By Kimmi Berlin
The following contains spoilers for Adolescence, a four-part limited series, written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, inspired by real-life incidents involving young boys and knife crimes in the U.K., now streaming on Netflix.
“You have to see Adolescence on Netflix!”
“Have you seen Adolescence? It’s brutal, but a must see.”
“Omg! Adolescence totally speaks to why you’re doing what you’re doing with Build Up Boys!”
*
When my son was two, he saw a cute girl in a doctor’s office waiting room. He toddled over to her and hugged her. As he was hugging her, her arms remained at her side. She looked at me with pleading eyes: get this kid off me.
He came back, confused and hurt.
I said, “Sweetie, not everyone is going to want a hug, and that’s okay. I love you, and I will always hug you.”
I didn’t want him to feel rejected, but I also really needed to teach him about consent, something that I didn’t think would come up until middle school. I wanted him to understand body autonomy and boundaries. I wanted him to learn how to read body language and facial expressions. I wanted something to help him become more emotionally attuned to himself and others.
I searched for some kind of class I could enroll him in, but all the programs I found were for older kids, and they were all about violence prevention. The messaging was: “You’re going to rape and kill us, so let’s tamp that down.”
As most mothers certainly do, I thought, my son is not a monster, which makes it particularly noteworthy that millions of parents who’ve seen Adolescence are now asking themselves: could my 13-year-old son kill a girl just because she rejected him?
This question is at the heart of what is so disturbing about the show. Many reviewers and opinion writers have been focusing on the online radicalization of boys, Andrew Tate, and the “manosphere,” warning parents to not let our boys fall prey to influencers who spew misogyny and perpetuate myths like 80% of girls/woman are attracted to 20% of boys/men—all things that point to the main character Jamie’s motivation for killing his classmate.
Since the miniseries premiered on Netflix on March 13, 2025, the show has amassed almost 100 million views, creating a collective panic worldwide: What ideology is being pumped into our boys’ heads behind closed doors?
I certainly wanted to know, so I asked my nine-year-old son to show me what he was watching on YouTube. It wasn’t good. It was a scene that showed a guy wearing a face mask to hide the fact that he was good-looking and rich so he wouldn’t attract an obnoxious girl who only cared about good looks and money. I immediately googled Dharminder Mann, the creator of the show, to learn he is an independent producer and influencer who creates short films, or what he likes to call “morality plays.” He won the 2024 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards’ Favorite Male Creator award, and Vulture called his content “feel-good” videos intended to “encourage people to be decent to one another.” Yet, here was this video playing right into the manosphere narrative that attractive women are superficial and only want to date the 20%.
I calmly explained to my son why I was deleting YouTube from his iPad, that there was a lot of garbage out there that I couldn’t monitor.
Like the parents in Adolescence, I had wrongly assumed that my son was safe in his bedroom.
Sadly, what Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, concludes is true: “We have overprotected our kids in the real world and under-protected them online.”
While I agree we have to better protect our kids online and we have to strongly counter incel culture’s influence, I don’t think the “why” behind the murder in Adolescence is because Jamie thinks he’s ugly or because a “weak” and “flat-chested” girl tells him she “isn’t that desperate”to go out with him; I think it’s because no one asked him about his inner life until it was too late.
Boys are not encouraged to talk about their feelings. It’s not that simple, but it kinda is that simple.
Dr. Judy Chu, a Stanford Researcher and author of When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity, followed boys from pre-kindergarten through first grade for two years. At first, she found boys to be “emotionally perceptive, articulate, and responsive in their relationships.” By the age of five, the same boys had learned to disconnect from their feelings, becoming “stoic, competitive, and aggressive” to be accepted as “real boys.” Essentially, they traded pieces of their humanity for social currency.
Decades of research on boys conducted by NYU’s Professor of Developmental Psychology, Niobe Way, shows that early-middle adolescent boys love and need their male friends, but when they reach late adolescence, they start to distance themselves out of fear of being seen as “girly” or “gay.” In her recent book Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture, Dr. Way writes about how important it is for boys to develop social and emotional skills for true gender equality to exist. She is quoted in The Nation’s article “Are Men OK?” as saying: “Boys have been telling us what’s at the root of their problems and how to solve it for almost four decades now. And we’re not listening. Masculinity needs to be reimagined? What the hell? No, humanity needs to be reimagined.”
As a #BoyMom, I wanted to reimagine the conventional wisdom of what boys and men are and could be, so I founded Build Up Boys, a nonprofit dedicated to helping young boys retain their innate emotional intelligence. I wanted the messaging to reflect Dr. Chu’s and Dr. Way’s findings: Boys, like girls, come into this world with access to their full range of emotions, instinctively knowing how to love and be loved, knowing how to be human.
Every Build Up Boys class starts with a “Welcome Circle,” where boys check in with their bodies and learn granular feeling words to describe what’s going on with them. Research shows that the more specific a feeling word is, the better a person is able to process that feeling. We play games that let boys practice reading facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues. We teach tools for emotional regulation and ways to resolve conflict internally and externally. We encourage interpersonal curiosity by creating a space for it.
I want boys to feel empowered so they don’t feel the need to have power over others. I want them to know they matter so they don’t fall prey to the Andrew Tates of the world so they don’t feel like victims justified in victimizing others. I want them to hold onto their hearts.
This can’t happen if we continue to genderize the human need for connection and then demean that need (to paraphrase Dr. Way). So, yes, download that online protection software. Ask your sons what they are watching on YouTube; warn them about the dangers of misogyny. But also ask them how they are feeling and encourage them to ask their friends. And if they don’t know, or don’t know how, help them.
Kimmi Berlin is an author, writing coach, #boymom, and founder of Build Up Boys, a nonprofit dedicated to helping boys retain their innate emotional intelligence. You can find out more at www.buildupboys.com.
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