Teen Brains, Netflix, and Vulnerability - What Can We Do?

A Show Which Spoke To Parents

It’s a scene that has had viewers reportedly in floods of tears. Eddie and Manda Miller, two parents played by Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco, sit on a bed together arm in arm. “Where did I go wrong?” asks Eddie. The ‘bit that went wrong’ was their fictional 13 year old son, Jamie, played brilliantly by 14 year-old Owen Cooper, has been accused of stabbing a young girl. When Eddie is brought into the police interview to accompany his son, he’s forced to watch a CCTV of the recording of what appears to be an argument between the two of them turn into a violent altercation and a vicious stabbing.

Months later, when his son finally changes his plea to guilty after protesting his innocence to his father, his family and the police, the parents are forced to confront possibly every parents’ worst nightmare.

They have raised a murderer.

The hit Netflix show Adolescence has been called “a cacophonous, gripping mini-series” by The New York Times and a “one-take wonder” by the Washington Post because each episode is filmed in a gripping continuous one-take. Its style sucks viewers in, taking them right into each immersive episode, as the story develops from the initial investigation through to Jamie’s detention before trial and the shocking fallout for the family as they cope with the news.

The show has been praised for its grippingly realistic portrayal of teenage life in the UK, a country which has seen knife crime rise to unprecedented levels and a shocking episode of mass-stabbing of young girls in Southport in the United Kingdom. Knife crime is so common in the UK that deaths are no longer reported on the news, as they once were. Yet each death is a tragedy which affects more than just the victim.

As a Parenting Trainer I work with parents around the world who are concerned about their teenager’s risk-seeking behaviour and worry how to cope with teenagers lying to their parents, as Jamie does in Adolescence, as well their lack of interest in learning and studying, something the show portrays brilliantly. 

What is it about the teenage brain which makes teenagers so uniquely difficult to raise?

Brains That Are Wired For Danger

Throughout Adolescence there are references to Jamie’s online activities and hints that he’s been engaging in more risky behaviour without his parents’ knowledge. This is entirely in line with what we know about a teenage child’s brain.

Neuroscience research shows that teenage brains have significantly less synaptic connections in the Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC), the area of the brain responsible for - among other things - control of your emotions, assessing risk and long-term thinking. When teenagers engage in risky behaviour - whether it’s cliff jumping or carrying a knife with them - it’s not that they don’t understand there’s a risk, it’s that they place far less importance on it than a developed, mature adult brain would.

Teens Experience Higher Highs and Lower Lows

In the most gripping episode for me, Jamie is shown smashing a hot drink off the table as he talks with child psychologist Briony Ariston, played by Erin Doherty. One minute they’ve been trading friendly banter, the next this troubled child is standing over this trained professional shouting in her face, a picture of terrifying adolescent rage.

It’s a scene that will be very familiar to parents of teenagers. Teenagers seem to experience dramatic mood-swings which can be hard for parents to deal with. Again, decades of neuroscience research explains why. The Pre Frontal Cortex is an area of the brain which plays a key role in moderating the limbic system, the brain’s emotional processing centre. Whereas the PFC is less active in teenagers than in adults, the limbic system is - ironically - significantly more active. The limbic system releases more dopamine, the reward neurotransmitter, when a teenager experiences pleasure, which means their ‘highs are high’ but it also means their ‘lows are lows.’

Their dramatic mood swings are not ‘deliberate’ but a result of the significant changes the adolescent mind is going through as it matures.

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Wired for Opinion

As we move through each episode of Adolescence, we learn bit by bit the context of Jamie’s life. In Episode 3 he discusses his relationships with the child psychologist and the extent to which being socially ostracized online and offline has hit him. Slowly opening up, Jamie explains that he’s been pronounced ‘ugly’ by the girl he went on to murder. His sense of humiliation is palpable and raw.

We know from studies that the Medial Pre Frontal Cortex, an area in the PFC associated with our sense of self and self-worth, is also unusually active in teenagers. By the time you reach your mid 20s, you have a fairly well established sense of who you are and your worth in the world. But in your teenage years the opposite is true. The opinion of your peer group is a matter of life and death, as Adolescence so painfully makes clear.

As a result teens are far more likely to make bad life choices in the company of peers. In the US reports show that more than half of all homicides committed by juveniles have multiple accomplices. In Adolescence’s Episode 2 we learn that Jamie was given the knife by his friend Ryan on the night of the murder.

Online Anxiety

In the final episode Jamie’s parents, Eddie and Manda, reflect on how their son disappeared into the online world. “I thought he was safe in his room,” Eddie said. Throughout the scenes in the school children are shown walking almost everywhere with mobile phones in their hands, constantly switching between the online world and the offline.

The reality is, as Sociologist Jonathan Haidt has said in his recent book The Anxious Generation, we are, “overprotecting children in the real world while under-protecting them in the virtual world.” Online children are particularly vulnerable to bullying, social contagion and extremist views (including misogyny, which is hinted at in Adolescence). We know from studies that the more you are online, the more likely you are to suffer from a mood related disorder and teenagers are particularly vulnerable. How could this be?

Again neuroscience can help us understand. We now know that there’s a neurosteroid called THP that in small children and adults reduces anxiety but, ironically, in teenagers does the exact opposite and INCREASES anxiety. This starts between 10 to 12 and then peaks at the age of 14-16. There has been an enormous spike in adolescent anxiety and depression - up more than 139% for people ages 18-25 - since 2010, when the smartphone started to come into general use.

The Future Doesn’t Have to be Bleak

Although knife crime is on the rise in the UK, most parents are fortunate indeed to never have to know the pain of having their child be a victim or a perpetrator. As we’ve discussed inside this article, though, raising children through adolescence presents a whole host of problems for parents. If you’d like to learn how to have less arguments, introduce rules into your family and have more love and connection with your child at any age, I’ve got a free PDF for you here with 7 steps.

Check it out! 

Patrick Ney

Lead Trainer | All About Parenting