Editor’s Notes: In this compelling episode, Oprah Winfrey is joined by addiction specialist Dr. Anna Lembke to discuss the growing crisis of tech addiction in children and teenagers. Dr. Lembke explains how smartphones act as “digital dopamine” delivery systems, leading to behavioral issues and emotional dysregulation similar to substance withdrawal. The conversation features real-life stories from parents struggling to manage their children’s device use and offers practical strategies for setting boundaries and reclaiming family connection. Additionally, the episode highlights the “Close Screens Open Minds” movement, advocating for reduced screen time in educational settings to protect young minds. (Mar 3, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
America’s Children Are Unwell
OPRAH WINFREY: Hello and a warm welcome to you. Thanks for being with me here on the Oprah podcast. Recently I saw this headline in the New York Times: America’s children are unwell. The Washington Post declared, managing technology has become an overwhelming part of modern parenting. And I bet that resonates with a lot of you.
So I wanted to dive deeper into tech addiction in children because I know that this is not just a headline. Amidst the hundreds of bits of bad news that we’re inundated with every day, I got a call from one of my cousins in Jackson, Mississippi, who watches the podcast and saw our episode on Gen Z tech addiction. And she said that when she tried to take away her child’s device, her child became so violent that she was really shaken up about it and really so concerned and asked me, “What am I supposed to do?”
And that’s why I invited Dr. Anna Lembke here. She’s a psychiatrist and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. That’s a lot to say — it’s a mouthful. But her New York Times bestseller, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, has sold over 1.5 million copies. And there’s a reason for that. Because it’s resonating. It’s resonating with parents, it’s resonating with people who’ve suffered from addiction themselves. It’s resonating with people who are concerned about where we are in our culture and where we’re going.
I encourage you to read Dopamine Nation if you haven’t yet, because it’s extremely eye-opening, especially if you are a parent. This is what I told my cousin: “You’ve got to get Dopamine Nation so that you understand what’s actually happening to your child. So when they’re screaming and you’re screaming, nobody’s going to get anywhere.”
You know what I said to her? I said, “It’s like if your child was shooting heroin and you went up and took the needle from your child in the moment that they were going to shoot the heroin — do you think they’d curse you out? Do you think there’d be a fight?” And she went, “Whoa.” But it’s kind of like that, isn’t it, Dr. Lembke?
Digital Media as a Drug
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah, I think it’s a great reframe because unless we’re thinking about digital media as a drug, we’re not going to appreciate the extent to which we and our children lose agency in terms of our ability to change the behaviors.
OPRAH WINFREY: I think you need to repeat that sentence. “Unless you’re thinking about digital media as a drug.” Right?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah, it’s a drug. It really is a drug. It’s incredibly reinforcing for our brains. It activates the same reward pathway as drugs and alcohol. And for people who are uniquely vulnerable to digital drugs, it can really lead to life-threatening addictions.
And I think this is a really important point that I want to make up front: we’re all wired a little bit differently, and so each person has a different potential drug of choice, based on their unique makeup. For some people, it’s food.
OPRAH WINFREY: Mine was food.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: For some people it’s romance novels — that was mine. And that sounds silly, but I actually did develop a kind of addiction to this genre. For some people, it’s alcohol, cannabis. And for some people, it really is social media, online shopping, adult content, video games, whatever it is. And when we encounter whatever that digital drug is, we are very susceptible to getting caught in that compulsive overconsumption loop.
OPRAH WINFREY: So parents who can’t get their kids to put the phone down, to put the iPad down, need to know that what you’re asking them is to put the drug down.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: That’s exactly right. To really conceptualize digital media as a potent drug and to think about protecting their child from it.
I think a good analogy for digital media is actually processed food. For example, most parents would not feed their kid ice cream for breakfast. And yet many parents are fine letting their kid, even a very young child, hold the phone at the breakfast table. When we think about it that way, there are occasions when you would give your child ice cream or chocolate cake or what have you, but you wouldn’t just let them have it whenever they want it all day long.
