I’m not a fan of horror films. In fact I avoid like the plague, anything on TV which I think will scare the life out of me.
When I saw the graphics coming up on Netflix last month trailing the big new Stephen Graham drama Adolescence; I wasn’t scared one bit. I was excited to watch it. After all everything he’s in is superb and I love a good old gritty northern drama.
Never did I imagine this series would instill more fear in me than any horror movie I’ve ever had the misfortune to watch.
See, axe murderers in the woods and zombie apocalypses and haunted mansions… they’re pretty unlikely to feature in my day-to-day reality I reckon. But the subject matter of Adolescence could, and I suspect already has to some extent, crept into my life. And I’m petrified it might be too late to get it out.
I’m not going to bore you with a brief synopsis of the show, you’ve likely seen it already (if you haven’t you must), and read and viewed countless commentaries on it. You’ll have heard celebrities and politicians weighing in on the terrifying issues it highlights, and if you’ve got kids, sons especially, you are probably feeling a lot like I am right now.
I have three boys. They’re 14, 12 and 7. I split with their Dad in 2022 and all our lives changed immeasurably. I had always been a freelancer and therefore largely able to be there for them whenever they needed me. Lots of quality time, homecooked meals and time in the great outdoors together. When things abruptly changed financially, that meant full time work for me, a lot more time on their own before and after school for the older two, and a lot more time in childcare for the youngest. It meant a pretty rushed, stressful home life with less time to talk, TV dinners hurriedly served in between work finishing and football training starting… and it meant a lot more screen time.
It pains me to admit that. And it confuses me as to how the time spent scrolling on phones and staring goggle-eyed at YouTube crept in; but undoubtedly it has. Although they’re super sporty active boys, the eldest two are undoubtedly addicted to their phones. They doom scroll through breakfast, hunched over, ending up late for school. They don’t hear me when I speak to them, so engrossed are they in whatever trash it is they’re imbibing.
And so to the point of Adolescence… what are my children, what are your children actually watching? The shameful truth, which has plagued my mind since I watched the show; is that I don’t really know. I tell myself it’s all football-related, maybe some stupid American teenage pranksters filling their parents bedrooms with styrofoam balls. I know the majority of what I’ve heard sounds like inane drivel and every day I ask them what that rubbish is they’re listening to… and then I walk out of the door and get onto the next household task or head off to work without ever getting a satisfactory answer. I put it to the back of my mind. I’m too busy.
I have often thought of one of my favourite quotes whilst watching them stupefied on their devices. It’s by the US author Jim Rohn:
Stand guard at the gates of your mind.
It relates to the importance of moderating and being mindful of what we allow into our minds, we can so easily become what we consume.
Adolescence is the ultimate wake up call for parents of young boys because it’s forced us to ask ourselves; have we been standing guard at the gates of our childrens minds? The minds of our vulnerable, naive, immature children. Their pre-frontal cortex’s nowhere near developed. Have we been doing our jobs as parents to stand guard at the gates of their minds? In the way that we stand guard over what time they physically come home from playing out with their friends? The way we stand guard over what they eat, making sure sugar doesn’t rot their teeth and saturated fats don’t lead them to obesity? The way we stand guard over their schooling and making sure they get their homework in on time and ensuring they do enough extra-curricular activities and make solid friendships?
The answer to this question, for me; is no. Adolescence has revealed to me how incredibly remiss I’ve been about what online content I have allowed them to consume.
To be clear; I don’t know they’ve been looking at Andrew Tate or any of the other delightful misogynistic influencers who normalise and encourage rape, violence against women and girls, coercive control and abuse. But… I don’t know that they haven’t either.
I’ve had the emails from school alerting me to the dangers of different extremists from the manosphere circulating online. Hell, I’ve even written for this very publication a couple of years back about the importance of talking to our children about Andrew Tate. But at the same time I’ve also read those school emails and after a quick two minute chat with the boys I’ve told myself that my sons are just not that type of boy. That there’s no way they’d have any interest in any of these ‘influencers’ and that if any of it came up on their feeds they’d skip past it and onto the next Messi Greatest Goals Of All Time montage. They’ve been raised to respect women, they’re surrounded by fantastic females and lots of great male role models too. So surely I don’t need to overthink these emails fom school.
In short, I’ve spent more time talking to them about the importance of brushing their teeth than I have about this pervasive and growing culture which is sweeping through the boys and young men of their generation. As the series showed, they are literally speaking a language we don’t speak, made up of emoji’s and acronyms far beyond the understanding of surely 99% of parents.
So now that I’ve had my wake-up call, what the hell can I do about it? How can I put the genie back in the bottle? I can’t take their phones off them, I can’t give up work and decide to relocate to the countryside with no wifi and live like The Waltons.
The fantastic thing about Adolescence is that it has forced a very necessary and long overdue conversation between police, government and policy-makers. There is talk of a smart-phone age limit being set, of more public money for youth centres and anti-radicalisation schemes. But what about little old me? What can I do now, tangibly, to protect my sons?
I’ve been doing a lot of reading this past week and the key takeaways aren’t surprising, but it doesn’t mean they’re easy fixes.
● We need to stop burying our heads in the sand. So for me, that means I need to stop telling myself they’re just playing FIFA up there in their bedrooms and check it’s not one of the huge selection of video games which incorporate violence against women. I need to stop blindly assuming that online radicalisation only happens to other peoples kids.
● We need to have the uncomfortable conversations. Yes, I’m aware my 14 year old will want the ground to swallow him up when I ask him if he’s viewing online pornography, if his friends are, whether misogynistic content about girls from school gets talked about, or shared. But like all relationships in life, the only way to deal with this issue is to keep gently trying to communicate openly. To make me and our home a safe space to talk about previously taboo things, and hope that all my sons in time are able to feel supported and never isolated.
● We need to set boundaries around device usage. I won’t lie, this is the one I’m dreading the most. It’s going to be tough to enforce no doom-scrolling at meal-times, before school, in the hours before bed. I’ve let it get out of hand, caught up in the day-to-day chaos.
But nothing worth having comes easy. And I want so much to set my children free from tech addiction. This means I need to role model that behaviour myself and be super mindful of the time I spend on my phone.
● We need to invest time in face-to-face interactions with our kids. It’s a no-brainer isn’t it? Of course we do. Of course we need to stop using screens as babysitters, as pacifiers, as a numbing agent. And again this won’t be easy. They won’t want to go for a walk with me instead of watching TikTok. They won’t want to help me cook instead of playing on their Xbox. But just as I go though the pain barrier to fight with them to eat vegetables, and clean their teeth and do their homework; this is a fight I mustn’t lose. It’s the most important one of all.
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