Adolescence, and the Need for Dads to Do Better

We need to talk about Jamie. And Eddie. And Luke.

I finished Netflix’s Adolescence last night. I spent the final thirty minutes in bits, and the last 24 hours staggering around in a daze. I’ll be writing more about it, likely next week, and digging into how the show depicts the relationship between fathers and their sons—how men pass trauma down through generations, echoes of pain, now exacerbated by social media: a can of gasoline thrown onto the raging bonfire of the masculinity crisis.

Next Tuesday, 1st April, we’ll be getting together for a TNF Roundtable to discuss the show. It’ll be at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET / 6 pm UK / 7 pm CET. It’s open to all paid subscribers—if you’d like to become one of them and support the work we’re doing here, follow this link, and you’ll find all the details in The Dadscord.

Earlier this week, I came across a short note from Negroni Breakfast’s Dan Cullen-Shute, a friend and former advertising colleague. He hit on many beats I’d observed in the first two episodes: the impossible balance between being a supportive father and an overbearing one; and the pivotal, but almost silent, role of class in the show.

I asked Dan to expand on it for you all. There are minor spoilers for episode one here, I’ll let you know where, so you can skip it if you want to go into the show blind.

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I write a lot. But I don’t write about being a dad very much.

I suspect it’s because, consciously or otherwise, I worry about being wrong. This is odd, because that doesn’t bother me when it comes to other things I write—opinions are opinions, and mine (largely) tend to be nuanced, thought-through, and evidenced, so if they end up being demonstrably wide of the mark, that’s something I can live with.

But being a dad is different. This, I really don’t want to get wrong. And, if I must—which, I hate to tell you, we all will at some point—I’d rather get it wrong in private. But as any parent or carer will know, that’s not a luxury life always grants you. The things that go wrong are more seismic in your head than in everyone else’s. Though sometimes, things go really, really wrong.

That is a rather understated way of describing the premise of Adolescence. One of the most astonishing pieces of television I’ve ever seen, it has provoked conversation, discussion, and abject terror in a way I can’t remember any cultural event doing in our lifetime.

For the uninitiated, let me offer a quick, not-entirely spoiler-free précis (if you’d like to go in completely blind, skip to the end of this paragraph). Over the course of four episodes, we follow the story of Jamie, a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering Katie, a young girl at his school. Each of the four episodes is filmed in one take, with zero cuts, which sounds like a gimmick, until you reach the end of the first episode and realise you haven’t looked away from the screen once, your screen time stats tumbling. It’s powerful, it’s affecting, and it’s utterly, utterly devastating, touching on more themes than I have the word count to cover here.

Much has been written and said about the series’ depiction of the online world and of kids’ relationship with it—the manosphere, the 80:20 “rule,” the insanely intricate coding of emojis used to bully and demean young people in plain sight. It’s terrifying, and the world it creates, for women in particular, even more so. But what stuck with me is what Adolescence says about fatherhood. Jamie’s relationship with his dad—a proud, seemingly decent working-class bloke—is complicated, rooted in love, awe, hero worship, and a fair bit of fear. Ashley Walter’s character, another “good man” who wants to be a “good dad,” finds out just how out of touch he is—both with his son and the world he lives in. We see fathers in pain, and their children in pain as a result. I don’t often quote Larkin, but you feel he might have had a point on the effect parents have on their children, no matter how hard they try.

Because fuck me, being a good dad is tough. Do you push them? Do you support them? Indulge them? How do you bring them up to be good? How do you give them the space to grow without abandoning them to wander off into bad places, online or otherwise? Or, conversely, how do you supervise and protect them without stifling them?

When my little boy was younger, my partner and I would watch him clambering over climbing frames, scurrying behind him, ready to catch him should we need to. We’d talk about the importance of “letting him fall.” Sometimes, you have to. But teaching your kids that there will always be someone there to catch them, that they’ll never have to worry about consequences—that’s not parenting. It’s damaging. It’s cruel. And the alternative? Not being there when they need you most? That’s overwhelming. It’s a nigh-on impossible tightrope to walk, yet we have to walk it every day.

The fact we’re even talking about this is an advantage. Jamie’s parents believed they were doing the right thing—he was in his room, they thought he was safe—but this is after the event. We hear from Jamie and his Dad about how hard their relationship could be—how his dad pushed him into football, the working-class language of love, to try to bring them closer together. And then, when he was rubbish at it, how the father couldn’t even look at his son.

And that question, the question of class, is the other thing I can’t shake. It’s a theme that permeates every second of Adolescence and one of its most important. Jamie isn't just a white boy from the north of England; he's a working-class white boy from the north of England. His school is chaotic, with teachers struggling to cope and pupils struggling to survive. As much as anything, his relationship with his dad is defined by his dad's job; his dad’s focus on overtime because that’s where the best money is; his dad's relationship with money, laid painfully bare in the final episode.

