Why Stranger Things Refuses the Coming-of-Age Story

A Note: Spoilers ahead for Stranger Things. Written shortly after the series finale aired on January 1, 2026.

A good ending doesn’t just resolve a story—it reshapes its meaning. After nearly a decade, Stranger Things has come to a close with a satisfying ending that invites a natural question: what was this genre-defying story really about?

It’s a story about found family in a world where belonging is fragile. About how, for some characters, the fear of being seen for who they are outweighs even the terror of monsters. About how cruelty so often traces back to pain rather than psychopathy, and how bullies are rarely born—they’re shaped. All of those readings feel true.

But as the series settled, one idea kept rising above the rest: that relationships do not erase hardship, but they profoundly shape what hardship does to us.

Stranger Things is often described as a coming-of-age story. A group of children face extraordinary danger, encounter death and loss, and confront a world far darker than they imagined. That description feels intuitive—but it’s also wrong.

Stranger Things is not a story about children being forced to grow up too fast.

It is a story about children who endure extreme experiences and are still allowed to remain children.

That distinction matters more than we might realize.

What a Coming-of-Age Narrative Assumes

Classic coming-of-age narratives follow a familiar arc: innocence meets reality, and the encounter permanently alters the protagonist. The world reveals itself as cruel, unfair, or indifferent, and the child adapts by shedding idealism. Growth comes through disillusionment. Maturity is purchased at the cost of hopefulness.

In those stories, adulthood arrives early because it has to—because no one shows up, because safety disappears, because belief in goodness becomes untenable. The trauma is the education. At their core, these stories often conflate maturity with disillusionment, suggesting that growing up requires the loss of innocence.

In the moral universe of Stranger Things, that assumption isn’t just flawed—it’s upside down.

Despite monsters, alternate dimensions, and repeated brushes with death, the kids of Hawkins are not pushed into premature adulthood. They don’t become hardened, cynical, or morally compromised. They don’t lose their capacity for play, tenderness, or hope.

They suffer, without being asked to grow up before their time.

Trauma Does Not Always Tell the Story

There’s a cultural assumption that severe or shared trauma inevitably produces psychological damage—that suffering itself forces maturity, hardening, or pathology. But clinically, that assumption doesn’t hold.

Large-scale research consistently shows that most people exposed to traumatic events do not go on to develop PTSD, even when those events are severe or shared. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for PTSD notes plainly that while trauma exposure is common, PTSD is not—and that most people recover without developing long-term disorder

International data from the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health Surveys echoes this across cultures and populations, showing high rates of trauma exposure but far lower rates of persistent post-traumatic illness

What predicts who struggles and who recovers is not the trauma alone. Risk increases with prior adversity, lack of social support, ongoing threat, and experiences of neglect or abandonment—especially in childhood, as outlined by the National Institute of Mental Health

Conversely, supportive relationships consistently emerge as one of the strongest protective factors against long-term traumatic stress, a finding replicated across decades of research and meta-analyses

Protective relationships are not incidental. They shape outcomes. And Stranger Things centers this reality—not through therapy or treatment, but through presence, belief, and care.

What It Means When Adults Show Up

One of the most overlooked themes in Stranger Things is how consistently older adolescents and adults protect, advocate for, and sacrifice for the kids.

Steve Harrington becomes a caregiver.

Joyce refuses to give up on her son.

Hopper absorbs pain so others don’t have to.

Teachers, siblings, friends—again and again—show up.

This matters.

In Lord of the Flies, children are isolated from adult care, structure, and accountability—and the result is brutality. That novel is often cited as evidence of “human nature,” but William Golding later acknowledged that the story was shaped by his own experiences of being bullied and being a bully. It was less a portrait of innate savagery than a study in how violence begets violence.

Stranger Things offers the opposite condition: needs are met. Eggos are left and found. A safe place to hide is provided. Someone notices when a child is missing. Someone believes them. Someone fights for them.

When care is present, even extreme hardship does not automatically deform development.

That’s not naïve optimism. It’s developmental reality.

What Remains Intact

By the end of Stranger Things, the kids graduate high school in an almost ordinary way. They get invited to a party. They joke. They grieve—but they also imagine futures. The series closes not with moral collapse or bitter realism, but with something far more countercultural: hope.

Not denial. Not erasure. But hope grounded in relationship.

The clearest evidence of this is in how the story frames who they are. Stranger Things begins with a group of friends gathered around a table, immersed in a game of Dungeons & Dragons—laughing, imagining, connecting. And after everything they endure, the series ends the same way: friends together, playing the same game.

That symmetry matters. It signals that the story was never about innocence lost, but about innocence protected. The world expands, danger intrudes, loss occurs—but the core of who they are, and how they relate to one another, remains intact.

The story suggests that trauma is not the final author of identity. That children do not have to be “used up” by suffering in order to become actualized. That protection, care, and connection can buffer even the darkest experiences.

In a media landscape saturated with narratives that equate maturity with damage, Stranger Things offers a quieter, braver, and right-side-up claim:

Connection doesn’t prevent trauma—it changes its trajectory.