I recently watched the Netflix TV series Adolescence. Filmed in the UK, it follows what happens after 13-year-old Jamie Miller (played by Owen Cooper) is arrested for the violent murder of a classmate.
It wasn’t easy watching, although the artistry and the storytelling were masterful. It did its job in forcing you to consider your own experience as a parent against the big question the show poses: How did such a horrific outcome stem from what seems a reasonably sound and good set of parents?
Being centred on a knife-crime it’s probably less relevant in Australia than it is in the UK, where that is a growing problem, but it also puts a finger on a number of other issues in the back of many people’s minds when it comes to raising children.
First, it taps into the anxiety of parents with regard to their kids’ Internet usage. Significant across the series is the incomprehension of the adults about what is going on with their kids, who seem to be living in a completely different realm.
And it’s true that the older generation, my generation, are digital immigrants in their children’s digital world. We are quite coherent in it and can navigate it well when we need or want to, but we still think like people from elsewhere while our children are true natives.
The concept of “disconnecting” from it for the sake of mental health or other reasons simply doesn’t occur to them because it is their natural habitat.
The show also highlights ways the education system is struggling. The teachers in the show are blamed in part for not preventing some of the occurrences leading to the murder. But at one stage, the lead detective says the perpetrator’s school is a “holding pen,” expressing that there are unfair and unjust expectations placed upon teachers.
The show works well at implying it would be impossible to keep track of everything occurring in the children’s lives—especially in a world where it’s expected parents work long hours and spend nearly all day, every day, apart from their kids, a reality that we have slid into in the last two decades or so.
Finally, at the core of Adolescence is an underlying issue with masculinity. It demonstrates what happens when you saturate young men in a culture which measures them by their sexual activity. The fact that Jamie, at 13, is worried by his lack of sexual experience is astounding.
It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that the show or its main character has simply been influenced by particular people such as Andrew Tate, whose “80/20 rule”—that 80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men—only gets a mention.
Rather, it shows a boy conditioned by and entrenched within a hyper-sexualised culture that demands he be sexually attractive and active above all else, rather than simply a boy who may make friends, play sport, read books, and generally function within a normal social milieu.
The show hits us so hard because we are forced to confront the fact that we haven’t been examples of positive, beautiful, good sexuality ourselves to counter this toxic culture. We may seek to hide any notion of our sexuality from our children or repress it, but if we don’t talk about it with them, Andrew Tate and others like him will fill, and have filled, the void.
The Song of Songs (in the Old Testament) is a beautiful book of erotic poetry expressing the healthy physical desire between a young husband and wife. In Hebrew culture, a family reads the entirety of The Song of Songs out loud on the evening before the Passover.
Their children and adolescents are brought up in a culture where sexual love is presented as good and beautiful, which blossoms within the proper boundaries of marriage. They are less likely to be enticed by cheap and toxic imitations of love.
For Christians, St Paul always said we should focus on what is good, true and beautiful. When I talk to Year 10 students about this, I always say that God wants you to have the best sex life possible. And when we whittle this idea down, and we discuss what it means to be in a healthy relationship, to not commit adultery, we discover that the best way to achieve this is through the sacrament of matrimony.
When they discover that, the students learn that marriage is the way God encourages us to live fully in a context where our sexuality flourishes best.
The western Christian world has done a poor PR job of late in discussing the importance of matrimony in allowing our masculinity and femininity to flourish within the context of a healthy, respectful and self-sacrificing love.
There are parliamentary proposals in the United Kingdom to screen Adolescence to teenagers in schools, but I believe that would run contrary to the show’s message, which is that teens are awfully unequipped to deal with these themes.
But parents should watch it to help them be aware of how far removed their world is from their children’s digital world. They should watch it as a catalyst for conversation, and a reassessment of their own lives and priorities and how much time they should spend with their children discussing these issues.
We all need to have a good, hard look at the world our children are actually growing up in and assess whether or not they are happy, whether we should be making adjustments towards more open communication with them about broad issues concerning masculinity and femininity.
Adolescence might just be the spark that gets conversation, and cultural change occurring when it comes to what it means to be a man, and offer more joyful, positive and wholesome advice in this area.
*As told to Alex Woolnough. Dr Peter Holmes is the author of Redeeming Masculinity: A Catholic Theology of Masculinity.