Entertaining Ourselves to Death
OPRAH WINFREY: Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Anxious Generation — you’ve seen him here on this podcast — he’s done a lot to bring attention to what social media and those devices are doing to our children’s minds. He asked ChatGPT, “If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation without them knowing it?” And he wrote about this for an article in the Free Press.
ChatGPT’s answer was: “If I were the devil, I’d destroy the next generation not by terror or violence, but by distraction, disconnection, and slow erosion of meaning. They wouldn’t even notice because it would feel like freedom and entertainment.”
Wow. How do you see it as fueling these addictions?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: I think this idea that we’re sort of entertaining ourselves to death — and there’s in fact a famous older book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman — really does capture it well.
Social media in particular essentially takes our innate need and desire to connect with other people and distills it down to its most addictive elements, so that for very little upfront work — all we have to do is swipe right, swipe left — it creates this illusion of connection even when real connection is not happening. Because real connection with other humans is effortful. We have to go out and find the humans, we have to compromise. There’s give and take, there’s going to be conflict, there’s frustration. But digital media and social media in particular removes all of that. So it’s just this seamless experience where we feel like we’re connecting.
OPRAH WINFREY: Now you see who’s calling you, so you can answer or not answer, right?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Or you get the likes, or the friends, or the followers, the comments. It’s like this trance-like state that we can get into where it just feels so good, like with any drug. But afterwards there’s this comedown, and over the long run we’re not really pursuing our goals — which with social media is nominally to connect with other humans.
A Place of Overwhelming Abundance
OPRAH WINFREY: One of the reasons this book is so powerful — even from the very first page in the introduction — you say: “Because we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance. Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting. The increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering.”
It really is staggering. The smartphone — this is why I loved what you said at the very beginning: “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. And if you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you.”
Wow. That’s how bad we are right now.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: We are living in an unprecedented time of overwhelming abundance where we’ve drugified almost every human experience — the food we eat, the games we play, the way that we connect with other people. And as such, we’ve all become more vulnerable to this problem of addiction. And I always like to define addiction up front for folks.
OPRAH WINFREY: Please do.
Defining Addiction
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: It’s the continued compulsive use of a substance or behavior despite harm to self and/or others. And importantly, sometimes we can see the harm and sometimes we can’t. And it is a brain disease. I think that’s really important to communicate — the disease model of addiction.
We’re not at a place yet where we can use brain scans or blood tests to diagnose addiction. We base the diagnosis on phenomenology, or patterns of behavior — often what we call the four C’s: out-of-control use, craving, compulsive use, and continued use despite consequences. But it’s a very recognizable behavior when we see it, especially in its most extreme forms.
And we’re living in an era where not only do we have more access to drugs that have been around for thousands of years, but we have drugs that never existed before — all of the digital drugs, drugified food. We have a food supply with the addition of fat, salt, sugar, flavorants, processed food, so that not only are we getting calories when we eat, we’re getting hits of dopamine that make it very difficult to stop, even when we’ve reached our natural satiety point. And that’s true for almost everything now, including, importantly for this discussion, digital media.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Let me charge it. Let me charge it. Let me charge it.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You have school tomorrow. You have school. You have—
VIDEO CLIP ENDS
What Happens in the Brain During a Meltdown
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Oh, man, that’s really hard to watch.
OPRAH WINFREY: My cousin said the same thing happened with her 17-year-old. Tried to take the phone away. He was in the middle of a gaming session and was cursing her out and all those things. What is happening in the brain when a child is experiencing those kinds of tantrums? A child, a teenager, a young adult — what’s going on in the brain in that moment?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: When you expose a child’s brain to a digital drug that is incredibly reinforcing, it is inevitable that that child will get into this loop of addiction where they get into a state of craving and withdrawal when they don’t have their drug. So when I see these kids and the extent to which they’re emotionally dysregulated when they don’t have it — that’s what’s happening.
