Adolescence
Netflix’s new hit show Adolescence plays a vital role in reintroducing why it is essential to know what your children are watching, streaming, entertaining, and discussing with their social circles. The narrative of helicopter parents has resurfaced as well, namely, how some parents become totalitarian overlords controlling every facet and thought their children have, and this mode of parenting has numerous negative implications on children.
Adolescence follows parents Eddie Miller and Mandie Miller (Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco) and their son, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), who is accused of and later found guilty of stabbing a classmate, Katie (Emilia Holliday). Ashley Walters, Top Boy alum, stars as DI Luke Bascombe alongside Faye Marsay as DS Misha Frank. Erin Doherty plays perhaps the world’s most patient child psychologist, Briony Ariston, who later interviews the incarcerated Jamie Miller in an attempt to evaluate his mental ability to stand trial. Her interview with Jamie Miller becomes the most biting sequence in the four-episode limited series.
If you’ve sat through the show you understand that the writers did a phenomenal job in portraying to us just how easy it is for online social spheres, like the incel movement, Andrew Tate, and their ilk, to influence and distort young men into women hating brutes. The issue here is social and para-social. Young men, devoid of either guidance or healthy authority figures in life, develop ulterior realities within these online circles, becoming radicalized in weeks, whereas the process of radicalization in a pre-internet world took months, if not years. Incels (involuntary celibate) are men who believe the myth that 80% of women choose to 20% of men, and the remaining men, the less attractive ones, are made to experience a fruitless and loveless life. The rage from being excluded and denied affection, love, and pleasure is bottled, incensed, and turned into a weapon of violence against women the world over.
Jamie Miller is radicalized by such destructive rhetoric. It all culminates when he asks his classmate, Katie, on a date after many of his classmates call her ugly, unattractive, and “flat” mentioning her figure. His attempt at romantics comes from a place of desperation, thinking that she will say yes to him because no one else thinks she’s attractive. When she rebuffs his advances and then mocks them online to her friends via Instagram post comment sections, he meets up with her in an empty parking lot late at night and takes her life with a knife.
Jamie is arrested and charged with murder. He denies the crime perfusely, convincing his father that he would never harm a soul. Once he is confronted with CCTV footage of his crime, he crumbles. His dad no longer makes eye contact with him. Jamie, an adolescent raised in a loving middle-class, blue-collar family home, becomes a violent, bloodthirsty, unrepentent woman-hating killer.
My Thoughts
I have been blessed with the luxury of fathering four healthy, loving, fun, and vibrant girls. This show strikes a different cord for me because I know my children are growing up in a world where men, seemingly innocent of any wrongdoing, could be fabricating plans to kill them simply because of their gender and biology.
Autonomy and Self-Control
Women are not responsible for your feelings.
What I mean is that when men are experiencing rejection, isolation, and disappointment, it is their imperative (OUR IMPERATIVE) to navigate these emotions with accredited therapists, community members of trust and character, and friends who can help them open up about these sentiments. The feeling of loneliness mixed with depression and social ostracism can and – with enough time – will lead the individual to self-harm or harm others. Human beings are, by design and biology, social creatures, and being denied a healthy social environment turns us into beasts of burden.
Therefore, when women do not accept your romantic advances, if you’re courageous enough to be respectful and thoughtful when asking them out, and, in light of this, your invitation is denied, you must thank her for her time and move on with your day. There are numerous fish in the sea, and you will, one day, find someone to share your life and love with. Becoming a fiend because a woman you fantasized over denied you is a YOU problem, not a HER problem.
Do not transform your entire personality into that of a disgruntled man because one or several women do not want to date you. Women are children of God, human beings, imbued with sacred life, and have autonomy and agency to choose who they want to involve themselves with and when. The same goes for men. Therefore, when decisions are made over whether or not she wants to date you or not, accept it and move on.
