The Most Important Answer to ADOLESCENCE—Hold On to Your Kids

The movement to protect kids from phones and social media will not succeed unless we the parents address our own perpetual distraction.

This post contains some spoilers about the show Adolescence.

One of the things you notice when you finally look up from your phone is how many people are still looking down. Once you see this, you cannot unsee it.

A mother and her young daughter are having hot dogs at Costco. The mother is scrolling. The daughter is staring into space, effectively alone.

A father and his son, age nine or so, board an airplane. “Do you want to play your game?” the father asks as soon as they’re seated. The kid nods and the dad hands him a tablet, and then pulls out his phone. They spend the flight each in their own world.

A family with teens is dining at a restaurant. Everyone’s looking at their phone and there is no conversation happening.

A new mother is nursing her baby while watching Instagram reels about the struggles of parenthood. The baby looks up at her mother and tries to lock eyes. The mother doesn’t notice.

(That last one was me.)

Taking Our Eyes Off the Ball

“Maybe I took my eye off the ball a little bit,” the dad in Adolescence admits as he tries to process how his 13-year-old son could have become a murderer. “But he was in his room, weren’t he? We thought he was safe, didn’t we? ...You know, what harm can he do in there? I thought we were doing the right thing.”

If you haven’t seen Adolescence, it’s a new Netflix miniseries about a 13-year old boy suspected of murdering his female classmate. But it’s much more than a whodunnit; it’s about a broken youth culture where 13-year-olds casually swap nudes on Snapchat, cyberbullying is rampant, and Instagram’s algorithm pushes extreme content on vulnerable young minds, with disastrous consequences. Most damningly, it’s about a generation of parents who are willfully oblivious to their children’s dark reality.

The most disturbing thing about Adolescence isn’t the grisly murder. It’s how completely normal and relatable the parents of the adolescent murderer are. This is not a story about parental abuse or extreme neglect. It’s a story about regular, loving parents who, preoccupied with their own lives, missed the red flags as their son increasingly moved his life online. They took their eyes off the ball, not in one catastrophic moment but in a million ordinary ones that added up.

I think the reason Adolescence is causing so much panic among parents is because “taking our eyes off the ball” has become second nature nowadays and, deep down, we know it.

Grabbing a bite to eat, sitting on an airplane, nursing a baby—these used to be moments where face-to-face connection between parents and their children occurred organically. As we collectively sleepwalked into the era of smartphones and 24/7 internet access, however, those moments of connection happened less and less. By design, our phones make us feel like we have to be constantly plugged into everything—we are always working, always texting someone, always looking something up, always checking social media and the news—too often at the expense of being present with the human beings right in front of us. We now have to be “intentional” about making time to connect with our own flesh and blood. This is a sudden, drastic departure from the prior 200,000+ years of human history.

Distracted by devices and apps that were purposely designed to steal our attention, parents and kids are increasingly “alone together”—to borrow Sherry Turkle’s phrase. Over time, the opportunity cost of all these missed connections accumulates. Children’s attachment to their parents, which should be their anchor as they enter the stormy world of adolescence, is weakened.

We Can’t Hold On to Our Kids Like This

As parents across the globe collectively freak out about how to protect their kids from the dangers depicted in Adolescence, lots of good advice has been shared: delay smartphones and social media, get phones out of schools, give kids more opportunity for free play in the real world. I wholeheartedly agree with all of that and have been advocating for these things through my volunteer work with Smartphone Free Childhood US over the last year. But I think there is a critical missing ingredient: parents must hold on to their kids by actively meeting their primal need for attachment.

“The more the child needs attachment to function, the more important it is that she attaches to those responsible for her,” writes Gordon Neufeld in Hold On to Your Kids. “Only then can the vulnerability that is inherent in emotional attachment be endured. Children don't need friends, they need parents, grandparents, adults who will assume the responsibility to hold on to them. The more children are attached to caring adults, the more they are able to interact with peers without being overwhelmed by the vulnerability involved. The less peers matter, the more the vulnerability of peer relationships can be endured. It is exactly those children who don't need friends who are more capable of having friends without losing their ability to feel deeply and vulnerably.”

If we look at what went wrong for Jamie, the 13-year old murderer in Adolescence, one thing is clear: he could not cope with the vulnerability of peer relationships. Feeling rejected by his peers and not finding anything solid to grasp onto, he is an easy target for radicalization by the hateful “manosphere” content Instagram’s algorithm pushes on him. While there are no guarantees in parenting, if Jamie’s parents had met his need for attachment by holding on to him rather than passively allowing him to spend hours every evening alone in his room online, it seems fair to say things may have panned out differently.