OPRAH WINFREY: Dysregulation.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah. They’re in withdrawal. They’re in withdrawal, they’re afraid. Because now they’ve basically become dependent on this drug —
OPRAH WINFREY: — on the dopamine and the hit.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: That’s right. In order to manage their everyday lives — to manage anxiety or depression or loneliness. But even separate from that, once our brains are repeatedly exposed to any reinforcing substance or behavior, we essentially adapt to that reinforcer such that over time we need more in order to feel the same response. And when we’re not getting it, we are literally in withdrawal.
The universal symptoms of withdrawal from any substance or behavior are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, depression, and craving for that drug. So again, I see these kids and I really feel like—
OPRAH WINFREY: So they’re not spoiled.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: They’re not spoiled. That’s the point. They’re addicted. They’re addicted and they’re really victims of—
OPRAH WINFREY: They’re suffering. In that moment, they’re suffering. So based upon what we’ve shared here so far, when you are trying to communicate with a child who is dysregulated, you absolutely cannot.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Right.
OPRAH WINFREY: And so you have to wait until that child gets regulated or calms down.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: That’s right.
OPRAH WINFREY: Have we even explained to people what dopamine is?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Not yet.
OPRAH WINFREY: We’re assuming that everybody knows what dopamine is. But tell us what dopamine is.
What Is Dopamine?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Okay, great. So dopamine is a chemical that we make in our brains. It is what’s called a neurotransmitter. Neurotransmitters are the molecules that bridge the gap between neurons. Neurons are these long, spindly cells — they’re like wires in our brains that conduct the electrical circuits that make us who we are. And those neurons don’t actually touch end to end. There’s a little gap between them, and that gap is called the synapse. Neurotransmitters are the molecules that bridge that gap, that allow for fine-tuned control of those electrical circuits.
Dopamine is one of many brain neurotransmitters. It’s essential for the experience of pleasure, reward, and motivation. It’s also, as I mentioned before, very important to movement. And it’s probably no coincidence that the same molecule that’s important for getting our rewards — that we need to survive — is also important for movement. Because for most of our existence, we had to move our bodies to go get a berry bush or get a—
OPRAH WINFREY: That’s why exercise is so, so important. That’s why exercise just really resolves a lot of these issues. Because if you can move, if you’re outside, if you’re walking — even just, as you say, a 30-minute walk—
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yes. Yes.
OPRAH WINFREY: —can change the dopamine in your brain.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yes. Exercise is a super healthy source of dopamine, and it also importantly reintegrates the function of dopamine for movement as the function of dopamine to go and get our rewards.
It’s Not Just About the Kids
OPRAH WINFREY: And this is what everybody who’s listening and watching us needs to know: we’re talking about your kids, but it’s also about you. You get your little dopamine hit every time you get a like, or you get a comment that says something flattering to you. Right.
Helping Children with Tech Addiction: Advice for Parents
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Or just watching short form video. Watching those short form videos absolutely lights up that reward pathway and releases dopamine. And the difference between things that are addictive for a given individual is that they release a lot of dopamine all at once. So we’re always releasing dopamine at a baseline tonic level in our reward pathway. When we eat something or smoke something or drink something or go on digital media, that temporarily increases dopamine firing above baseline, along with other chemical changes.
We always want to go back to our set point or our homeostatic baseline. But what happens is that through that process of the brain adapting to that temporary increase in dopamine firing, what can happen with addiction is that the brain over adapts, overcompensates, and ends up in a chronic dopamine deficit state. So now we have below healthy levels of dopamine firing in the reward pathway. And when we get into that state, now we need to keep using our drug not to get high, but just to bring those levels back up to normal and feel normal.
OPRAH WINFREY: And feel okay.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah. And feel okay.
OPRAH WINFREY: That’s what the kids on the iPads are trying to do.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: That’s exactly right.
A Mom’s Struggle: The iPad Battle at Home
OPRAH WINFREY: That’s what they’re trying to do. We have a lot of moms with questions who recognize that they’re in trouble, I think, but also don’t know what to do. Ida is a mom of two girls in Massachusetts. Welcome, Ida. Tell us. What’s going on with you?
