'Letters To Our Sons' Advances The Conversation Started By Netflix Original ‘Adolescence’

My nephew (b. 2018) learnt to skip YouTube ads when he was two. He discovered his fingers had a magic touch. We have a cute video of him demonstrating it. At the time, my mother was learning to speed-dial contacts. Her touch was perhaps too outdated for her smartphone. 

One day, my sister played a Hanuman cartoon series for our nephew. Stumbling across the room, the toddler reached for the Smart TV screen to skip the ad. Failing to do so surprised him. He was mildly frustrated when we laughed. The magic touch wasn’t so magical after all. 

As children, when our understanding of the world fails us, we either lose hope or gain insights. Last year, now a seven-year-old, he came home with a black-and-blue bruise under his right eye. He was so scared to tell us that some kid had hurt him. We never got to know why. The other child appeared innocent too. His class teacher irresponsibly said these things happen. 

My instant reaction was to ask her what she was supposed to be doing if she wasn’t taking care of the children in her class, but I know now that it isn’t always possible to oversee a child. As a guardian, a teacher, or a parent, the moment you blink, the world around your child changes, and it isn’t easy to navigate. 

It was around the time I watched Adolescence (2025) on Netflix. It begins with an armed police force barging into a house to take away thirteen-year-old Jamie, played to perfection by Owen Cooper, on suspicion of murdering a teenage classmate, leaving his parents wondering, 'Where did we go wrong?' 

Jamie was as fragile-looking and harmless as the kid my sister-in-law told me about. To date, I worry that my nephew might find himself in a harmful situation and be too tongue-tied to share it with us, the ones he loves the most. But then, why can’t he just trust us? Have we gone wrong too?

It isn’t a world where children are safe. In fact, it never has been. The conversation Adolescence started was crucial, but what people are looking for now are ways to inform themselves about how to guide their young men through such an impressionable age, instead of losing them to the manosphere and incel subculture. When an opportunity to do so came, British actor and producer Stephen Graham’s way, he acted with the same as quickly he did in the TV series where he plays Jamie’s father. 

Compiled in collaboration with Orly Klein, sourcing over 1600 letters to address issues facing the fragile relationship between a father and a son “going through a cosmic change”, Letters to Our Sons (Bloomsbury) is a timely and welcome addition to parenting books.

In the Foreword, Graham notes that when Klein’s son turned 13, she had asked “some men to write to him with some guidance on what it means to be a man.” When approached with an idea of a book by Orly, Peters Fraser + Dunlop (PFD) literary agency’s Jude Marwa thought it’d definitely interest Graham, the co-creator and co-writer of Adolescence. Graham writes that if “we want to help our boys, if we want them to flourish, if we want them to feel loved, to be secure in who they are, to feel like they belong and to grow into good men, then we need to communicate with them.”Divided into three sections—Early Years, Adolescence, and Adulthood—the book opens up warmly to its readers with a poem, If I Ever Have Boys by Daragh Fleming, who wrote this in a response to Lucas Jones’ poem titled Dangerous Men, which begins with teaching “my boys to be dangerous men.” 

The letters in the book are wide-ranging and diverse in every way. In one, a Merseyside-based actor, Jay, writes to his three-week-old son that he “was a scared little boy who didn’t know how to ask for help.” How often does one find a father demonstrating vulnerability in the face of events, acknowledging his fragility in a society that wants him to present himself as an inhumanely unemotional and unbreakable figure? 

In a letter to his teenage son, an anonymous dad says, “This is the letter I think I needed at your age.” The lacuna this father felt as a child isn’t the legacy he wants to continue. This is something he shares in common with other dads, who come in a variety of forms in this book. 

There are men who became fathers in their teenage. They were more scared than grateful for the gift of a child. Then, there are those who ache for their sons to grow up in front of their eyes but can’t, for they are writing to their sons from prisons. Breaking away from the norm are queer dads writing to their adopted sons. In a letter, a father, owing to his childhood experiences with bullies, asks his son if he was being “made fun of” in the class for “having two gay dads”. His tiny son immediately puts him at ease, saying it isn’t “a big deal”.

When I read these letters, I read them hoping manosphere wouldn’t be a big deal in future. For realising such a bias-free, hate-free, and tolerant future world, Letters to Our Sons is most certainly a compounding investment for two reasons.

First, it’s attempting to correct the mistakes made in the past. Fathers in this book, raised by abusive, alcoholic, absent, and non-communicative fathers, are determined not to become a variant of their parents. By breaking away from justifying “but in those days” kind of excuses, these fathers are demonstrating a new kind of resilience that’s required from them today more than ever before. 

Second, recommendations in this book are outright hilarious, which is refreshing in a parenting manual of sorts. “Get a dog”, says a father. “Never take advice from books like these”, says another. Among other advice, there’s one I highly second. Harry, a London-based video editor, writes: “Don’t pay builders in full until all the work is done.” 

But perhaps nothing screams topicality of this book than what a father named Edward notes. “The glow that lights your face won’t come from the night-light anymore, but from a screen. And I carry a quiet fear that you’ll lie there, scrolling through a world that hums too loudly – measuring yourself against the mirage of curated perfection.” 

Reading this book, I also realised that in a world going berserk with incomprehensible changes, we just have to make sense of a few things that matter. We must tell our children that they can exist without competing with others. They should remain secure in themselves without worrying about feeling like a spectacular failure, or, in fact, we should teach them to fail better (to paraphrase Samuel Beckett). Doing so won’t help us become a perfect parent, for no such thing exists, but we may help our children see us as partners in this journey to becoming a better person – not just a gender. 

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