Watching 'Adolescence' After 10+ Years Writing About Boys

Parents are terrified, but is our fear justified?

If you’re one of the people who urged me to watch Adolescence, thank you. If you’re my friend Stephanie, who told me every detail of the show after I turned it off just a few minutes in, thank you even more. Without that help, I wouldn’t have gone back to finish it, as the first fifteen minutes were too upsetting to for me to proceed without spoilers.

I’m glad I went back after she briefed me. Everything you’ve heard about it is true, the miniseries is fantastic. But, like so many of my colleagues covering boys, I didn’t want to write about it.

As you likely know, Christopher Pepper and I just finished writing Talk To Your Boys, a conversation guide for parents and caregivers of adolescent boys (available for pre-order now), so the problems caused by boys and young men are nothing new to me. I’ve also been writing and speaking about some of the scariest trends among tween and teen boys for years, covering painful and uncomfortable topics.

That’s probably why I wasn’t shocked by the accusations leveled against Jamie — or how he became dangerous. We hear it every day … but it’s not the whole story.

What Adolescence gets right about teenage boys

The internet will become your child’s primary teacher — if you let let it

I was surprised at how exactly right they got the lives of many young people today: the hopelessness too many working and middle class kids experience at school, the inadequacy of their resources, the ways in which some boys — even ones with hard-working, positive male role models at home — can find themselves lured into a mindset that makes them believe they are victims all while encouraging to victimize others.

While parents know that dangers lurk in the vast online sea, too often we focus on the wrong threats at the wrong time. Exposure to adult sexual material, violent material, and kidnappers are a real threat to our kids’ well-being, but mostly at younger ages. Older kids may see this material, but feel well-prepared to handle it or have already been exposed and somewhat desensitized (which is also a bad thing, but a discussion for another day).

What worries those of us who are watching these spaces and seeing the effects of online exposure on adolescent boys are the people selling illicit substances on social media, using sexual material (real or AI-generated) as blackmail, and ideological predators — the adults who target young people online with the intention of indoctrinating them into hate-based mentality.

Ideological predators don’t reach our kids by telling them to hate somebody. They don’t peddle racism like a Klansmen or sexism like some piggish slob in a dirty undershirt who demands his wife bring him a beer and a TV dinner. They sell their ideology using empowerment and preying on the sadness, loneliness and fear adolescent boys often experience.

‘Red Pill’ and the 80/20 Myth

The writers and director clearly also understand the role of “red pill” propaganda. They use the 80/20 myth to illustrate the ways in which propaganda and misinformation can cause people to make bad choices.`

If you don’t know the 80/20 myth, it is based on “data” collected and reported by a dating app that implies 80% of women want to date only 20% of men.

Yes, the 80/20 rule comes from an app — not a research organization like Pew, not a graduate student working on a thesis, and not even from an advertising firm doing surveys. It isn’t peer-reviewed and it’s never been replicated. It is in-app data.

It doesn’t even come from a wide variety of dating apps — just one. That’s why it’s so tragic to see these numbers used to explain why so many boys and young men feel hopeless — including by a noteworthy professor at a well-respected institution who went viral spreading it —without any sort of caveat.

In a post on Medium, Lexie Janson sums up most of my critiques of the 80/20 myth:

1. Tinder is full of bots. Heck, the issue is big enough that a google search of “tinder bots” will give you pages after pages of “how to spot a bot” or “how to report a bot”.

2. A lot of men swipe on every woman without looking. — There is an actual study that has calculated that men swipe on 61% of women. I know men that swipe on everyone, and there are whole reddit threads about this phenomenon.

3. Tinder is also full of… let’s call it professional accounts. This involves dating coaches, prostitutes (male and female) and more.

4. Those stats only mention “women swiping on men” it does not include LGBTQ+ (Before you grab that pitchfork — Think of bisexuals for example).

I’ve been hollering about this “stat” for more than a year (and probably driving Christopher nuts with my annoyance at the people who cite it — some of whom are important influencers in this space!), so you can imagine the shout I let out when I heard it said by a boy in Adolescence.

YES! I thought. VALIDATION! This myth is out there and doing actual harm.

Jamie’s parents are good people who raised a seemingly bad kid

Most importantly, the creators of Adolescence got it right when they made Jamie’s parents good people. Average, normal, good people who raised a child that may actually be a monster. While this type of contrast is rare, it does happen.

While a troubled childhood raises the risk of a child growing into a troubled adult, not all dangerous boys and men come from dangerous situations and that is the point the creators of Adolescence say they wanted to drive home.

Need a real life example?

