For the original piece in the NZ Herald, click here…

The recent worldwide success of the Netflix drama Adolescence has caused a very public debate about the struggles of growing up in 2025.

It’s easy to see it as a call to take smartphones off teenagers. But Adolescence is not actually a show about the evils of the internet leading to a 13-year-old boy murdering a female schoolmate. It is about much more than that.

When horrific violent crimes happen it is human nature to look for a target to blame. With a murder of course that is easy. But Adolescence makes it much more complex than just identifying a monster. That is what makes it feel so real.

Mental health professionals talk about vulnerabilities – the accumulation of individual, family and cultural factors that come together to create individual struggles. The writers of Adolescence lay out a thoroughly believable set of vulnerabilities, and to simply see technology as the villain is to misunderstand the messy nuance that plays out.

On screen, Jamie turns to the internet for connection and affirmation. His family loves him, but he feels unable to be a man in ways that garner his father’s admiration.

As a young boy he liked art and drawing and yet his father is a physical man, who turns away from his son’s mistakes on the football field. His father carries his own trauma and rage. Beaten viciously by his own father as a child, he swears to never do the same to his own son, yet in controlling himself he also turns away from his son, his rage flowing over in other areas of his life.

There is no doubt he loves Jamie, but he doesn’t know how to love him safely, and so in subtle ways he keeps his distance.

So is it his dad’s fault? His mother works hard to regulate and keep his father calm. In doing so she models a power dynamic that is common in patriarchal families, it is the women’s role to keep their men calm, through their emotional intelligence that is culturally mandated in ways male emotions aren’t.

This is highlighted when Jamie’s sister rolls her eyes at her mother when discussing her boyfriend, and proclaims, “I don’t need him to look after me Mum.”

So is it his parents’ fault?

Well, this is a family living in working class England, where Jaime’s father works on-call as a plumber. So his own issues aside, financial pressures take him away from the family. His parents, naive about technology and glad that their son has an interest, buy him a computer which he has in his room.

At school Jamie is spat on and singled out – in a school system that struggles to keep children in class, with inexperienced teachers turning on TVs to teach and with little time to attend to those who may need pastoral care.

Jamie’s victim Katie, herself new to the school and struggling to find her place, sends a topless photo of herself in an effort to connect with a boy. After the photo is spread around school by the recipient, she lashes out at Jamie’s efforts to connect with her (while she is “weak” in his words) and she taunts Jaime online.

Of course the school has no resources to respond to any of this – with the exception of the one teacher who tries to help Katie’s friend Jade, but is only able to suggest once more referring her on to mental health services.

Can we blame the schools, the mental health system, or wider society then?

Is the real problem that Jamie is an “incel” (involuntary celibate)?

All of these factors, lack of affirmation, feeling weak and unacceptable to his father, loneliness and lack of connection in a family understandably too busy to notice he has turned to his computer in the privacy of his own room is ultimately Katie’s demise.

The majority of young people consume some form of online content, yet the world is not filled with Jamies. In the same way that every young person who is handed a smartphone doesn’t go on to murder a classmate, or develop a mental illness, not every person who picks up a drink, or smokes a joint goes on to become an addict.

Banning smartphones or social media is likely to be as successful as banning drugs – even age limits have their, well, limits. When we blame “technology”, we also wash our hands as a society of responsibility.

Responsibility for a society that has created work hours that take parents away, a school system under-resourced and focused on achievement at the cost of caring and relationship, of a world that fails to protect young men and women at a time in their development when it can seem like they don’t need us anymore, but in fact need us more than ever.

Just as Jamie’s parents painfully wrestle with their own responsibility – “we made him”, they sob, we too must take all the responsibility that is ours. As parents we must educate ourselves, and make a clear-eyed assessment – with the help of trusted friends or other parents – as to the vulnerabilities our children bring to their engagement with the online world.

We should at the very least be following the age limits of the platforms themselves, and taking the time to fully engage with the parental controls that exist for devices and platforms. Coming together as communities of parents can also help shape shared norms.

Legislated age limits, bans on use in schools, and public education in schools – are all measures that make sense to me, but also in reality have their limits – we only need look at adolescent drinking and drug use to see that.

But the one thing that we need to do is maintain good close, open and loving relationships and connections with our children, even when they start to actively avoid that as adolescence kicks in. One of the strongest results in the literature is in the protective value of close family relationships and strong communities.

So who’s to blame? All of us. And until we all take community responsibility for a world that creates Jamies then nothing will change, in fact it will only get worse.