Incels, Red Pill, Tate, Rogan, and Jordan Peterson
I cannot emphasize just how bad these horrible men are for young men and men in general. Patriarchy is a cancer within society (and this is not to say that matriarchy is better, simply because it is women in power. All forms of hierarchies where inequality, discrimination, and prejudice play a role must be unequivocally condemned.) And allowing these men and their ilk to influence your headspace in 2025 is gullibility at best and disingenuous ignorance at worst.
You cannot continue down the YouTube path of information gathering in these spheres knowing that incels become mass killers, red pill ideology leads to misogyny, the Tate brothers are human traffickers, Rogan is an anti-science nutcase, and Peterson is the voice-piece for the emotionally unstable and pseudo-oppressed white men of privilge who now have to share power with women and minorities.
Parenting and Surveillance
Parenting is a challenge even in the best possible scenario. Exhaustion, stress, responsibilities, diet, nutrition, exercise, and more, on the part of parents alone, is quite the task. And then managing the same for your child or children is final boss level insanely stressful stuff. But, we must admit that our children did not ask to come into this world. Our actions, all 57 seconds of them, for some, initiated their journey from heaven into this world.
Therefore, we must be cognizant that we now have a life-long responsibility to raise these innocent human beings correctly, making them not just the best possible versions of ourselves but also healthy and thriving members of society. It is OUR responsibility to give them foundational knowledge about life, love, family, the world, morals, ethics, social life, laws, and their responsibility to their fellow human being.
Now, this doesn’t always go as planned. We fail. We blunder. We yell. We lose our temper. We become their worst enemy while being their provider. We can introduce them to authoritarian power dynamics long before they’re able to understand and define authoritarianism, power, and dynamics.
Parenting is challenging. It is demanding. It is a paradox because it is a life-draining and life-giving experience. While we lose so much of ourselves in our children, we are at the same time being rewarded for giving them what they need to thrive in life. Failure happens but it must not be the end goal.
Apologize. Understand. Grow.
And, now, parenting and surveillance. The term surveillance means to have oversight, supervise, or to be watchful or vigilant over someone or something over time. It even means that we spy on one another. Hence, government agencies and law enforcement agencies surveil certain persons or locations for potential evidence of criminal activity.
Parents who surveil or monitor their children’s digital content and communications tend to have a better grasp of what is going on in their kids’ minds. If they’re consuming copious amounts of Bluey, chances are they’ll reference Bluey quotes. If they’re consuming Dragon Ball Z, you best believe they’ll be screaming from sun up to sun down to transform into Super Saiyan super warriors to fight evil human-eating space aliens.
But if your children are consuming content that explicitly or implicitly diminishes the value of women or men, content that mocks disabilities, videos that disparage people who are different, sermons that condemn immigrants, or influencers who emphasize materialism, popularity, West European and North American white beauty standards, and affluence, you will find that your children are more prone to becoming bullies, experiencing depression, chemical dependency, and suicidal tendencies.
I’m of the flavor that parents should keep a “healthy” awareness and interconnectedness with what it is their children are consuming. I say healthy because over-surveillance can stunt a child’s ability to become autonomous and independent. Knowing whether your child is watching adult content is one thing, but knowing whether they ate Doritos for lunch instead of the strawberries you packed for them borders on cultic parenting behavior. Healthy monitoring includes but is not limited to conversations about online content, the extremes, the acceptables, and the negotiables after certain maturity stages are reached. It includes safeguarding your internet services to block or limit extreme, violent, and disparaging content. It also involves being able to access your child’s device remotely, in extreme and I mean extreme cases.
If you want your child to hate you, simply intrude on their privacy numerous times, invalidating them and their autonomy, without cause or case for doing so.
Therefore, the best route, and I am speaking for myself here, is to have open and continuous conversations with your children about life, love, God, money, social dynamics, Marxist views of classwarfare, and the socioeconomic factors behind racism and sexism at place in ecoterrorism and settler colonialism. Your children are intelligent, and if you treat them as such, you will be rewarded with honesty and openness when interacting with them.