IDA: Hi, Oprah. Hi, Dr. Lembke. Thank you for having me. So I have two girls. They’re 10 and three. Most concerning is my 10 year old. She has an iPad. A lot of her friends have phones. We are not quite there yet in that department. But she definitely uses her iPad a lot more frequently than I would like. Usually right after school, it’s her go to and she prefers to be on it all day.
It ends up being a battle when we get home from school about, we need to do your homework, it’s not iPad time. She does have her moments of getting upset, throwing a tantrum, being resistant to having the iPad taken away. And it’s more worrisome during the weekend. She will use that tool also for transitions, like in the car, for going to any of her activities after school, like cheer practice or whatnot.
So after hearing you talk for a bit, it seems like she’s using this as an emotional tool to cope. And when it is taken away from her, she’s quite anxious. So part of me is wondering, is
OPRAH WINFREY: she showing signs of addiction?
IDA: And then another part of my question is, my 3 year old has had some exposure with an iPad, but not to the extent that my 10 year old has. So my other question is, how do I avoid what’s happening to the 10 year old from happening to the 3 year old?
Dr. Lembke’s Advice: iPads Are Just as Addictive as Phones
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Okay, great. Well, thank you for being willing to share something about your experiences. You’re certainly not alone. I think most parents are struggling with this in some form or another. I was interested that initially you sort of framed giving your daughter an iPad as if it were maybe less addictive than the phone.
OPRAH WINFREY: Oh, yes.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: But I would say that’s not really the case. Any device that gives that child that kind of visual and audio stimulation and has access to the Internet, where they can see an infinite number of videos, including, by the way, videos that you probably would be horrified to know she was watching. So I think this is a really important piece, that people think if
OPRAH WINFREY: it’s not the phone, that the iPad is better.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah, that’s the case.
OPRAH WINFREY: Or a tablet is.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Or even that they know what their kid is doing on the Internet, because the Internet will push to your child stuff that they’re not even looking for and haven’t even considered. So that’s one thing.
The second thing is, we always need to think of the age of the child. 10 years old is still within a frame, an age range, when you do have control as a parent and can do more. And what I would recommend first — and by the way, I’m contrasting that to older teenagers where they’re out in the world — but with a 10 year old, here’s what I recommend.
You can sit down with a 10 year old when you’re not dysregulated and they’re not dysregulated — you know, you’re not screaming at them to get off the iPad — and say, “You know what, we need to talk about this as a family. This is a problem.” And you can describe what you see. The way she gets dysregulated, the way she kind of uses it as this transitional object, which by the way is a Freudian term to talk about how we do use an object to kind of get us through emotional, bumpy patches.
But I would just really have a very open and transparent discussion. And you can even bring in your own struggles with limiting your digital media use, because we’re all struggling. And I think it’s good for parents to be transparent. And then this should involve your partner, if you’re raising her together with a partner. It could even involve the three year old. I mean, it’s amazing what kids can understand.
So get the whole family together, sit down and say, “Hey, we care about each other. Our use of digital media is problematic for our family individually and collectively.” Each person can go around and say what they’re observing, including asking your daughter, “What do you think? Do you think this is a problem? What do you observe? What’s good about using the iPad? What’s not so good about using the iPad?”
And then I really recommend a behavioral intervention for the whole family that might actually include getting rid of those devices for a period of at least four weeks. Now, importantly, the danger that many parents make — I’ve made it myself — is you’re so upset, you just dive in and you grab the devices away. The kid goes nuts, like we saw in those videos. You want to talk about it, you want to plan it out. And your kid, she’s not going to be happy with it, but you need to really say, “This comes from a place of love. Because I love you, because we love you. And we are observing signs and symptoms of an addiction to the digital media, or really just an unhealthy relationship. We’re going to pull back, we’re going to change things in our home.”
I think this is the key. We can make these changes. It’s effortful, but it’s worth the effort.
