The Netflix series Adolescence highlights the harmful risks of the social media world for young people, the role of online influencers in driving the roots of toxic masculinity and misogyny among young boys, and the risks that this world poses. Gordon Harold joins the national and international discussion that the series has provoked, emphasising the need for parents to be supported in navigating the digital world to protect their children's mental health and development.
“I’m not who I think I am, I’m not who you think I am, I am who I think you think I am” (The Looking Glass Self, Cooley, 1902).
Quote 1 (Jamie, son of father): “He knew I wasn’t sporty or anything like that… He used to take me to football. This football thing on… on Saturdays. And he’d um… He’d cheer me on and everything but… when I… I’d f*** up, he’d just… He’d… He’d just look away”… [Psychologist: “Pretend he didn’t see?”] “…Maybe… or [clears throat] maybe he didn’t just want me to see him looking… sorry… I dunno – Ashamed.” (Adolescence, Episode 3, 2025).
Quote 2 (Father, of Jamie): “I took him to footy didn’t I? ‘Cause I thought it’d toughen him up… No, but he was crap… So they just stuck him in goal… And I just stood there on the side of the pitch while all the other dads were laughing at him… And I could feel him looking at me… And I couldn’t look at him [speaking to wife/mum] …I couldn’t look at me own boy… (Mum: “he idolised you.”] (Adolescence, Episode 4, 2025).
The Netflix series Adolescence, from which these quotations are taken, has created an enormous amount of debate and public interest on the topic of digital world and social media impacts on young people. The series charts the inferred role of social media influences on Jamie (a 13-year-old boy), his friends and others, with Jamie accused of murdering a similar aged schoolmate (Katie).
The series has provoked a welcome national and international discussion regarding the risks of the social media world for young people, the role of online influencers in driving the roots of toxic masculinity and misogyny among young boys, and the risks that this world poses; from adverse mental health impacts to murder.
In 2021, the Bennett Institute published one of my blogs covering the topic of mental health and how parents can support children and young people at a time of mental health crisis; it was written as the world began to slowly exit from the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, mental health problems among children, adolescents and adults have continued to rise. It is currently estimated that 1:4 young people and adults in the UK experience serious mental health problems, and that by 2030 depression will be the leading cause of disability adjusted life years (DALYs, time lost to employment and education) globally, with >70% of serious psychiatric illness in adulthood in place before the age of 18 years. In 2022, it was estimated that the economic costs of mental ill health in the UK exceeded £300 billion. This cost equates to double the NHS’s entire budget in England in 2022 (£153bn) and is similar to the estimated impact of Covid-19 on the UK economy (£260bn), comparable economically to having a pandemic every year.
Factors that remain significant in affecting young people’s mental health include economic disadvantage and wider inequalities, parent mental health, domestic adversities including high levels of inter-parental conflict and negative parent-child relationship dynamics, poor peer relationship quality, trauma and related adversities, and the increasingly prevalent role across all facets of modern life of the digital world.
This blog focuses on one relatively neglected area of potential policy engagement in contending with the issues raised in Adolescence and elsewhere: how we might more effectively support parents to support their children in a digital age.
The core message is simple – and the opening quotations speak to it – parents continue to matter to their children; and most parents want to support their children at a time of tumultuous political, economic and technological change, but are finding it increasingly hard to understand how to do so. In a recent study, parents reported that parenting was harder today than it was 20 years ago, which they attributed in part to new technologies and social media. Quite simply, we need to revisit the fundamentals of what matters most to young people, what their development skills and assets are, how parents can be supported and feel confident about their continued significance as potent positive ‘influencers’ for children and adolescents, and how to equip parents with the skills and confidence that they need.
With the correct evidence-based strategies it has never been more opportune to provide parents with knowledge and resources to help them understand, engage, protect and benefit from the digital world that now surrounds them, their families and the world that their children will inevitably navigate. Helping parents understand that they have the opportunity to positively broker their children’s social worlds (interpersonal and digital) and that they remain a key player in children’s lives is a message that most people regard as obvious and already in place in the contemporary world of parenting; yet, the need for this message to be delivered to parents across all demographic communities in the context of a modern digital and social media world is now a matter of national priority and societal urgency.
