TV shows rarely have that big moment these days – that rattle of emotion – but Adolescence on Netflix has it.
It hit harder than I’d thought it would. Maybe because I still carry echoes of my own teenage years. Maybe because the world that today’s teens are growing up in feels so unrecognisable. Or maybe because it all just felt a little too real.
The show follows a 13-year-old boy caught up in something terrible – and it doesn’t take long before you stop seeing a character on a screen. You start seeing bits of someone you used to be. That awkwardness. That quiet yearning to belong to something, anything. It stirs something deep. A reminder of how fragile those years really are.
When I was thirteen, the “playground” was a real place. It was splintered wood and metal slides that got too hot in summer. It was scraped knees, whispered secrets, dares you regretted before you hit the ground. But what happened in the park stayed in the park.
Fall out with someone? It was over by the time you got home. Embarrassed yourself? You laughed it off by the next day. There was a mercy in how temporary it all was.
Now, the playgrounds have shifted. They’re glowing screens and endless scrolls. They’re everywhere – and nowhere. What happens in them doesn’t stay there. It follows. It’s screenshotted. Shared. Immortalised. The stakes feel higher, the audience wider. And the exit? Not so obvious.
It’s easy to forget how hard it is to grow up while being watched. Not just by friends and peers, but by an invisible world waiting to react. And while some corners of the internet offer comfort, others are far more insidious – especially for boys. Adolescence pulls back the curtain on that. Shows how some of these digital spaces dress up in language that sounds supportive, even healing – until you listen a little closer and hear the undercurrents of anger, of control, of something deeply warped.
And it’s subtle. A new phrase. A new tone. The way a joke lands that makes you tilt your head and wonder. The bravado that sometimes feels a little too rehearsed. These shifts in language and posture – they tell a story, if you’re listening closely.
One scene in Adolescence made that painfully clear: a boy explains the meaning behind certain emojis to baffled adults. Every child watching understood immediately. The adults had no idea.
That moment stayed with me.
Because that was it – the line in the sand. The quiet reveal that there’s a whole world of coded language, of cultural shorthand, happening in plain sight. A language that, once upon a time, you spoke fluently – and now, you don’t. Not fluently, anyway. That gap? That’s the gap we need to notice, and bridge.
Since watching, I’ve been thinking a lot more about those spaces we grew up in – how physical they were. Playgrounds where risk came in the form of a fall from the monkey bars, not a comment thread that spirals into humiliation. Community spaces where you learned about people through presence, not profile pictures. But now, the playgrounds are algorithmically curated. The games have changed. And the communities? They’re scattered across platforms, even continents – some warm and welcoming, others cold and echoing with cruelty.
I’ve found myself paying closer attention lately. Asking better questions – not to interrogate, but to understand. “What was it about that video that made it funny?” and “Do you think they really meant that, or were they just trying to go viral?”
Sometimes those questions lead somewhere. Sometimes they don’t. But the asking matters. It says: I’m here. I see you. And maybe that’s the most any of us can do – be present. Not in every scroll or click, but in the pauses in between. In the quiet moments when the noise dies down and the real stuff can surface.
Because the truth is, the risks of growing up haven’t disappeared – they’ve just changed shape. They’ve gone digital. They’ve gone quiet. And they’re far more persistent.
So, we adapt. We put up a few guardrails – not walls, just soft boundaries. Filters. Time limits. Conversations.
Not because we want to control the experience, but because we know and remember what it was like to fall. And we’d rather the landing not be so hard.
Adolescence didn’t just remind me of what it means to grow up – it reminded me how much the environment matters. That the scaffolding around a person – their playground, their peers, their virtual hideouts – shapes them. And that those scaffolds are ours to notice, to question, to repair when needed.
I didn’t expect a TV show to shake me like this one did. But I’m glad it did. Because it made it clear: we might not be able to rebuild the old playgrounds. But we can still help make the new ones safer. And maybe that’s enough.
Pictured: Christine Tremarco as Amanda Miller and Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller in Adolescence
© Ben Blackall/Netflix