Modeling the Behavior You Want to See
OPRAH WINFREY: And also what has to happen, Ida, is you have to watch what you’re doing with your devices. You can’t tell your kid they’re off of it and that there’s a problem, and then you’re sitting at the table on the phone all the time, or they’re trying to talk to you and you’re distracted because you’re on the phone, you know?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Absolutely. We need to model what we want. Our parents.
OPRAH WINFREY: You’ve got to extract this behavior, you’ve got to model the behavior.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: And it’s all about cultivating a digital etiquette in the home. So what are the appropriate times and places for you to be on your device? For me to be on my device? Like, not at the dinner table, not when we have guests over, not in the bedroom, not late at night.
And Ida, it’s hard, but again, with a 10 year old, you can get in there. And here’s the other important thing, Ida: if you feel you can’t do it, it’s just too overwhelming, get some professional help. Get a mental health care provider. And there are more and more of them, thank goodness, responding to the call, who have expertise in this area, who can come into the home and help you make a behavioral plan.
And then finally, I just want to add, apropos of what Oprah was talking about — Ida needing to
OPRAH WINFREY: model the behavior —
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: you also need to change the environment. We cannot rely on willpower alone when we have an environment that is constantly inviting us to use our drug of choice, whatever that may be. So if you’ve got screens in every room, devices in every bedroom, you need to change that. And you might even need to think about limiting Wi-Fi to the house. So these are structural and environmental changes.
You can’t just say something. And not that you would say this, but “my kid’s spoiled,” or “something’s wrong with my kid.” The disease process of addiction that we’re facing in the world today lives in the space between our brains and the environment that we’ve created. So we need to recognize that biopsychosocial interactive piece. We cannot expect ourselves to stop the behavior when we live in an environment that’s constantly inviting us to consume.
Tech-Free Alternatives and Healthier Habits
OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah, I’m hearing about parents creating tech free pods with, you know, landlines.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah, tech free pods. A lot of young people now are embracing older tech. They’re getting film phone cameras, they’re playing vinyl records. Much of this is coming from Gen Zers, who themselves are recognizing that there’s a problem. Right? So that’s the other piece.
And actually, one more thing I have to say that is so important, Oprah, for Ida. The other thing, Ida, is you don’t want to just take something away without replacing it with something that’s better. Of course your daughter is exhausted at the end of the day — it’s exhausting to be a 10 year old. But when she comes home and she legitimately needs to relax, you all need to come up with a healthy way for her to do that. Maybe it’s spending time talking with you or doing crafts. Maybe it’s joining a sports team and decompressing by being physically active.
Movement is medicine. Dopamine is not only important for reward, pleasure and motivation, it’s also important for movement. And we need to integrate those things. So you need to give her healthier alternatives at the same time that you’re going to try to take away the iPad.
OPRAH WINFREY: So she had asked the question, “Do you think my child is showing signs of addiction?” Yes. Yes.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah. I mean, I don’t like to diagnose people who are not my patients. But what you’re describing is similar to the types of addiction to digital media that I do see in clinical care.
OPRAH WINFREY: Does this sound reasonable to you?
IDA: Yes, for sure. And it just, it’s eye opening as a mom. And I mean, I feel like it’s a tactic that a lot of people use. Like, it’s been a long day, we’re all tired. Here’s this device and here we go. But it’s really not beneficial for anybody.
OPRAH WINFREY: So we’re going to send you this book so that you can understand. I really do think knowledge is power, and I do think understanding the full scope of what you’re dealing with is going to be really helpful to you. And I think that what Dr. Lembke said is so important. Ten years old, you can still get in there. There’s still hope, you know?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah. Well, there’s always hope. I just want to say that’s a message I really want to convey. There’s always hope at every stage.
OPRAH WINFREY: But you as a parent — there’s always hope — but if this was 17, 16, you have a much harder time.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah, it’s harder.
OPRAH WINFREY: Much harder time. Thank you, Ida, so much.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Thank you, Ida. Thank you. Thank you both. Nice to meet you.
