Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child's Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods

From the bestselling author of Hunt, Gather, Parent comes a revolutionary five-step guide—packed with practical, science-backed strategies—that shows you how to raise confident, happy kids while breaking the cycle of overdependence on screens and ultraprocessed foods.

“Dopamine Kids promises to wean families from two modern scourges: screens and ultraprocessed foods...in essence, promising a solution to the problems laid out by Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation....On the other side, readers can discover lives full of authentic pleasure.” —The New York Times

When Dr. Michaeleen Doucleff decided to address her family’s screen time and dependence on processed foods, she found that parenting advice around these products is woefully outdated, hinging on studies of dopamine that date back twenty to fifty years. But new research reveals that contrary to what we’ve been told, dopamine isn’t the molecule of happiness and pleasure. Instead, dopamine gives us motivation, and can drive us to engage in activities that we don’t actually enjoy—activities that can make us feel sad, lonely, anxious, and depressed.

What works, Doucleff found, isn’t depriving children of pleasure, but bringing more joy and pleasure back into their lives. Merging modern neuroscience and psychology with practical experience, Dopamine Kids is a five-step operating manual for habit remodeling that is tailored for parents and their children, shifting the power dynamic back to families. Instead of devices and foods controlling us, we can control them, retraining children's brains so they want and reach for activities and foods that leave them feeling good afterward. You’ll learn how to:

- Create boundaries around screens and ultraprocessed foods that not only work but that kids enjoy;
- Replace screen time with equally enticing activities;
- Set up your routine, so that so that the healthy options become the default without negotiation or struggle;
- Celebrate your family’s choices before, during, and after trying new hobbies, and, finally,
- Transform your home into a screen-free sanctuary that protects conversations, focus, sleep, and adventure.

After reading Dopamine Kids, you will be empowered to create habits that genuinely fulfill your family’s biological and emotional needs, to bring true satisfaction and purpose to their lives, and to improve their behavior, happiness, and confidence. The Anxious Generation alerted you to the danger of screens, but the demands of the twenty-first century require that you use them anyway. Dopamine Kids is your handbook for solving that fundamental problem of our times—and for teaching your kids to have a healthy relationship with technology and food.

Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD, has reported on children’s health for NPR’s science desk for more than a decade. In 2015, she was part of the team that earned a George Foster Peabody Award for its coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. She has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor of science from the California Institute of Technology. Before joining NPR, Doucleff completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. She lives with her husband and daughter in Alpine, Texas, and is the author of the New York Times bestseller Hunt, Gather, Parent and Dopamine Kids.