Contains spoilers for Netfilix series Adolescence
Watching the Netflix series Adolescence facilitated reflections on my life, specifically being a problem teen from a more problematic home.
I remember being in the courtroom when my brother was being tried for beating up six kids who were on another town’s football team. It was supposed to be him and his two best friends. His friend’s got a flat tire along the way. David showed up, not knowing that it was just him. Several weeks later, seeing these six boys who were all several years older than me in casts, splints, and nose guards with various bruises and scrapes on their faces and arms, my body tensed. They were finding out what I knew already: David was dangerous, like really dangerous, and he slept in a room right next to mine. The judge threw the case out because he didn’t believe that one young man could do this to six guys who were at least his size, if not bigger. If the judge had asked me, I would have told them that it wasn’t a fair fight and that they needed another three or four boys to make it equal.
The following year, my brother was arrested for six counts of armed robbery. He and his friend lurked outside jewelry stores at night and robbed elderly women at gunpoint. My family met several times, strategizing how to keep him from being found guilty in court. Not once were the women for whom he put a gun to their heads mentioned. Not once did they discuss that if he didn’t go to prison, he was going to keep doing what he was doing. Not once did anybody think that getting him out of the county jail meant a violent sociopath was going to be roaming the streets. It was all about protecting David so he didn’t get “screwed over by the system”.
We moved to a new town where I didn’t know anybody. David was on the front page of the Newark Star-Ledger the first week at my new school. It was not long before the kids and teachers connected the dots. I became “The kid from THAT family”. I stopped leaving home except to go to school, where I sat the whole year without having a conversation with anyone. I was not a shy or introverted kid by any stretch of the imagination. I talked so much that people typically said they had to go to the bathroom to get away from me, since I learned how to speak.
He was found guilty and received a 10 to 13-year sentence. Every weekend, I would trade off which divorced parent I would visit my brother. Spending your weekend afternoons in a state prison is not as much fun as it sounds. Okay, it sounds awful, and it was worse. I hated him; I hated going there, I hated being part of ”THAT family”.
When he got out 4 years later, he was different. When he went in, he was a violent sociopath; when he came out, he was a hardened, seasoned, and pissed-off violent sociopath. At this point, I had failed or been kicked out of three colleges and universities. I had no direction, I was one of the smartest kids I’d ever met, and I failed out of school and committed enough crimes to get kicked out of the ones I didn’t fail. I was a mess; I felt lost and a complete failure. David kept encouraging me to come and join him. He had connected with some mob bosses while doing time and now had connections. I shifted from being a DJ who was a drug addict and small-time drug dealer to being a low-level mob guy in a matter of months. Little by little, everything that was beautiful, kind, and thoughtful about me became replaced by hate, aggression, and violence. I had now become one of them.
We were running a scam of duplicating credit cards with large balances. The whole organization was making a ton of money, and so was I. Everywhere I went, people knew about me for the second time in my life, but this time, I skipped the lines outside of the big clubs in NYC, and didn’t pay for drinks; when I played blackjack in Atlantic City, I was always comped drinks, food and rooms, and I got to park in front of everywhere I went. I felt powerful. I felt in charge. I felt unstoppable. That changed when the Secret Service subpoenaed about eighty of us and successfully prosecuted sixty-two members of the organization, who all went to various federal penitentiaries throughout the country. My brother was one of them, and I wasn’t.
Fortunately for me, I got clean and sober a handful of years later, and slowly, my life started to change. While in a locked mental health facility, there was a man on the unit who was a patient due to his third suicide attempt. His wife was one of the women my brother held up at gunpoint. She had a stroke and had been paralyzed for all those years.
A few years after that, I became a social worker and an alternative counselor, which I’ve been since 1993. For almost two decades, I worked with adolescents and their families in crisis or teens on juvenile probation. When watching the third episode of Adolescence, seeing the psychologist with Jamie, the 13-year-old boy who was arrested for savagely murdering a girl with a knife, reminded me of what it was like to work with some of those teens during the 90s and 2000s. There were moments when incredibly violent kids, primarily boys, seemed like they were only about five seconds away from ending mine or somebody else’s life over really stupid things like the wrong flavor of ice cream, or we weren’t going to play basketball because it was raining that day. They were that volatile.
As I watched the fourth episode, I reflected on my unique experiences and perspectives, such as being that 13-year-old boy who thought he was ugly, lost, and hated himself, being the sibling of a high-profile case that everybody knew your brother was who he was, and being a social worker working with those kids in adulthood.
The thing that really stands out from watching that series is that most people focus on how dangerous social media is for violent and aggressive influencers like Andrew Tate and others. And it’s true; teenage boys and young men are very susceptible to being exploited and manipulated by these kinds of characters, just as I was by the Italian Mobsters at that time in my life. What they’re not taking into account is that both fathers were clueless about their sons, their sons’ lives and interests, and didn’t have strong connections to their sons. Most importantly, both fathers were ashamed of their sons! We can lie and act in all kinds of ways to make our kids think that we love them and we’re proud of them, but what we really feel about them leaks out, and they know! The boys knew their fathers did not respect them.
I am incredibly grateful for two things right now. The first is that with the help of many people, I was able to turn my life around and sustain being a healthy and balanced man for more than thirty-five years. The second is witnessing the impact of this series on people around the world. I understand why parents are freaking out that social media can impact adolescence in this way. Still, if that’s all they walk away with, they missed the critical point of not having solid, safe connections with their kids, who their kids trust to bring up things they’re struggling with and to ask questions.
Reading thousands of parents commenting on social media, “We can do all that we can and give them everything, and sometimes they still make bad choices”. That is true, but that’s not what happened to Jamie, the 13-year-old boy in the show. His father did not do all he could to give him everything he needed and protect him. He was ashamed of his son and was not involved in his son’s life. This is what makes teenage boys and young men susceptible to Andrew Tate and other influencers who do not have the kids’ best interests in mind. We can’t blame parents for everything, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have built more trusting, intimate, and supportive relationships. If the series Adolescence teaches us one thing, we better pay attention and build trusting relationships with our kids, if not, really bad things can happen. A 13-year-old boy stabbed a classmate nine times with a knife because she made fun of him, and the classmate died. It’s just fiction, but it’s not.
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Previously Published on Medium
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