OPRAH WINFREY: Katherine is joining us from Toronto. Katherine, what’s going on with your family? Hi.
Navigating Tech Addiction in Teenagers and Young Adults
AUDIENCE MEMBER (KATHERINE): Hi, ladies. Thank you for the work that you do. And Oprah, of course, such a big fan, thank you. So I have a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old. My 13-year-old is my son, who I find that I have the biggest challenge with. He struggles a lot with impulse control with his phone. And even though when he got his phone about a year and a half ago, we put a contract in place and we adhered to it pretty well.
The last couple of years, I’ve been struggling with breast cancer. And in that time, I was not able to monitor it in the same way that I used to. And I think he started using his phone as an emotional support buddy almost. And what I have found is that he is not able to self-regulate, even around the rules. And even though he cognitively can say, “Okay, mom, I’m going to put it down,” he takes it up immediately, like an addiction, like you were speaking about.
And I find it such a struggle because now he’s bigger than I am. It’s the only currency I have with him to have some control. But then he gets aggressive and I’m not able to take it away like I was able to even a year and a half ago. And what I’m noticing, speaking to the addiction part that you noted, Dr. Lembke, is that he’s manipulating and he’s using different strategies cognitively to justify his behavior. Like, “Oh, I’m just looking something up,” and, “Oh, I’m doing some research for school.” And I really am struggling to figure out what to do from a conscious parenting lens. And I know that you had children close to my kids’ age before — what did you do in your home to manage this?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Oh, gosh, so much there. And I wish I had better answers for you, because what you’re describing is really tough and what a lot of us are dealing with. First of all, I do want to comment on your struggles with cancer and how that meant you were more preoccupied, less able to be in there the way you wanted to.
OPRAH WINFREY: And are you better now? Are you better?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yes, I am. Thank you.
OPRAH WINFREY: That’s great.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: But I mean, I think this is really an important point — that we blame ourselves often as parents with these issues. And yet even the perfect parent with all of the time in the world, it’s still really, really hard. And then if on top of that you’re a single parent, or you have cancer, or you’re working double jobs, or whatever’s going on, then you have a whole added layer. I just want to acknowledge — it’s really, really tough for parents, even very hardworking, well-intentioned parents who really care.
So your son, he’s 13. That is the cusp where it just starts to get really, really hard to take the device away. Because kids are manipulative, sneaky — one of the telltale signs of addiction is lying about our use. Whatever the drug is, if we take the device away, they’ll often go and get another device, or pay for one themselves, or get one from friends.
OPRAH WINFREY: That’s why our previous guest with a 10-year-old — you were saying it’s easier to get in there at 10 than at 13.
The Power of Open Dialogue and Family Meetings
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Once you’ve entered these teenage years, where they’re sort of off living their own lives, this is where open dialogue really becomes core. Having — and I emphasize this — sitting down with him at a time when you’re not dysregulated and he’s not dysregulated. Even schedule it on the calendar. We want to have a family meeting. I like to call it a family meeting because it’s like we’re a family —
OPRAH WINFREY: — because they get to participate.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah, yeah. And being in a family setting —
OPRAH WINFREY: — also, you know that your opinion matters and you’re contributing. We’re all contributing to the whole.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: That’s right. We’re all equal partners. You sit around the table, you get the whole family. And again, it starts with observation: “Here is what I am seeing.”
One of the things that is most notable and most distressing with tech addiction is the kind of antisocial traits that come out in kids, where they basically are rude. They treat parents badly, they manipulate, they’re very self-involved. Now, some of that is characteristic of being a teenager anyway, but it’s really much, much worse when kids get caught up in this world. Parents often talk about losing that child that they knew, and this being a person that they don’t recognize. And that’s true also with many other types of addictions.
So I would reflect back to your son, in particular, the specific unacceptable behaviors — his rudeness, his lateness, his not doing his chores, his lying, his disrespecting. And talk about how it very well may be linked to his over-dependent, addictive use of digital media. And what you can then do is advise him.
