Adolescence can be tough. We will all remember it – the good times and the toe-curlingly embarrassing ones – and will probably recognise many of the situations in which our children will find themselves. Tough for them, tough for us.
Adolescence is also tough. By this I mean the Netflix TV series which has caught the national imagination more, perhaps, than any programme since Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
If you haven’t seen it, the Netflix blurb runs like this: “When a 13-year-old [Jamie] is accused of the murder of a classmate, his family, therapist and the detective in charge are all left asking: what really happened?”
It’s a gripping, sometimes shocking and deeply thought-provoking series. One scene in particular has stayed with me, though. (This is not a spoiler.)
Jamie’s parents are sitting on their bed, discussing how they parented their son – their child who has been charged with murder. They talk about the amount of time he spent in his bedroom with unsupervised access to his computer. “He was in his room. We thought he was safe…We thought we were doing the right thing.” In fact, he was immersed in dangerously misogynistic online culture.
And then what was, for me, the most harrowing question they ask: “Should we have done more, though?”
They mean, “More to prevent our son being infected by what he’s seen, by what he’s read, to the extent that he has been accused of this terrible crime.” But we don’t need to be the parent of someone in serious trouble to wonder whether we could be doing more with our children to help them become the adults we want them to be.
I have a hunch that it’s not only what Jamie (and for ‘Jamie’ let’s read our children’s names) has seen and the people he’s met online, devastating and distorting though they have been, that his parents regret; it’s the time he didn’t spend with them and his sister. Jamie’s family reveals itself, in the crisis, to be warm, loving and funny: hilarious shopping trips, for example. By contrast, Jamie’s alleged crime jolts another character and his potentially estranged son into re-booting their stalled routine of sharing a meal at a favourite bad-food restaurant, of cracking in-jokes on the car ride home, of having father-son chat time.
We used to know that, whatever form they take in our household, family routines are vital for building deep and lasting parent-child relationships. There’s no substitute for spending time together, doing the same things, chatting about everything and nothing. Social bonds must be worked at lest they don’t form properly or, once developed, wither and fray. But phones and computers have allowed us to think we are spending time with each other because we eat and sleep within the same four walls. How much time, though, are we actually together?
The online world is all-encompassing, and we teeter into it as if into an abyss. But it is no substitute for actual human interaction with those closest to us.
We have seen this in schools around the country. Our ban on phone use has reintroduced conversation to form rooms. Where tutors would have walked into a room full of children atomised in their own online worlds, they now find huddles discussing, well, everything and nothing. It’s a great step forward.
I’ve blogged before about the joys of a phone-free trip to Lille with all of Year 8. Instead of staring at screens, catching up on what people have posted or keeping up their streaks, pupils play Uno – even those who, we might have assumed, thought they were too cool for it.
This is all part of teaching our young people about the impact of technology on real-world relationships. They (re)discover it is possible to survive, and even have fun, without a screen and with – and I mean really with, as opposed to just sitting next to while watching TikTok – other people. Amazing.
This is important at home, too. Our children absorb things from us. Our views, actions and habits shape them. If we like reading, it’s more likely our children will like reading. If we support a team, it’s more likely our children will support that same team. We end up not only having things we do in common; we’ll be doing them together. In the Pettitt household, it’s crosswords and cooking. You’ll all have those special but really not so special routines which mean you spend time together and time chatting.
Technology is a wonderful thing and the internet is an extraordinary place. Our children will need to explore both. Parents will, of course, try to ensure that children do it safely and in ways that are not detrimental to their health, outlook, morals and offline relationships. We understand that this means knowing how much time they are spending online, understanding what they are experiencing there and, if necessary, restricting both.
Given the nature of the internet, I suspect it’s a matter of when rather than if our children happen across something we’d rather they hadn’t seen. But if we have wired into our routines time to be together for some part of every day, time to chat every day, we’ll see more quickly when they withdraw, we’ll notice if something is awry, and we’ll be able to help them pull back from the edge of that abyss We’ll ask ourselves whether the mood swing is adolescence or Adolescence.
Adolescence paints a particularly grim picture of how this can all go wrong. Realistic as it is, let’s not catastrophise: allowing our children more screen time than we think ideal is unlikely to have such appalling consequences (though we should be aware of the dangers). More likely is that they, and their parents, will be less happy in each other’s company, less able to support each other, less likely to share in the good times.
That’s bad enough, though. So, whether you watch Adolescence or not, I wish you holidays full of great times together. Precious moments.
About the author Adam Pettitt, Head Adam has been Head of Highgate since 2006. He was previously Head of Modern Languages at Abingdon School and then Deputy Head at Norwich School. He read French and German at university and continues to teach both subjects to Y9 pupils at Highgate. Beyond work, Adam enjoys running marathons and is a recent convert to inter-railing.
