“Have you seen Adolescence on Netflix?” my daughter texted the other day.
If you haven’t watched the thought-provoking drama yet, about a 13-year-old boy, Jamie Miller, who is accused of murdering his classmate, you’ll certainly have heard about it.
My daughter had watched it with her boyfriend and they had both sat in silence afterwards, she said. “I can’t remember the last time something affected me like that,” she explained.
My daughter is not like me, who only had sisters. She grew up in a house of boys. Six brothers, to be precise. That’s a lot of Lynx Africa to endure. And a lot of male hormones to coexist alongside. She gets boys – the younger ones, and the teen ones. She perhaps even cuts them more slack than the average person. Except when it comes to loading the dishwasher (or any household chore), babysitting or basically any suggestion that I might lower my expectations of her brothers.
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She’s right.
But Adolescence isn’t about your everyday sibling relationships, or brothers with learned dishwasher-loading helplessness. Adolescence gives us a glimpse of a boy parent’s worst nightmare. And it reminds us, even when we think we know what’s going on in the lives of teenagers, how little we really know.
Raising boys is hard. Raising girls is hard too – though, at least as a mother, you were a teenage girl once, so you have some experience of what it’s like to be inside a teenage girl’s mind. You have some idea of the pressures, the insecurities, the potential dangers and the vulnerabilities. You know because you’ve lived it. Even if the setting and some outside influences have changed beyond recognition.
But teen boys, well that’s a whole different story when you’re a mother. Because we were never in their shoes. We don’t have that first-hand experience of what it’s like to try to find your way in the world as you move from boy to man. But just like with our girls, there are outside influences waiting to pounce. And through mediums we didn’t grow up with.
[ Adolescence: Five truths about our teenage boys we need to address urgentlyOpens in new window ]
Teen boys grow up in a world that often views them suspiciously, and negatively. Boys are thoughtless. Boys are disruptive. Boys are trouble. And there are probably few more vilified groups, in society, than teenage boys.
“Society is terrified of teenage boys,” one mother told me when I asked parents their thoughts on how teenage boys are perceived. Boys are viewed “with suspicion. And always assume the worst [of them],” another offered.
“Awfully. And I was one of those parents before I had my own,” one mother of sons admitted. “A bit thick. Not emotionally intelligent and not very capable. It’s sad, really,” another observed.
It’s “always assumed they’re trouble”, one parent explained, adding that the preferred uniform of most teenage boys, tracksuit and hoodie, was seen to indicate only one thing – trouble.
And although teachers who worked with boys offered some positive insights, including “most are really lovely”, they too acknowledged this was often not the general view of them. Not one parent who responded offered any suggestion that teenage boys were perceived positively by society.
Could they all be wrong in their observations? Or Houston, have we got a problem?
Because while Adolescence is a fictional drama, its purpose, actor Stephen Graham, who plays Eddie Miller, Jamie’s father, said, is to “hold a mirror up to society”. And judging by the reaction of viewers to the drama, it’s very much a case of mission accomplished.
Parents, teachers, politicians and even newspaper columnists are talking about it. Even though much of this isn’t new, and we’ve been aware of toxic influencers and internet dangers for some time. The story of a very typical 13-year-old, in a very typical family setting, has caught our attention. Perhaps because we see ourselves in it. And we see how easily it could be us, and how our boys could be influenced. And that dawning realisation is no bad thing.
But where do we go now that the conversation is in full flow? Will it make us ask questions of ourselves and society about how influencers with toxic messaging are gaining access to our children? Or why we fear our boys might be susceptible to being influenced?
And, rather than papering over the cracks, will we hold a mirror up to ourselves, question the danger of self-fulfilling prophecies, and ask, have we forgotten to look out for our boys?