This is my column this week in the New Zealand Herald, which is published in the digital edition every Thursday…

So here we are, in 2017, once more having a debate because some people believe it’s a good thing to use physical violence against children. And as if that isn’t bad enough, some politicians even see it as a way to grab some votes.

Frankly, I find it morally reprehensible we’re still having this conversation, but I also understand there is a big difference between making a mistake as a parent, which most later regret, and arguing for the right to intentionally and deliberately use violence against young people.

But there is confusion in many of the arguments, the “n=1” problem. If you were smacked by your parents, and you feel it did you no harm, you may even be right, but your sample size of one (just yourself) proves nothing. In fact it’s more accurate to say you are okay, despite being smacked.

As you might expect there’s been a ton of research into the impact of smacking, and while controversy exists as to how bad it is, there isn’t a single study that shows it improves childhood outcomes.

There are some fairly large “meta-analysis” studies, where the results of many large studies are collected together to understand the overall trends, and these show clearly that spanking, specifically – as opposed to more severe physical violence – is clearly associated with a range of negative behaviours, both as children and later as adults, including increased use of interpersonal violence, aggression, mental health problems and substance abuse.

Before you go rushing off to claim that “yes but there’s this one study/expert/example that says it’s fine to smack kids”, science is about weight of evidence, and putting together a picture over time.

And the picture is clear: There is no known safe level of physical violence that can be used with children. Or to put it another way: Any use of physical violence, even so called light “smacking” runs the risk of adverse outcomes.

But there’s a simpler test: When was the last time someone hit you? Have you been assaulted as an adult? What did it feel like, even if it didn’t hurt much, did you feel angry, humiliated, powerless, enraged?

Did it improve your relationship with the person that just hit you?

Empathy is what goes missing in the politicisation of parenting. I have a lot of empathy for parents who lash out in frustration, because that’s what they know to do, or what was done to them. We should be able to make the distinction between saying this is wrong and let’s help you do this differently. Our current law recognises this, and allows for help not punishment to be the outcome of any reported incident.

But that is worlds apart from those who seek to argue for the use of violence being acceptable. And if you’re argument is that I was smacked, and it did me no harm, so I’ll do the same to my kids, then you’ve just proved the research right.

Violence begets violence, and no good comes from that.

If you enjoyed this article please make sure you click here to view the the original article in the NZ Herald.  The Herald measures the popularity of columns based on how many people view them.  So by viewing the orginal article you’ll be telling the Herald you like my column!

– nzherald.co.nz

The stereotypical image of the father throwing a young infant in the air while mum anxiously looks on, is one that all parents are familiar with. Recent research has suggested that this type of vigorous play that typically fathers engage in is not only good for children but may in fact be necessary for their development. Mark Sainsbury and I talked about this research on his Sunday morning show on Radio Live this week.  (Click here to listen to the interview)

Parenting research is generally focused on the importance of the attachment bond between mother and infant. But when using these models to try and understand the bond between a father and child they often don’t adequately describe the quality of the relationship…

“When Kathryn Kerns asked 30 teens and preteens to come to her laboratory and talk about their parents, many of their dads scored low on a standard yardstick her research team was using to evaluate the parent-child bond.

The children described rich, warm relationships with their fathers, however, says Dr. Kerns, a professor of psychological sciences at Kent State University in Ohio. They said things like, “My dad gives me encouragement to do things,” or, “My dad tells me he thinks I can do well.’ ” (Click here for the whole article)

Paternal relationships tend to be more about encouragement, building confidence and engaging the outside world. These are ideas that are familiar to psychodynamic therapists where fathers are seen as the bridge from the  “symbiotic” maternal relationship, to the outward looking engagement with father and thus the outside world.

It’s also true that psychotherapists understand that ‘maternal’ and ‘paternal’ doesn’t necessarily mean a female mother and a male father.  One of the interesting aspects of this recent research is that in male same sex parent relationships the man who takes on the more ‘maternal’ role shows biological changes in parts of the brain (mainly the amygdala) that are identical to the changes that mothers undergo when parenting.  Although the study doesn’t explore it, I have no doubt the same is true, albeit in reverse, for females parenting in same sex relationships.