Parenting in the social media age
A great deal has already been written regarding the significance and importance of constructive parenting practices for youth development. In a nutshell, parents who employ authoritative (“do as I ask and let me explain why”), versus authoritarian (“do as I say and don’t ask why”) or permissive (“do what you want and I don’t really mind whether you ask why”) parenting practices promote a multitude of positive emotional, behavioural, social and academic outcomes for children across all ages. Governments across the globe (including the UK) have advocated and invested in strategies aimed at enhancing positive parenting skills to promote improved outcomes for children and young people for decades. This blog is aimed at reminding parents, mothers and fathers, that they remain centrally important to promoting positive outcomes and protecting against negative outcomes when it comes to your children, particularly in a digital world. An affirmative or disapproving look or action from a parent at a sensitive developmental stage can potentially carry more powerful interpretive currency than any online “like”. Helping parents understand this fundamental role as powerful positive influencers offers a significant policy opportunity. Access to support and information, through public health related strategies, has never been more important or timely, and can serve as a productive next step generated from the national conversation inspired by Adolescence, as well as other recent contributions to the debate.
The TV series has brought the topic of social media influences on adolescent development to a level of public awareness that is on a par with the Mr Bates versus The Post Office (2024) TV series charting the Post Office computing scandal impacts on the lives of hundreds of individuals and families. Adolescence and Mr Bates versus The Post Office share one other important factor in common – the evidence underpinning the TV representation of related storyline facts had existed for a long-period before they were embraced by the public. The creators of such series deserve immense praise, not only for gripping the nation’s attention and stimulating public and high-level political discussion, but for their detailed engagement with evidence (actual and research based) that underpins the actors’ exceptional portrayal of their everyday lived experiences.
In the case of Adolescence, the central storyline follows the distressing (indeed disturbing) journey of Jamie who allegedly murders his classmate Katie based on information presented to the viewer in the very first episode. Jamie proceeds to deny that it was him in the following episodes, through to the final episode where Jamie admits to his parents in a telephone call that he has decided to plead guilty. The spine of the storyline is the almost haunting backdrop of the ‘manosphere’, purported to have influenced Jamie in his murderous act. What is even more powerful is the portrayed powerlessness of traditional influencers deemed central to children’s healthy development in past generations; parents and teachers, expertly juxtapositioned by the writers relative to the digital world that now pervades all facets of contemporary life.
The perspectives of Jamie, his parents, Jamie’s friends, the police, a clinical psychologist, friends of the murdered girl, attitudes of local residents and members of the community are presented in a somewhat asynchronous manner (the storyline does not follow a traditional sequence or linear exposition of factors deemed to be at play across the timescale covered). Reviews of the series have since noted that viewers reported learning something new from the perspective of each of the main characters portrayed; this is one of the most successful aspects of the series, it is educational through lived experience portrayal. Among the stand out details are the significance and salience of particular social media/messenger platform ‘emojis’ in communicating peer-based judgements (and the interpretation and emotional impacts of these judgements), the limited understanding adults have of this communication world, the ‘manosphere’ culture, the risk to young people’s development (at least as portrayed) of unregulated social media access, the visceral anger portrayed by Jamie towards women and girls, the role of social media influencers in driving this culture of hatred and hostility, and the communicated powerlessness of adults (parents and teachers) to manage a community of always-online young people.
A core narrative stands out in the series, that the social media world is a toxic, dangerous place that singularly conducts the orchestra of social world elements that drive how adolescents engage with each other, their families, teachers and others. Fundamentally the storyline focuses on the ‘manosphere’ world, its portrayed influencers and content that lead young men to embrace misogynistic views, actions, and related expectations of their social worlds (“I’m not who I think I am, I’m not who you think I am, I am who I think you think I am”, 1902).
In the next instalment of this two-part blog, we review the specifics of social media influence on adolescent development in further detail.
This article was written by Gordon Harold (University of Cambridge), with contributions from Iris Ji (University of Cambridge), Elizabeth Nixon (Trinity College, Dublin), Xiaoning Zhang (University of Cambridge), and Leslie Leve (University of Oregon) for further information please see https://ruddcentre.com/.
References for this two-part blog on supporting parents in this digital age.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
