Opinion | Adolescence and the Surprising Difficulty of Hugging a Teen Son
Early in the first episode of the four-part Netflix series “Adolescence,” a father and son sit in a room at a police station because the son has been accused of murder.The boy, Jamie, who’s 13, has been surrounded by officers, lawyers and medical workers he barely understands.
Alone with his father, he weeps.Throughout the scene, Eddie, the father, repeatedly leans forward or begins to lift his arm as if he is going to hug or comfort his son, but he never touches Jamie.Instead, Eddie tells Jamie, “Eat your cornflakes.” Practical matters — that is how Eddie shows love.During that long first day in the police station, Eddie makes very little physical contact with his son.
They do not embrace until the episode’s final scene, after both have reviewed the video evidence that establishes the son’s guilt.Their eventual embrace, initially sought by Jamie and rejected by Eddie, is not one of comfort but one of shared devastation.That gap is echoed in the distant relationship between the investigator, Luke, and his own son.
Both dads struggle to get the love inside them into the hearts of their boys.My relationship with my teenage son is different and, I think, quite warm.Still, I know that struggle.
As my eldest son exited early childhood, his shoulders broadening to match mine and his voice shifting a register, I wondered what to do with this emerging adult that now inhabited my house.As someone who grew up without a dad around, I lacked a healthy model to imitate.
I didn’t know how to tear down that wall of silence and mystery that creeps up between parents and their teens.But I knew that such barrier destruction is an essential task for parents.
Watching the show reminded me that I wasn’t alone.In a past generation, researchers who studied the impact of fathers on their sons often focused on their physical absence from the home.Boys raised without their fathers around, the research showed, were at greater risk for all sorts of negative outcomes ...