Chilling ‘Adolescence’

If you hear the word ‘Adolescence’, you know what I am talking about in the current Netflix age. It is the new four part series that is currently available on Netflix about a teen and the trauma the family undergoes because of the teen being bullied on social media. For those who have already watched the four part series, it brings chills to teen and adolescent parents. It is beautifully taken and the truth is quite raw and harsh.

As a security and privacy professional, I always write about children’s safety and privacy issues and what may be good digital etiquettes for parents and children.

If fellow adolescent parents can answer the following questions, it will be great:

1. Do you always know what your child is doing online?
2. Do you care to know what they are doing as well?
3. Do you know the different social media platforms they are on?
4. Do you think they are mature enough to handle all the social media platforms?
5. Do you check their phone or do you think it is an invasion of their privacy?
6. Have you ever been stumped by what they are doing online(if you found out)
7. Is your adolescent smarter than you on different social media platforms(I know they will be!! ;))

If you answered ‘Yes’ to question numbers 1 -5, and ‘No’ to question 6 and 7, you are fine.

But if you answered ‘Yes’ particularly to question number 6 and 7, then, I think it is better to get up to date with Gen Z lingo and the different social media platforms(we can try! :))

Gen Z and young adolescents love Instagram. It is their favorite place on the Internet. They have shied away from Facebook saying that, that it is for ‘boomers'(face palm) Gen Z and Gen Alpha have a unique language and multiple acronyms. It is quite hard to keep up and learn them all. And the way it is thrown all across their social media platforms will definitely make Gen Z parents bewildered and uneducated!

Towards the end of the Netflix series, it depicts a young teen sitting along with his parents in the room and doing things on his computer. The child is supposed to be on his computer till 1 o’clock at night and parents really have no clue of what he is doing and have no intention to try and know either. What does he do? Parents don’t know. We just assume that the young child is doing something and he was safe because he was sitting with them all the time. It is quite ironic that a child can do something mischievous when they are sitting right in front of their parents on their computer.

Image source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/03/14/netflixs-adolescence-review-an-all-time-technical-masterpiece/

Adolescent age is a confusing age. We are not a child and we are not an adult as yet too. We are somewhere in the middle and it is hard to figure the right from the wrong. In the midst of it all, the Internet also acts up and a new world has sprung up for them which is fundamentally more different from ours.

The one thing that I took away from the whole thing was that we as parents are in a highly digital and social media age. Fortunately or unfortunately, we have to have some clue of what is happening in their digital lives. We don’t have to be helicoptering them all the time, but keeping in touch with the digital realities and learning about it will help us all great deal. In addition, if they trust you with all their social media insecurities(like ‘X is bullying me’ or ‘X sends weird messages’), it will be great.

I am not sure whether all this is possible for all of us, but we can certainly try..

This post is for for the BlogchatterA2Z challenge!