However all of this exciting rough and tumble play is not just about engaging with the outside world, researchers in the above study came up with a way to measure the quality of the relationship between fathers and young infants in a test they called “The Laughing Task”…

“In this procedure, researchers leave parent and child alone in a lab without toys for two or more minutes and ask the parent to make the child laugh.  “A landmark of optimal fatherhood” may be the ability to maintain sensitivity and emotional rapport during rambunctious play… …Other fathers scared or unnerved their children by using monster voices. Fathers who aren’t sensitive during play can disrupt a child’s ability to form attachments, fostering insecurity and fear.” (Click here for the whole article)

So while this information about the importance and value of young children’s relationship with their fathers may for some be politically and economically uncomfortable, we know from countries where more paternity leave has been offered to fathers that more engaged and attuned fathers leads to a range of positive health outcomes for the infant, the father and the mother…

“There is growing evidence that employment-based family support measures such as maternity and paternity leave after childbirth and parental leave to care for children in the early years has the potential for improving children’s health.  More research is emerging on the benefits of fathers taking parental leave, particularly in the Nordic countries – including boosts in fathers’ involvement in care of infants, cognitive outcomes for children, improvements in the quality of couple relationships and even fertility gains.”  (Click here for the whole article)

Of course this are of research can be used by some to further all sorts of arguments for traditional families, and even by some against same sex parenting.  However this particular study shows clearly, children need a range of different relationships with adults: regardless of gender.

And in light of the recent landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in the USA, it’s important to underline that there are no differences between children raised by heterosexual and same sex parents…

“The new research, which looked at 19,000 studies and articles related to same-sex parenting from 1977 to 2013, was released last week, and comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule by the end of this month on whether same-sex marriage is legal.
“Consensus is overwhelming in terms of there being no difference in children who are raised by same-sex or different- sex parents,” University of Oregon sociology professor Ryan Light said on Tuesday.” (Click here for the whole article)

Love wins indeed.

Retweet to spread the word. #LoveWins pic.twitter.com/JJ5iCP4ZWn

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) June 26, 2015

We all know money can’t buy you love, but it seems that it also can’t guarantee your children’s happiness.  Mark and I talked about some recent studies on Radio Live today, specifically about the impact of growing up in upper middle class families.  The results aren’t what you’d expect.  (Click here for to listen to the interview)

One of the things I love about science, and the social sciences in particular, is how they can throw up completely unexpected results that challenge our stereotypes and force us to re-think things.  Dr. Suniya Luthar’s research into vulnerability and resilience in young people is an example of this, and her most surprising results were initially discovered by accident.

She was studying the effects of growing up in lower socio-economic familes on young people, and as part of this research needed a control group, or a “normal” sample with which to compare her low socio-economic kids.  However once she had gathered data on a group of upper middle class, suburban teens from the North East of the US, she was shocked by what she found.  Not only was this group not a suitable “control” but on many measures they were faring worse than their poorer, inner city peers.

After further investigations, and more studies, the differences started to fall into a predictable pattern.  In prosperous cohorts, teens tended to have worse substance use problems and with all drugs.  They also showed comparable levels of delinquency, albeit of different kinds, with stealing and cheating more prevalent with the more prosperous, and violence and self defence more common in areas of poverty.  The studies also show alarmingly high rates of depression and anxiety, again at comparable rates, and in some cases higher than for poor inner city youth.

“The high rate of maladjustment among affluent adolescents is strikingly counter-intuitive. There is a tacit assumption—even among those most affected—that education and money procure well-being, and that if children falter, they will swiftly get the appropriate services. Education and money may once have served as buffers against distress, but that is no longer the case.”  (Click here for the whole article)

So what’s going on here?  Well subsequent studies have started to isolate some of the factors that seem to cause these high levels of distress in prosperous teens, and these results seem less surprising.  The first is not much of a leap, the pressure of expectation that many young people of wealthy families experience…

“The first of these potential causes of distress was excessive achievement pressures. In upwardly mobile suburban communities, there is often a ubiquitous emphasis on ensuring that children secure admission to stellar colleges. As a result, many youngsters feel highly driven to excel not only at academics but also at multiple extracurricular activities, with these pressures beginning as early as the middle school years.”  (Click here to read the whole article)

The second, at least in my experience, is also not surprising…

“Aside from achievement pressures, a second broad factor potentially salient in suburban students’ adjustment disturbances is disconnection from adults—both literal and emotional… …Most often, this phenomenon reflects not a lack of child care, but rather, parents’ beliefs that it promotes children’s self-sufficiency.”  (Click here to read the whole article)

We might prefer to think that money and opportunity will pave the way for our children’s success, but actually what makes the real difference?  The space to play and grow to know yourself, free of intrusive expectations, and the consistent and loving presence of a attuned parent.  And it’s hard to put a price on that.