OPRAH WINFREY: This is done in a very loving way. This is done from a space of love and not accusatory.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Right. And then what I’m getting to here is setting boundaries.
OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah, because you’re doing it from — “This is what I’m seeing.”
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah. “This is what I’m seeing.”
OPRAH WINFREY: “Tell me what you’re seeing.”
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Right.
OPRAH WINFREY: “Tell me what you’re seeing in comparison to who you used to be, or what you used to believe.”
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: And then elicit from him what he thinks. Again, this is — and then the offer of help: “Would you like to get some help with this problem that we’re observing? Would you like to see a mental health counselor?”
OPRAH WINFREY: What if he says, “I don’t think I have a problem”?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Oh, he probably will say that.
OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: He will. But at least you’ve identified that you see a problem, what you’re observing. You’ve made the offer of help. Maybe he doesn’t want help now, but maybe so.
OPRAH WINFREY: I like this idea very much — of saying, “You’re becoming someone…” Like you were talking about parents saying, “I don’t recognize my child.”
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Right.
OPRAH WINFREY: This part of his personality you don’t even recognize. So I think your vulnerability and honesty, as you’re offering here, Dr. Lembke, is going to be very crucial to how the conversation goes, because he sees your honest concern, your pain, and your desire for the whole family to be whole. And I think you’ve raised a good boy, so he will respond to that if he’s not in the throes of being dysregulated.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Right. Right. Right.
OPRAH WINFREY: Does this sound reasonable to you, Katherine?
AUDIENCE MEMBER (KATHERINE): Yeah. And I just really wonder — how much onus and accountability can you give a 13-year-old, understanding that their brain is not fully developed, so that you can break that cycle?
Using Contingency Management and Setting Expectations
OPRAH WINFREY: Right.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah. I mean, here’s the thing. Katherine, you as the parent could always step in and say, “We’re going to take the phone away,” like what we talked about with Edith. You could do that. And again, depending upon the severity of his behaviors, I might even recommend that you do that. So I’m not saying you never do that. But I don’t like to just talk about taking the devices away, because some parents are simply not in a circumstance where they’re going to be able to do that. So that’s where I think at least opening up the dialogue — again, identifying what you see that’s distressing, eliciting from him what he thinks is problematic —
OPRAH WINFREY: He’s already broken his word. You all had rules. You set out with rules.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah.
OPRAH WINFREY: And he didn’t honor the contract.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Right. And this is key — thinking about a family as something that requires the mutual investment of all members of the family, who must abide by the family expectations and rules. So even if you’re not going to take the phone away, you could say, “But we still expect you to do X, Y, and Z — to show up, to talk with us with respect.”
And then you could even use what we call contingency management. Contingency management is well known in the addiction field to be a potential way to treat. It’s essentially using punishments and rewards to shape behaviors. So the way that we’ll often use contingency management in this situation is to say: “If you can meet certain expectations — we expect you to go to school, we expect you to do these chores, we expect you to speak to us with respect, to not have the device in the bedroom, to not use the device — and we’ll give you a month to do that. And if you’re not able to do that, then we are really dealing with a more serious situation. And then we’re going to take you to see a mental health care professional. We’re going to consider actually taking the device away.”
OPRAH WINFREY: Yeah, sounds reasonable.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Thank you so much.
OPRAH WINFREY: Yes, beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much.
When Your Child Goes Off to College
OPRAH WINFREY: Kelly is joining us from Massachusetts. Kelly, your story. Hi. Oh, I love the warm fire. I love that.
AUDIENCE MEMBER (KELLY): Hi. Yes. So I have an 18-year-old son who’s a freshman in college. And like you’ve already mentioned, it’s a tougher age to manage this stuff. When he was home, he was busy with school and busy with sports and really didn’t have much time.
OPRAH WINFREY: You’re no longer managing anything. Now you’re just a consultant.
