Description: 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 Nearly everything you've heard about dopamine is wrong. No, it's not the molecule of happiness. And no, it doesn't give us pleasure--it gives us motivation. For the first time in history, we are inundated with "dopamine surges" inside our brains, pulling us to technology and ultraprocessed foods like magnets--every day, many times a day. Over the past decade, neuroscientists have finally begun to figure out how these surges alter our choices, our habits, and even our moods. We've learned how dopamine can drive adults and kids to engage in activities that we don't actually enjoy--activities that can make us feel sad, lonely, anxious, and depressed. When Michaeleen Doucleff decided to address her family's screen time and dependence on processed foods, she found that scientific study after scientific study refuted nearly all the claims in the media about dopamine and the supposed reasons why we're so inclined to pick up our phones or raid the pantry. She took this new neuroscience and psychology and merged it with practical experience, shifting the power dynamic back to families: Instead of devices and foods controlling us, we control them, and both screens and the pantry become tools rather than burdens. Dopamine Kids is a five-step operating manual for habit remodeling that is tailored for parents and their children. After rediscovering what's most important for your family, you'll learn how to create successful boundaries around screens and ultraprocessed foods; replace screen time with equally enticing activities; remove triggers that pull children toward screens and junk food; and, finally, celebrate your family's choices before, during, and after trying new hobbies. These five steps weaken the neurological pathways established by devices and make dopamine work in your favor to get kids to want to pursue high-quality activities that reduce anxiety, create better moods, and diversify interests. Dr. Doucleff's research culminates in a four-week plan to create screen-free sanctuaries that protect 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.Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: "Ms. Doucleff might be the biggest parenting expert you've never heard about. Hunt, Gather, Parent, published in 2021, has been translated into thirty-one languages. It has sold more than one million copies worldwide. . . . 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. . . . Ms. Doucleff promises that, on the other side, readers can discover lives full of authentic pleasure."
--Emi Nietfeld, The New York Times
--Pamela Druckerman, The New York Times Book Review "THIS IS THE PARENTING BOOK I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR!!! Smart, humbling, and revealing, Hunt, Gather, Parent should force a re-set of modern American parenting and return a healthier and happier childhood to both parents and children."
--Julie Lythcott-Haims, New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult and Real American "Parents: You don't have to go to kid birthday parties anymore! Or awkwardly straddle playground equipment! Or create chore charts! In her funny, honest, and practical book, Michaeleen Doucleff collects ancient wisdom that can restore sanity to parenting."
--Amanda Ripley, New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Kids in the World and High Conflict "Deeply researched . . . [Doucleff] takes care to portray her subjects not as curiosities 'frozen in time, ' but instead as modern-day families who have held on to invaluable child-rearing techniques that likely date back tens of thousands of years."
--The Atlantic "Michaeleen Doucleff's Hunt, Gather, Parent breathes a gust of fresh air onto the parenting bookshelf. She gives us a whole new way of looking at raising kids, and it is so beautifully intuitive even as it runs counter to everything we have been taught as Western parents. I loved all the families she introduces us to, the landscapes she brings to life, and her honesty about her relationships with her own daughter. It really does take a village to raise a child, and it is pure joy to follow Michaeleen and Rosy from village to village seeing how it can be done. I can't wait to talk to other parents about this book."
--Angela C. Santomero, creator, head writer, and executive producer of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood and Blue's Clues, and author of Radical Kindness and Preschool Clues