The Same Way We Made Him

Watching Adolescence as I stand at the beginning of parenthood.

It has been a long time since a television drama stayed with me like Adolescence did. The premise is almost unbearably simple. A thirteen-year-old boy, Jamie Miller, is arrested for the murder of a girl from his school. His father, Eddie, cannot believe it. Or perhaps he cannot afford to believe it.

Jamie insists that he has done nothing wrong, and his father holds tightly to those words—until the police show him the CCTV footage. There, in front of him, is his son.

Not the frightened child sitting beside him at the police station.
Not the boy he has raised.
Not the son he believes he knows.
A boy stabbing a girl to death.

From that moment on, the drama stops being a question of whether Jamie did it.
The answer is already there.

The harder question becomes:

How did he become someone capable of doing it?

And almost immediately, another question follows.

What could his parents have done differently?

I Tried to Be a Good Father

Eddie wanted to be a good father. More than that, he wanted to be a better father than the one he himself had known.

He worked.
He provided.
He bought his children what they needed.

Jamie spent most of his time at home, often in his bedroom, and that seemed safe. He was not disappearing onto the streets late at night. He was under their roof.

What Eddie could not see was that a closed bedroom door was no longer the boundary of his son’s world. The internet had already entered the room. By the time the adults begin trying to understand Jamie, they discover a world of humiliation, anger, misogyny, social media codes, and online ideas they had barely known were there. The series explicitly explores Jamie’s low self-esteem, bullying, and exposure to incel propaganda rather than presenting the murder as the result of one simple cause. 

That may be one of the most unsettling things about raising children now. A child can be physically at home and still be somewhere you have never been. I think previous generations could at least imagine the places their children went.

School.
A friend’s house.
The playground.
The street.

Now an entire world can enter a child’s bedroom without making a sound. And a parent standing on the other side of the door may honestly believe:

At least he’s home.

If One Child Turned Out Fine

The final episode gives us one of the most painful complications in the whole story.

Jamie has a sister, Lisa.
She grew up in the same family.
She is thoughtful, capable, mature.
At a moment when her parents are falling apart, she is almost the one holding them together.

Eddie looks at her with something close to wonder.

How did we raise this child?

And then comes the answer from his wife:

“The same way we made him — with love, to the best of our ability.” 

That line stayed with me.
Because it refuses to give the audience the easiest answer.

If Jamie’s parents were simply cruel or neglectful, the story would be easier to understand.
Bad parents produced a damaged child.
Cause.
Effect.
End of story.

But Lisa is there.
The same parents loved her too.
The same home held both children.
One child grows into someone capable of comforting the parents who raised her.
The other kills a girl.

So what are parents supposed to do with that?

Children Are Not Outcomes

I am now standing near the beginning of parenthood myself. And one thing already seems certain:

raising a child is not computer logic.

I cannot enter the correct inputs and expect the correct output.
Love + education + discipline + opportunity + affection does not automatically equal a healthy adult.

Children are not equations.
They arrive with temperaments I did not choose.
They will experience things I cannot predict.
They will meet people I never meet.
They will interpret my words in ways I never intended.
They will live inside a culture I cannot completely control.
And increasingly, they will encounter ideas before I even know those ideas have reached them.

That realization is frightening because parenting invites the illusion of control.

If I read enough books,
make the right schedules,
choose the right school,
set the right boundaries,
say the right things,
then surely I can protect them from becoming the wrong kind of person.

But can I?

There is something comforting about believing that every outcome can be traced back to a parenting decision. Because if parenting caused everything, then good parenting could prevent everything.

Adolescence refuses to give us that comfort.

But That Does Not Mean Parents Do Not Matter

Still, saying that parents cannot control the outcome is not the same as saying parents are powerless. This is where the drama becomes painful rather than nihilistic. Eddie’s grief is not simply:

I caused this.

It is also:

What did I fail to see?

At the end, he goes into Jamie’s bedroom and confronts the ordinary things that once reassured him.

The bed.
The belongings.
The evidence of a child who had been living only a few feet away from him.

And suddenly proximity no longer means intimacy.

That frightens me more than the idea that I might make one catastrophic parenting mistake.
What if my children are near me, but I do not know them?
What if I know whether they finished dinner but not what humiliates them?
What if I know what grades they receive but not what they are beginning to believe about women, men, themselves, or the world?
What if I know that they are in their bedroom but have no idea who else is in there with them through a screen?

Perhaps one of the challenges of parenting now is accepting that supervision is not the same thing as relationship.

Safety cannot mean only knowing where a child is.
Sometimes we need to know where their mind has gone.

How Do I Keep Them From Learning to Hate?

This is the question Adolescence left me with.

How do I raise children who do not learn to hate people they do not understand?
How do I keep resentment from becoming identity?
How do I teach boys to experience rejection without turning women into enemies?
How do I teach them that loneliness is painful without letting that pain become entitlement?
How do I give them enough confidence to withstand the voices telling them that someone else is responsible for every insecurity they feel?

I do not think the answer can be simply:

Keep them away from bad things.

Eventually they will see bad things. I cannot build a wall high enough to keep every form of cruelty, pornography, misogyny, racism, humiliation, manipulation, or hatred outside their lives forever. And perhaps attempting to do so would only leave them defenseless when those things eventually appear.

Maybe I need to give them something stronger than isolation.

A way to recognize hatred when it is dressed up as truth.
A way to question the community that tells them their pain gives them permission to despise another person.

Enough security to admit,
I was rejected.
I am lonely.
I am embarrassed.
I do not feel good enough.
without needing to transform those feelings into rage.

And perhaps, above all, a home where those things can be said before they become something else.

The Question Every Parent Will Ask

No matter how many explanations there are, I understand why Eddie still blames himself.

Perhaps every loving parent would.
You can explain algorithms.
You can talk about adolescence, masculinity, temperament, peer culture, isolation, misogyny, or the internet.

But when it is your child, the question becomes terribly small and personal.

What could I have done?
What did I miss?
What if I had spent more time with him?
What if I had hugged him more?

The creators of Adolescence deliberately resist offering one clean answer; Stephen Graham has said the goal was to provoke conversations between parents and children, and Jack Thorne describes the series as a “why-done-it,” asking what is happening inside teenage boys rather than pretending a single cause explains Jamie. 

Maybe that is why the drama affected me so much. Because I wanted an answer too. I wanted to finish it knowing what good parents should do so this never happens to their children. Instead, I was left with uncertainty. And perhaps parenting begins with accepting more of that uncertainty than I would like.

My children are not things I will make.
They are people I will raise.

There is a difference.

I can shape their environment.
Teach them.
Correct them.
Protect them while I can.
Show them what dignity looks like.
Talk openly about cruelty and prejudice.
Pay attention to the worlds they inhabit.
Love them.
Know them.
And keep trying to know them again as they change.

But at some point, they will become people who make choices that belong to them.
That is both the dignity and the terror of raising another human being.

So perhaps my task is not to figure out how to manufacture a good person.
Perhaps it is to remain close enough, curious enough, and humble enough that my children know there is always somewhere to bring the parts of themselves they do not yet understand.

I cannot guarantee what kind of adults they will become.
But while they are still growing, I hope I can keep the door open.

And keep asking what is happening on the other side of it.

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Series Referenced
Adolescence. Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham. Netflix, 2025. The four-part limited series follows 13-year-old Jamie Miller and the family and community confronting the aftermath of his arrest for murdering a classmate.