Is your family addicted to screens and junk food? How to change their habits

Michaeleen Doucleff set out to examine her and her family’s relationship to – reliance on, really – screens and junk food. Why was she checking texts at every stop sign when biking with her daughter, Rosy? Why was she mindlessly devouring Pringles crisps? Why did Rosy impatiently count the minutes to nightly cartoons from the moment she got home? When was the last time they ate a whole food? At the beginning of her reckoning, Doucleff prepared herself for a lesson in willpower. If she was going to come to terms with how lousy these guilty pleasures were for her and her family, she was also going to have to find ways to forgo them. “I believed that I had fallen in love with pleasure and that I had too much pleasure in my life,” Doucleff writes in her new book, 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. “Therefore, to lift away the grey gloominess that I felt, I needed to accept less pleasure in life. I needed fewer rewards. And as a parent, I needed to show Rosy how to accept less pleasure as well.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Avid Reader Press (@avidreaderpress) She had internalised the message that she was, like so many of us, chasing the next dopamine hit. “According to this theory, when I picked up my phone or bit into a slice of pumpkin bread, it triggered a surge of this tiny molecule inside my brain,” she writes. “And this surge gave me a little bump of pleasure.” Hence the slavish social media posting, the manic email checking, the constant craving for baked goods. “I was constantly seeking dopamine and the pleasure it provided,” she writes. Dopamine’s downside By poring through hundreds of studies, interviewing dozens of neuroscientists, psychiatrists and psychologists, and tuning into her own nervous system, Doucleff learned instead that the guilty pleasures brought her guilt, fatigue, restlessness and melancholy – to name a few feelings – but not pleasure. That is because dopamine is not actually a burst of pleasure. Doucleff learned that dopamine sends us on the chase for pleasure. And dopamine “magnets” – her term for ultra-processed foods and screens – pull us, often subconsciously, towards them. “Once we’ve locked into these powerful magnets, they take hold of our attention and throw off our internal compass,” she writes. “They can make us forget about the genuine rewards and pleasures in our life. They make us lose track of what we value and really want out of life.” This explains why Doucleff felt anxious, rather than joyful, when she and Rosy spent a phone-free morning building sand castles at the beach. Dopamine Kids provides a detailed, five-step process for remodelling our habits and creating boundaries around screens and junk food: Rediscover what is most important for your family Create boundaries around screens and ultraprocessed foods Replace screen time with equally enticing activities Remove triggers that attract children to screens and junk food Celebrate your family’s choices before, during and after trying new hobbies Whether you wholeheartedly adopt all five steps or use the guidance to reorient some of your priorities, it is a fascinating read. “On the surface, screens and ultra-processed foods don’t appear to have much in common,” Doucleff writes. “At first, I didn’t see the connection either. But as we’ll learn, they’re intimately entwined inside our brains. “The neurological pathways that drive our desires for high-fat and high-sugar foods overlap substantially with those driving our consumption of videos, games and social media. Once we understand how one technology works, we understand how the other works.” Doucleff writes about how both tech and ultra-processed foods arrived in our homes like a tsunami in the last few decades – the latter helped along by tobacco companies, who bought up food manufacturers when cigarette sales plummeted in the late 1980s. “In many ways, these foods carry just as much power and influence on our lives as apps and devices.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Avid Reader Press (@avidreaderpress) Doucleff is trained as a biochemist and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the United States’ National Institutes of Health. Now she works as a reporter for National Public Radio, focusing on children’s health. Shortly after the 2021 publication of her first book, Hunt, Gather, Parent, which sold more than 1 million copies, she and her family moved from San Francisco to West Texas. Now she raises chickens and grinds her own grain. For a while, she and her husband ran a home-schooling co-op out of their greenhouse. Understanding forces that shape our habits She encourages us to choose one room at home for our phones and leave them there, plugged into the wall. Some readers will probably experiment with the five steps, and many will succeed. The book is about understanding the forces at work that shape our habits, our days and our family dynamics – for better or worse. “Scientists now believe that about 40 per cent of all our actions occur without much thought or deliberation,” Doucleff writes. “We are still conscious of what we’re doing, but we don’t pause and intentionally scrutinise if an action is really worth its costs.” We ought to, she maintains. And her book explains how.

Is your family addicted to screens and junk food? How to change their habits

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}In her book Dopamine Kids, Michaeleen Doucleff examines our reliance on ‘magnets’ that hamper happiness and explains how to overcome them

In her book Dopamine Kids, Michaeleen Doucleff examines our reliance on ‘magnets’ that hamper happiness and explains how to overcome them