In Netflix’s Adolescence, 13-year-old Jamie is accused of murdering a female classmate. He goes behind bars, and his parents are trying to understand the bureaucratic process and cope. The four-part series explores the issue of growing up online and what social media pressures can do to lonely, angry young men. It also looks at how families pass on male violence through generations.
Erica Shoemaker, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and a USC professor, says, “Jamie is both a sad, scared, and sensitive little boy who desperately wants to be liked. And he is a boy who is learning how to intimidate other people and who murdered another girl. … We see his parents, who are good people … who still had this horrible thing happen. So I like the complexity of it.”
She also references The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt’s point that parents strongly protect their kids in real life — not allowing them to go to the park or shopping center alone — but allow unbridled freedom online.
The show’s creators wanted this family to look like every family out there, Shoemaker says, and it’s hard for her to blame the parents for what ultimately happened.
However, she says she was struck by the dad’s anger in the series — he threw bicycles at kids and experienced uncontrolled outbursts — but so much of that anger was in response to humiliation and shame.
“The father is losing his temper in the fourth episode … because these boys have scrawled a slur on the side of his car, and he catches the boys. … What he's yelling at them is like, ‘Don't laugh at me.’ … You just see this intolerance for anyone making you small, and I think the sense that you have to stand up for yourself if you're a man.”
She adds that a tragic aspect of this story is the father taking Jamie to sports to toughen him up, but ends up feeling ashamed of him.
“I think Jamie remembers that lesson, and he can't be strong in the context of sports. But as he grows up and is trying to grow into manhood, he tries to be strong in this different way, which is really very dangerous and actually not consistent with the father's and family's values about how to conduct yourself as a man.”
Another issue: Jamie didn’t seem to have supportive friends. Shoemaker points to essayist and culture critic Ruth Whippman’s work around the decline of friendship among boys. Whippman has written that for these boys, the internet has become a substitute for both friends and parents.
In the series, Jamie also has a therapist, with whom he experiences both tension and connection. “She's saying, ‘Look, I was here to do this professional task.’ … She was there as a servant of the court. She is using skills that therapists use about how to engage kids and get kids to talk with you. And he was so hungry for someone to be kind and care about him that he is just devastated when it's revealed that … she's finished her job,” Shoemaker says.
At the end of the show, did Shoemaker feel like she understood Jamie? Not fully, she admits. “His relationship with his dad wasn't great. He didn't have good friends. He spent too much time online, maybe doing bad things. I'm not sure it's sufficient to say how he got to that single horrible act. I can't fill in the narrative piece that would make it feel like, ‘I get it.’”
As for general audience responses to the series, Shoemaker says it’s great that people are discussing how to get kids off phones more, and ensure that the online content they’re consuming aligns with their parents’ values in real life.
She points out, “LA Unified now has a cell phone ban in schools, which I think is imperfect, but great. I think it is much better that kids are off their phone in school. And I'm hoping that we will eventually have some technological tools such that we can keep kids out of porn, keep kids out of very negative content online.”