Remember Dylan Klebold, who, along with another boy from a seemingly normal home, who committed 1999 Columbine massacre? By all accounts, he had a good mom (Sue Klebold) who did everything she believed possible to raise a good man. After her son’s horrific actions ended the lives of 12 students and one teacher (and set a horrifying precedence for school shootings that has spanned three decades — and counting), she tried to figure out where she failed. She wanted other parents to understand what happened, so we could help prevent our kids from turning into killers.

Boys and young men are angry at (and likely afraid of) girls and women

If you’re a Generation X woman, like I am, you may laugh at the notion that girls and women hold power over men in our patriarchal society, but I’m going to ask you to pause that reaction for just a moment to understand one thing: Gen Z and younger boys often believe their female peers hold all of the social power.

This may be due to girls’ earlier sexual and emotional development, but it’s also due to what they’re told online: That girls and women use our allure to “control” them. These perspectives are shared by the manosphere, who urge our boys to take back this power by sleeping with a ton of women, but marrying a woman who has a low “body count”.

This mentality isn’t new. For generations, patriarchal society has forced women and girls to be the “sexual gatekeepers” in our society. We are assigned the task of being attractive to boys and men, but not so attractive that we tempt them. In addition, “No means no” sex education taught a generation or more of boys that their job was to see how far they could get with a girl — their only obligation being to stop when told to stop.

We now know that “No means no” is better than nothing, but it puts the responsibility on girls to stop people from doing more harm, after some may already have been done. “Yes means yes” education empowers everyone to help prevent assault (or simply making someone uncomfortable) from happening in the first place. In essence, "Yes means yes” just means to ask someone how they feel before you do the thing, and waiting until you receive a freely-given, enthusiastic “yes” before proceeding.

What does this have to do with Adolescence? After generations of teaching boys that they should push a girl as far as they can, and making girls the only thing that stops them from “scoring” (attention, a date, a kiss, a sext, sex).

Under this model, when boys don’t get what they want, who gets the blame? Women and girls.

Because of this, too many boys and men (and even some women) believe that that if girls and women would just say “yes” to sex with more men (see above, the 80/20 myth), men would be happier, healthier and, ultimately, nicer to women.

In Adolescence, this is modeled in episode three, when Jamie can’t decide if his alleged victim was too sexual (he saw a topless photo she’d sent another boy) or not sexual enough (she didn’t want to be sexual with him). That confusion is, ultimately, why she was killed.

This is what happens when we teach men and boys that their self-worth should come from how many women they’ve hooked up with and how much power an individual man is able to hold over the girls and women in his life.

I still believe in the goodness of boys

It may surprise you to learn that I do still believe in the goodness of boys, especially given that, in the last 10+ years writing about raising boys, masculinity and gender, things have continued to be dark for this segment of our population.

Yes, innocent-looking boys can be capable of horrific crimes. But in my time doing this work, I’ve learned that most boys are on their way to being wonderful adults, and nearly all boys want to become men who feel good about themselves and make the world better for others. the problem is that many boys don’t know how to do it — or even what goodness looks like out in the real world.

What is goodness? Is it their dad, grandpa or uncle who is a provider and loving family man? Their wild older cousin who parties, sleeps until noon and seems to have a dream of a life? Or is it the guy online who drives $250,000 cars, dates women with impossible curves, and has 2 million followers on TikTok?

This is what makes them vulnerable: their desire to feel important, their need to feel a sense of control in an out-of-control world (and during a relatively powerless stage of life), and/or their drive toward being a hero.

A few things you can do now, as a parent or caregiver

I wish I could tell you exactly what to do here to prevent your son from becoming a monster, but I can’t. We wrote Talk To Your Boys to give you tools for helping that process along — but it comes down to looking at your unique kid and seeing where he might be vulnerable, and staying aware of the ways he may be influenced online.

All of that comes down to talking and keeping him close. As Dr. Stan Tatkin told us while we writing our book, tween and teen boys are like “high octane cats” and they can feel hard to contain. That’s why talking to them is often best done on the move — while playing ping-pong or pool, on a hike or a neighborhood run, or while sketching or strumming guitars together.

No matter how we do it, we must talk to our boys — thoughtfully and with intention — on a regular basis. It’s the only way to know how to counteract the scary stuff that might be reaching them online.

Also read: 26 Questions To Ask Your Son Instead Of 'How Was Your Day?'

Pre-order Talk To Your Boys here.

PS: Here’s a great counter to the Manopshere’s message about what women want, from a man for young men. For older boys, it’s good to watch this (or parts of it together). For everyone else, take some time to understand the messages our boys ill inevitably be inundated with online:

Joanna Schroeder is a writer, editor and media critic whose work focuses on raising healthy boys. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Vox and more. In addition to writing a newsletter (“Zooming Out”) about parenting, relationships, and family equity, Schroeder is the co-author (with Christopher Pepper) of the forthcoming book Talk To Your Boys: 16 Conversations to Help Boys Grow into a Confident and Caring Young Man.