What Netflix’s adolescence really teaches us about parenting
The new Netflix docuseries Adolescence is more than just entertainment. It’s a mirror. And if you’re raising a teenager right now, it might just hold up a painful truth about how our children are struggling — and how we, as parents, are being called to evolve.
Because this isn’t just Jamie’s story, it’s ours too.
This is not a tale of bad parenting or evil children. It’s a story about emotional repression, intergenerational trauma, and a desperate lack of what I call emotions education, the skill of understanding, feeling, and leading with emotional intelligence in families.
Emotions Education: what Jamie never got
Jamie’s actions weren’t senseless. His violence and shame didn’t appear out of nowhere. They were the result of a child who was never taught to name, understand, or express his emotions in a safe and healthy way.
He wasn’t emotionally damaged, he was emotionally uneducated.
Many boys are still raised to believe that anger is the only acceptable emotion. Everything else, sadness, fear, vulnerability, is dismissed or punished.
This isn’t resilience.
It’s an emotional shutdown. And it always leaks out eventually, often in the most harmful ways.
Emotions education is a foundational part of parenting in this generation.
It’s not a luxury. It’s survival.
Validation isn’t optional, it’s emotional first aid
Jamie’s hunger for approval from his peers, from Briony, is heartbreaking. But it’s not vanity. It’s a wound. One that is created when children don’t feel seen or heard.
When children grow up without emotional validation, they go searching. And in today’s world, that search leads them straight to social media, influencer culture, and often the darkest corners of the internet.
Our children don’t just need safe homes. They need emotionally safe spaces — places where they can express themselves without fear of shame or dismissal. Because that is what builds true emotional resilience.
How intergenerational trauma silently shapes the family
Jamie’s father isn’t the villain in this story. He’s another emotionally uneducated man, raised in a culture that taught him silence was strength.
What we see in his disappointment, his disconnection, and his shame is not cruelty. It’s inherited pain. It’s unprocessed trauma playing out, the kind that doesn’t leave bruises but leaves scars all the same.
This is intergenerational trauma. It doesn’t start with you, but it can end with you.
Because until we learn to process the emotions we’ve spent decades repressing, we’ll keep projecting them onto our children. And they’ll absorb them, just as we did.
The silent power of toxic masculinity
Jamie was not born believing women should be objectified. He didn’t start life believing dominance equals worth.
He learned it. Through subtle cues. Through cultural messages. And yes, through his own family dynamics.
When his artistic side was dismissed and his worth reduced to his performance on the football field, it planted a seed: you are only lovable if you perform.
This is how toxic masculinity takes root. Not with hatred, but with a lack of emotional fluency. We must teach our boys that their worth is not tied to dominance, success, or emotional control, but to who they are and how they connect.
Empathy is the turning point
Briony doesn’t try to fix Jamie. She does something far more powerful. She sees him. She listens. She reflects.
And in a world that is quick to judge and punish, that kind of connection is everything.
Empathy is emotional leadership. And when we model it, not just towards our children, but towards ourselves, we create the conditions for healing and growth.
The internet is not the enemy, but it’s not a co-parent
The internet didn’t create Jamie’s behaviour. It simply amplified the pain that was already there.
He was primed by silence, by shame, by disconnection, long before an algorithm ever found him. And when it did, it offered him the one thing he craved:
- Identity
- Power
- Belonging
We must stop pretending we can protect our kids with parental controls alone.
What they need is emotional anchoring.
What they need is us, emotionally available, conscious, and resourced.
This is the parenting shift we desperately need
You don’t need to be a perfect parent. That’s not what this is about.
But you do need to be a conscious one. A reflective one. A parent who is willing to look inward, break old patterns, and lead from emotional strength rather than fear or shame.
Because noses and smiles aren’t the only things passed down through generations.
So is trauma.
But so is healing.
And it starts with you
✨ Parent like a leader.
💜 Break the cycle.
💥 Reclaim your emotional power, so your children can too.
Ready to begin?
👉 Book a (free) WayForward Consultation
Let’s work together to shift the emotional patterns in your family and raise a generation that knows how to feel, heal, and connect.