And I think that’s one of the reasons this show is hitting such a nerve with parents. You can trace a line from the breastfeeding mom routinely ignoring her baby for Instagram (yep that was me) to Jamie’s dad, coming home from a long day at work and not interfering while his son spent entire evenings alone in his room on a device. In both cases, parents are putting connecting with their child on the backburner, and their child’s attachment to them is surely weaker for it.

Adolescence is a work of fiction that represents an extreme worst case scenario, but its depiction of modern parenting is disturbingly on the nose. “It’s the story of the modern child, the sacrificial lamb to parents’ desire to live in convenience. To avoid the hard things,” writes psychologist Nicole Runyon in the best take I’ve seen so far on this show. She continues: “what stands out to me most is the way the adults are depicted. They are weak, helpless, and powerless.”

That is, until they aren’t.

Messages of Hope from Adolescence

While Adolescence is extremely hard to watch as a parent because it holds up a mirror to our own BS, it also offers hope. One example occurs in episode two, when the head detective in the murder investigation visits the school that both Jamie and the victim attended to conduct some interviews. The detective is also a dad and it turns out his teenage son happens to attend the same school. As the detective observes the angry, out-of-control energy of the students in the school and learns about the horrific cyberbullying many of them are involved in, he’s jolted out of his own parental distraction. What he sees at his son’s school shocks and appalls him: “Does it look like anyone’s learning anything in there to you?” he asks his colleague. “It just looks like a f***ing holding pen. Videos in every class. [The history teacher] just walking in and out when he wants.”

Most jarringly, the chaos and cruelty he witnesses at the school shatter his illusion that he has any clue what his son’s life is really like or how he’s truly doing. Clearly overwhelmed by the daunting task of creating the type of relationship where his son might open up to him about his life, he is tempted to give up before he starts, to avoid doing the hard thing.

“Sometimes I don’t think I'm the right fit for [my son] as a dad,” he tells his colleague. “You know what I mean?”

But she doesn’t let him off the hook with this cop out. “Well, I know you. And I know you can be,” she replies.

It’s what he needed to hear and it helps spur him into action. He invites his son for an impromptu chips and Coke outing after school that day. “I’ve got some free time. I want to spend it with you. Because I love you. All right?”

His son’s initial confused response to this invitation makes it clear these types of father-son outings don’t happen often. But he doesn’t take much convincing.

“Yeah. I can be hungry,” he says, climbing into his dad’s car.

This is what holding on to your child looks like. It doesn’t take a grand gesture; it can be as simple as grabbing some takeout together and chatting about the day, with no agenda other than connecting.

We also see Jamie’s parents holding on to their teenage daughter Lisa (Jamie’s older sister) in the final episode. Wisely, they don’t overly shield her from their grief about Jamie; she sees their pain and that makes her feel ok about sharing hers too. But what I loved most was how the parents invited her into the lighter moments as well, like the scene where they’re driving to Wainwright’s and listening to a song that prompts them to reminisce about an embarrassing and very funny experience they shared at a school disco decades ago. In the beginning of the car ride, Lisa is engrossed by her phone, but her parents gradually draw her out and she’s begrudgingly laughing with them by the end.

These are the types of moments that create connection and strengthen attachment, giving kids the sturdy foundation they need to weather the slings and arrows of adolescence. What’s wonderful is they don’t require any planning or significant effort. They simply require our attention.

As Jamie’s parents wrestle with their guilt over raising a son who turned out to be a murderer, the dad references their therapist’s advice to not blame themselves. But the mom knows in her gut this advice isn’t quite right. “Should we have done more though?” she asks. “I think it’d be good if we accepted that maybe we should’ve done. I think it’d be okay for us to think that.”

While it’s too late to save Jamie and the girl he killed, we see Jamie’s parents consciously “doing more” for their other child, Lisa. Not through any major lifestyle changes, but in the most simple actions they take during episode four, like insisting she come with them to Wainwrights rather than stay home by herself. Drawing her into the conversation in the van rather than sitting “alone together” while she goes on her phone.

At a time when big tech’s hold over almost every aspect of modern life feels stronger than ever, I saw these examples as powerful messages of hope. We may not be able to get phones out of schools right away or force Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. to stop using persuasive design techniques that exploit the vulnerabilities of minors for profit any time soon (though we’ll keep trying!). But there’s no one who can stop us from holding on to our own children starting right now, today. This does not mean parroting gentle parenting scripts that Instagram feeds us. It means snapping out of our distraction and taking advantage of at least some of the countless opportunities embedded in the most ordinary of days to “collect our children.”

Relevant Upcoming SFCxUS Zoom Events

• Better Than Real Life book club discussion with author Richard Freed - April 2, 8:30pm EST

• Adolescence discussion with psychologist Nicole Runyon - April 14, 12pm EST

• Hold On to Your Kids book club discussion - April 30, 8:30pm EST