It’s a response that has nothing to do with children and everything to do with adults.
On Sunday, my family had a picnic. We went to Grey Lynn Park, lazed around in the autumn sun, and appreciated the corny, wholesome vibe of being together. My siblings and I are all aged between 39 and 45 years old, and my parents are in their 70s. For the most part, we have moved past aggravating each other and settled into the stage of life where being alive, well, and together is not taken for granted.
We all grew up with our adolescence and young adulthood firmly rooted in an analogue era. While our parents had a lot to contend with, they did not lie awake worrying about whether we were sending pictures of our breasts or genitalia to other kids on Snapchat only to have them shared with everyone else at school.
Like most people who’ve watched the outstanding new Netflix show, Adolescence, we couldn’t help but discuss it at our picnic. My husband and I watched the first three episodes on Saturday night in total silence.
The next day in the park, my eight-month-old niece sat on a rug and ate a mandarin, joy flashing across her face at its sweetness. She ate some chicken for the first time and seemed to like it. I held onto her as she tried to climb me, using my hair, glasses and cheeks to grip her way up the top of my head. I blew raspberries on her tummy and was proud as she remained unperturbed by the presence of our two dogs who must look like horses to her. She is a complete delight, and I love her dearly. I also told my brother that his daughter should never, ever have a phone and that I was hopeful a catastrophic event would force us all to live in the bush, where food, shelter, and rebuilding society without wifi or billionaires would occupy our days. According to parents I’ve talked to, the urge to flee to an imagined agrarian bolt hole is not an uncommon response to watching Adolescence.
I watched the fourth episode on Monday night. Tears rolled down my cheeks as it ended, the scale of parental impotence and grief laid bare. I turned to my husband and said, “I am glad we don’t have kids”.
The show is harrowing to watch, but I am more bothered by what it stirred in me. It’s a reaction I thought unimaginable not long ago, given the grief I’ve nursed about not being able to have children. That lump has diminished over time through a conscious decision to embrace my life as it is. A television show prompting me to say something that sounds more cold and callous each time it rolls around in my head suggests a more existential anxiety.
I don’t have children, and I imagine that for most people, certainly for the parents of children I know, any sense of life being more straightforward or less frightening without kids is overridden every day. They eat a mandarin for the first time, and it’s joyful. They hug you, make you proud, and sometimes confirm that being a parent might be the most challenging yet rewarding thing you will do.
My reaction is not an informed point of view. It’s driven by fear, feeling powerless and a frustration at our inability to speak about matters of importance honestly, without malice and with a degree of individual accountability.
Adolescence is fictional, but the influence of Andrew Tate and the manosphere, so cravenly fed by algorithms designed to exploit data points for profit, has been cited in real-world murder cases. In a recent case in the United Kingdom, prosecutors said the convicted killer’s actions of murdering three women with a crossbow were fuelled by the “violent misogyny promoted” by Tate. In March 2023, the UK Ministry of Justice convicted or cautioned almost 18,500 knife-related crimes. Approximately 17.3% of those offenders were between the ages of 10 and 17.
In our own country, it should be made clear that research to date acknowledges evidence gaps in several key areas related to misogyny, both online and offline, as well as gender-based violence. Correlation is not causation. In short, it’s complicated and inevitably, conclusions are drawn along ideological lines. Populist politicians use concerns about free speech and false flags about “wokeness” to spout lines designed to distract us and shore up their chunk of the vote. At the same time, the impact on generations of young men of gleeful and unchecked cancel culture and the rapid, necessary societal change that upended gender roles remains something we seem afraid to talk about.
There’s been some backlash to the show and its lack of storytelling about the victim, a young girl named Katie. To be clear, any talk of individual accountability is not aimed at women who have lost their lives at the hands of violent men, nor is being subjected to rapid-fire emoji bullying justification for murder. At the same time, criticisms of the show’s approach to Katie’s story miss the necessary focus on what the hell is going on with young men. As reported by The Spinoff on Monday, the only category that returns a positive net approval rating for Donald Trump in New Zealand is men aged under 40. That’s in step with global trends. The show also glosses over why young women might attempt to assert power in ways that young men view as emasculating.
In the face of tech companies whose accumulated wealth overtakes that of most nation states, talking about individual accountability and behaviour is also akin to haranguing people who have to drive cars to work while the 100 companies responsible for more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 go about their merry way. Two-sidedism isn’t a meritorious argument in that case, nor this one.
Donald Trump and his acolytes represent nothing good. I will die on that hill. I also think rendering the people who support him or think he might be an answer to their disenfranchisement as “two-dimensional profiles without history, family or feelings”, a description used recently by Canadian author and poet Ian William during a recent lecture, is precisely part of the problem that we often lay at the feet of “the other side”. As William says, we are verbally violent with each other, and this behaviour from adults spans the political and ideological spectrum.
As the mountains of cravenly accrued power become more challenging to scale and the old norms are set on fire, I increasingly wonder what good comes of hunting out faceless forces to blame. As we become increasingly forced into and comforted by swimming in familiar lanes, gulping at the air shared only by those who agree with us and spitting venom at those who don’t, the commonality we think we’re experiencing increasingly feels false, and the chasm between us wider. The more I think about it, the more this seems to have been by design. The powerlessness I felt watching Adolescence is not a manifestation of anger at governments or global tech titans but a frustration that we’re falling into a well-laid trap and flailing about looking to lay blame.
Thinkpieces about phones, kids, social media, and regulation have started to take on the same appearance as the Spiderman pointing meme. That’s not to say they’re not real solutions and justifiable demands, but they feel increasingly beyond the realms of possibility. In the US, home to most global technology companies, the second-in-command to the president is arguably Elon Musk, a global social media platform owner. Following the election of Trump, social media company CEOs and media moguls have gathered at the feet of the Trump administration to shore up their interests and have dismantled the pretences of caring about their role in civil society.
For me, the show has had the percussive effect of a staccato note in a loud and anxious symphony about concerns about our inability to turn back the tide on the degradation of civil society and discourse and the balancing of culpability, agency and impotence. Perhaps the very notion of civil discourse has withered on the vine already, but of the tools adults have in their arsenals, individual accountability for our behaviour and a belief in the merits of cultivating curiosity, critical thinking and empathy are the keys to maintaining a sense of agency. Agency is what those who are accumulating power and wealth to objectively evil ends want to rob us of.
Feeling paralysed in the face of the overwhelming systemic challenges Adolescence draws attention to is completely normal. The impulse to point outward – at algorithms, social media, government, and generational shifts – is correct, but perhaps the most radical act of resistance is decidedly internal.
If adults think it’s their god-given right to sling hooks at each other online without questioning whether they’re now just mindlessly participating in a failed experiment, why would we expect more from our kids? If we write off vast swathes of the population because of who they vote for or what they believe, lured into holding pens by the promise of false community and performing like monkeys for small doses of recognition and comfort, why would we expect children not to seek out the same?
Children are growing up in a world bereft of adult behaviour. No one should be off the hook.
