Adolescence star Ashley Walters says Netflix series changed the way he parents his children

Adolescence star Ashley Walters has said that starring in the Netflix series has changed the way he parents his eight children.

The 42-year-old Top Boy actor played DI Luke Bascombe, who finds himself caught up in the case of 13-year-old boy Jamie Miller (newcomer Owen Cooper) accused of murder.

The four-part series, co-created by and starring Stephen Graham, has received huge praise since its release in March,becoming one of Netflix’s most-watched shows ever. It has sparked conversation about the influence of the internet on young boys, been discussed in Parliament and had calls for it to be included on school syllabuses.

Walters said it has also had the inadvertent effect of making him realise he had been “too liberal” with his own children. It comes after creator Graham also issued a warning to parents about the effects of the internet on young people.

“I guess none of us knew how much conversation it would create,” Walters told Fearne Cotton on the Happy Place podcast.

“The biggest thing I’ve taken from it is how it’s affected me and my family. It’s very rare that I will be in a show and then learn huge things about myself afterwards.”

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The actor has two children and a stepson with his current partner and Chewing Gum actor Danielle Walters, four children with an ex-partner, Natalie Williams, and two with another ex-partner. His children are aged between 21 and seven, and Walters became a grandfather at the age of 38 in 2023.

Explaining how it had affected his parenting, Walters said: “I realised I’ve been a bit too liberal as a parent. I’ve been a bit too easygoing with my kids, with devices, screen time, stuff like that.

“I don’t think I understood how dangerous those things can be sometimes so there are a lot of changes that happened in my house, a lot of conversations between me and my wife just about where we’re going with them and how much time they spend on screens and on their iPads.

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“The stuff that they’re doing on there as well that we maybe felt was like quite harmless, actually you look deeper into it and you’re like, wow, that could lead to this and that could lead to that.”

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The conversations with his family were not easy but the star said that he has forced himself to have them and that this is part of the enduring appeal of the show.

“I feel like that is part of why it’s become so big, because before that, I felt scared to have those conversations with my kids,” he continued.

“I didn’t want to make them stand out. Their friends are doing it so it’s fine, right? I feel like what Adolescence did was say to parents, okay, you can all have the conversation now, like here’s evidence and proof of the extreme of where it can go if you’re not going in their room and checking on them.

“Parents all around the world have gone ‘Okay now we can discuss this openly without feeling like c****y parents’.”

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Graham told The Independent that he wanted to explore the wider influences affecting young boys from “ordinary” backgrounds, when creating the show.

“It’s just being mindful of the fact that not only we parent our children, and not only the school educates our children,” he said.

“But also there’s influences that we have no idea of that are having profound effects on our young culture, profound effects, positive and extremely negative. So it’s having a look at that and seeing that we’re all accountable.”

The Boiling Point actor went on to unpack the “microcosm of the home” and “the macrocosm of the world outside”, explaining that the separation no longer existed.

“When we were kids, if you got sent to your room or if Kenny Everett was on the telly, and it got a bit racy, you’d be sent to your room and then you couldn’t watch it,” he reflected. “But today even within the context of that home, when lads and girls go to their bedrooms, they have the world at their fingertips.”