My dad, like Stephen Graham’s character, was a “working-class lad made good.” My dad, like Stephen Graham’s character, had a difficult relationship with money. And yes, my dad, like Stephen Graham’s character, sometimes had a complicated relationship with his children as a result. Like many men of his generation, he wasn’t great at expressing emotion, or at expressing pride, and while he expressed disappointment or anger quite freely, he wasn’t great at expressing it in ways that we would see as acceptable today. Men, particularly working-class men, aren’t skilled at talking about pain, confusion, or sadness; class and gender can be stultifying and paralysing. All too often, left unprompted, we just don’t talk. We know all of this, but it doesn’t make it any easier to watch, and it doesn’t make it any easier to parent— despite your best intentions.

I watched Stephen Graham struggling to process the emotions he was feeling, and it damn near broke me, because I saw my dad. The truth is, I can’t ever dad without the spectre of my own father looming over me, and that’s not always a good thing. He was a million miles away from a bad man, but he wasn’t always good, and he didn’t know how to balance those two things. As much as I might worry about parenting, about getting it right, about being a good dad to my kids Stan and Mali, and as much as I might sometimes feel the pressure of living in a world that expects men and women to be perfect, progressive, supportive parents, I know how lucky I am. Because I can talk about how hard it is, and nobody laughs. The opposite, in fact. People step forward. People help.

Above all, that’s what I’m taking from Adolescence—the need, as Stephen Graham’s character says in the final minutes of the show, to do better. To step up. The world is changing around us, and the threats our children face are more systemic and insidious than a creaky climbing frame. Sometimes, our kids are going to fall, because it’s important that they do: it’s never been more vital, though, that we’re there to help them pick themselves back up. A good relationship with my children bears little resemblance to what my dad might have pictured, and that can be unnerving. But what matters most, what’s always mattered most, is that they know that I’m there. And that I’ll be there if they fall.

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More Adolescence

Thanks to Dan for stepping up to the plate this week. There have been no shortage of articles and podcasts discussing the show, both on the technical tour de force behind the lens to bring it to life and the wider issues raised by the story. I want to call out two here, both focusing on the portrayal of fatherhood. The first, from British writer Caitlin Moran in The Times, raises a thought that was front of mind for me throughout: “This isn’t a crisis in teenage boys. This is a crisis in adult men. This is a crisis in these boys’ fathers.”

As a father, imagine how much more you need to do to make a bigger impact on your son’s life than Andrew Tate. Tate is available for your son 24/7. He’s posting 20 times a day. He’s naming every grievance and confusion your son has and then providing a solution to them. He’s telling him his future is great so long as he simply goes to the gym, invests in cryptocurrency and blames all his problems on mouthy women and “wokeness”. All your son’s friends at school know who Andrew Tate is. They don’t know who you are.

In Men’s Health, Rory Doherty scratches his head watching “Millennials and Generation Xers try to level with the digital and psychological spaces that immerse impressionable minds.”

Adolescence is most affecting when it shows us fathers reckoning, in real time, with the reduced role they have in influencing—or understanding—their children’s behavior. The show was created and directed by three men in their 40s and 50s, and it is, at its heart, a story about middle-aged men realizing that the most hurtful and influential messages about masculinity have found a vast, invisible (to them, at least) new channel.

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Starting the conversation

In an interview with US morning show Today, Stephen Graham told the audience, “Everyone is accountable: parenting, schooling, politics, the educational system, society, and the internet.”

The show asks incredibly tough questions and offers no easy answers. I arrived assuming the blame would be laid directly at the door of the manosphere, mobiles and Meta’s algorithms. But over four hours, it became painfully clear that how men fail to show up—for each other and their children—is the root cause of the problem; the Andrew Tates of the world merely opportunistic vultures offering simple, sticky solutions to complex problems.

Graham said, “We have a real crisis going on with young men today, and we’ve got to start talking about it right now. It affects all of us. I didn’t know if people would be ready to talk about it. But I think they are. And hopefully, this is just the beginning of the conversation.”

I’ve never been more certain that the work we’re doing here, as a community of fathers, is so painfully necessary. From my experience writing this newsletter over the last five years, and talking to some of the almost 20,000 of you, I know this group is filled with some of the smartest, most emotionally intelligent, and engaged dads out there. So, let’s kick off this conversation ourselves:

• What did the show reveal to you about how you parent or how you were raised? Did it uncover any blind spots or prompt uncomfortable reflections?

• How can we better model vulnerability, empathy, and emotional awareness to our children—especially our sons?

• For dads with older kids: how are you navigating conversations around the influence of social media, the manosphere, and toxic role models? What can dads with younger kids start to do today?

• What role do we have in shaping a healthier cultural narrative around masculinity? How do we practically step into that role within our communities and families?

• How can we, as a community of fathers, more effectively support one another in raising emotionally resilient, thoughtful young men and women?

Warning: I want people to be able to speak freely here, so I’m assuming this comment thread will be heavy on spoilers. If you’ve not seen the show yet, leave this open in yet another of your hundred-plus tabs, then come read it afterwards.

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Say Hello

Thanks to Dan for kicking this conversation off. I suspect we’ll be talking about this one for a while. How was this week’s issue? Your feedback helps me make this great.

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