TV show Adolescence sparks parental fears over phone use – Greg Bruce

A scene from the Netflix TV show Adolescence.

THREE KEY FACTS

• Adolescence highlights the murder of a 13-year-old by another 13-year-old and its aftermath.
• The series emphasises parental concerns about the influence of phones on adolescents.
• It explores the challenge parents face in trying to protect and control their children.

Immediately after watching Adolescence, like all parents of pubescent children, my wife and I huddled together on the couch, terrified by what we had just seen and by what it foretold about what was to come.

Over the coming days, we discussed it frantically with our friends and colleagues, who were all either watching it, about to watch it, or too terrified to watch it.

For those of you who haven’t watched it, you must, unless you want to be excluded from every conversation at every social occasion for the next four to six weeks and intermittently thereafter for years to come.

Also, it’s too important to miss. And it’s fantastically compelling. Advocacy television has never achieved such artistic heights.

As the whole world now knows, the central narrative is about the horrific murder of a 13-year-old by another 13-year-old. And the fallout from it. And the reasons for it.

But after finishing the final episode, huddled on the couch, what my wife and I were most obsessed about were the phones.

Phones are pretty much the only things parents of adolescents talk about these days. What are you doing about their phones? What are they looking at on their phones? How are you policing their phones? Phones, phones, phones.

Phones dominate parents’ lives. How to protect kids from all the bad content and the bad people and the bad ideas; how to protect them from being brainwashed and turned into agents of chaos; how to protect them. We must protect them!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Netflix US (@netflix)

It is one of Adolescence’s rare missteps that the radicalisation of the child murderer takes place not on his phone, but his computer. Parents might have worried about computers in the 2000s and 2010s but the power of the computer is nothing when compared to the power of the phone.

Phones are portable, omnipresent, easy to conceal, and – ironically – modern parents have been tricked into thinking they’re an important safety tool; presumably to stop kids getting lost on the way home from school and accidentally taking a bus to Australia.

Which, of course, is a concern, but we must give the correct weighting to our concerns and all concerns are not equal.

The pull is of the phone too strong and the power of The Zuck too great even for parents. This morning, I watched my son get on the school bus, and then – literally as it was pulling away – I felt my hand snaking into my pocket, my fingers stroking the smooth outline of my black box full of wonders. Just a little look, I thought. What could be the harm? I thought.

I resisted, but it wasn’t easy. I had to talk myself through the worst of it: blue sky, birdsong, present moment, Eckhart Tolle and so on.

I passed another adult whose phone was to her face and I felt smug because I was better than her, but also jealous because I wasn’t her. What fantastic pleasures and treasures were streaming directly into her brain, I wondered, while I was doing my best to convince myself of the moral superiority of my commercialised, sanitised, westernised, faux Buddhism.

Adolescence is about a boy who is overwhelmed by these powerful forces and who, as a result, consumes online content that shows him a version of himself and a life that he finds comforting and believes to be true, and how that content steers him in a direction that ultimately leads to death, destruction and eternal misery.

But it’s just as much about that boy’s parents and more specifically about the parental rite of passage that comes with learning you can’t control your kids forever, nor can you protect them, but that if you ever stop trying, this is what will happen.