Our children (I’m a millennial) will have more access to information and ease of attaining that information via the web and numerous apps (AI now included in the mix) than we ever have. What that means is that the hyperspeed in which they consume content will outpace our ability to manage their content. What we watched in weeks, they will consume in days. What took us years to learn, they will master in hours. With this shift, we will become, with time, somewhat obsolete to them as arbiters of knowledge and information. That is fine. Our children becoming more intelligent than us is a great thing. What must remain and grow is the two-way highway of communication and love between us.
It is said that parents are nurturers, coaches, and later in life, advisors. Our responsibilities shift and change with each child depending on their stage in life and with that we release more and more our grip of their emotional, developmental, psychological, social, and yes, financial life. This is natural. This is normal. This is life.
“This is the way.”
When Feces Hits The Fan
What then can we do when we have been the best possible parents in the world, and our children falter, fail, and commit heinous crimes?
As parents, we must acknowledge that yes, we can and must do our very best. We must be near perfect as parents. But, even there, in our hagiographical sphere, the truth is that our children, as adolescents, teenagers, young adults, adults, and beyond, will make their own life choices. For them to succeed, they must be allowed to fail. The type of failure, however, isn’t always within our control.
They will choose love or hate. They will choose God or gods or agnosticism or no gods or the denial of the argument for metaphysical entities altogether.
They will choose a healthy life, a healthy diet, loving friendships and relationships, a wholesome profession, or several. They may travel the world or find joy raising cattle to supply local markets with dairy products. They will become vegetarians or vegans, or worse, they may cheer for Argentina’s, Portugal’s, or Germany’s national football clubs. (God forbid.)
Or your children may become mass killers, thieves, predators, cannibals, terrorists, fraudsters, or prosperity gospel preachers. Technically, a prosperity gospel preacher is a fraudster.
If this is the case, you must acknowledge that even doing your best as a parent does not guarantee your child will make the best decisions in life (as this show explains) and that the WHY behind their decisions isn’t always as clear. Pursuing an answer to unanswerables is Sisyphean chasing after the wind.
Your responsibility is to do your best, love them, teach them, steer them when and where possible, guide them, correct them, and imbue respect, kindness, and laughter into them to launch them forward into the world.
Conclusion
Adolescence was a great limited series that revives the conversation on misogyny, online indoctrination and radicalization, violence against women, the susceptibility of youth being prone to horrible content and influences, true crime, detective work, and the social dynamics at play that cause or at least produce the soil for hate and violence in youth to flourish.
I want to make note that the show focused exponentially more on the perpetrator, Jamie Miller, than it did on his victim, Katie. An intentional part of the writing, I believe, which reflects reality. Too often, the media focuses on the heinousness of the crime and the criminal responsible, forgetting the life, memory, and dignity of the victim or victims.
I want to take a moment to remember and acknowledge every woman who was taken away from us due to misogyny and feminicide.
– – –
It is a great show but not the best show. It is a challenging show, but it does not answer all the questions it introduces. This is by design. Life does not always have all the answers when tragedy strikes. It is a good portrayal of how criminals are caught but not very accurate about how often criminals get caught, charged, and indicted. Too often violent criminals offend repeatedly for years without facing justice.
Watch it. Don’t. Enjoy it. Hate it. But do talk about it with your children. Watch it with your children. Discuss it with them on and off for the next week or two. And, when you get the chance, truly analyze and rewatch episode 3, where Jamie Miller is interviewed by a child psychologist. It is possibly a masterpiece of an episode. How the perpetrator evolves and shapeshifts from an innocuous adolescent into an imposing brute in seconds, most of the time without much or any reason. It was truly disturbing to watch. And this mannerism, these behaviors, these flawed character traits often go unnoticed in the real world until the man behind the mask, the perpetrator and abuser, reveals his true nature to his next victim.
And by then, it is too late.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
Currently Reading
Best Work
Display photo.
Olivet Theory 