to become more aware.

We undoubtedly need to have a sense of how our teens are spending their time, but parents as a collective have never known and will never know every minute of the goings-on in our teens’ lives. Nor should we, for the sake of adolescents developing their independence and autonomy. We can’t control every portal of influence; a truth arguably more indisputable now than in any other time in history.

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t be worried. We need a healthy level of concern to keep us aware of and engaged in our children’s tech lives. There’s clear evidence of threat in these tech lives, and we should stay informed of all the bad actors, from influencers monetizing the -isms to the social media companies intentionally capitalizing on addictive behaviors. There are real threats, and we can’t control everything our children do. We need to invest in our relationships with our children so we can maintain dialogues about these threats, better protecting our children against risk.

This critical role of parent-child dialogue brings up what matters most, and what we have the most influence over: our relationship with our child. We need to stay aware so we can have productive discussions with our children, understand their experience, and engage their critical thinking. Our teens are more likely to share what they’re struggling with and avoid the most terrible of outcomes when they feel like we will listen, support, understand, and not control them.

The problem is, that would just be boring TV.