AUDIENCE MEMBER (KELLY): Yeah, I’m not. And he has so much more time on his hands too, with college only being an hour or two of class a day. He’s not playing sports in college. So he came home from break and I was pretty shocked at how much technology he was using. He’s having a hard time pulling himself away from it at all. And I know he uses it — he has anxiety and has been struggling with depression — so he uses it as a bit of a coping mechanism as well.
And so I’m just trying to figure out how am I supposed to help him, with him not being in the house? How do I guide him to stop using technology so much?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah, we see this quite often. Kids who, while they’re still living at home with the container and the guardrails that parents provide, are able to manage their relationship with technology. But when they go off to college and all of a sudden those guardrails are gone, some of these kids will very quickly fall into a kind of a 24/7 online digital habit.
OPRAH WINFREY: So you’re not alone.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yep. You’re not alone. And then if you couple that with a child who’s prone to anxiety and depression — what’s very clear from the data is that the more time a child spends online consuming digital media and social media, the higher their risk of becoming depressed and anxious. And if they already have depression and anxiety, that depression and anxiety will get worse. So we really have a causal phenomenon where the consumption of digital media and social media drives the depression and the anxiety. This is a really, really important concept.
Back to some of my earlier advice — sitting down with your son, having a really transparent discussion about what you’re observing that’s different from before he went away to college. Talking about whether he observes the same thing. Offering him help. I mean, if he has depression and anxiety and he’s not getting help for that, I strongly recommend you hook him up with either your own resources for mental health or the school’s. Most colleges have very good mental health resources. Get in there and don’t just assume that it’s going to get better naturally on its own.
And Kelly, the reason that I would especially emphasize this is — Oprah, we do see some kids who, when they go off to college and all of a sudden are surrounded by the wonderful opportunities and the new friend groups, they actually get off their devices. They’re on their devices less. College becomes this kind of opening to the world. But if your child is having the opposite experience, I think the alarm bells should be ringing and you should really be thinking about how you can help.
OPRAH WINFREY: And in some instances — I had a friend whose son had to drop out of college at 19 because he became so obsessed with the devices. And then when she tried to take it away from him, he ended up trying to fight her and beat her up. And it’s just — it’s a real thing. What you’ve observed is not some plaything. It’s a real thing.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah. I was just —
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Right?
OPRAH WINFREY: It’s a real thing.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Right? Yeah. And kids can get incredibly isolated. They’re up all night playing video games, watching YouTube, sleeping during the day, getting suicidal. I have had lots of patients where they actually have to stop out of school, come home, and really get some very intensive treatment. And I have no idea what your circumstance is, so no way to make any specific recommendations, but just to give you a sense of the range of issues.
OPRAH WINFREY: And likely your son, depending upon what your relationship is or is not, may not tell you the truth. Just like we were hearing earlier with Katherine, they start lying about it and making up stories about it and using other ways to get around it. And so we’re going to send you Dopamine Nation.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Perfect.
OPRAH WINFREY: Ok, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Kelly.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Yeah, thanks, Kelly.
Hugh Grant on Tech Addiction and Schools
OPRAH WINFREY: So in a clip that has since gone viral, British actor Hugh Grant vented his frustrations as a parent in the age of tech. Many say he spoke for millions of parents. Here it is, in case you haven’t seen this.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
HUGH GRANT: The exhausting nature of parenthood under these circumstances. Year after year, month after month, day after day, fighting the children. No, no, no, no, no, no. Give that back or no. We agreed you could have 20 minutes on Saturday. And so it was extremely surprising and extremely depressing when you get emails from the school about the new school you’ve sent your kid, just saying proudly, “We give all our children their own Chromebook or their own iPad,” and you just think, what? How could that be a good idea? If school is for anything, it’s surely they deserve just six hours off from their addiction, from this crazy addiction. Because to people like us, honestly, big Tech, with its extraordinary powers, seems like a drug cartel pushing its wares at children.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
OPRAH WINFREY: Hugh Grant is a patron of an organization called Close Screens Open Minds, which advocates to get screens and tech out of the school. Now, another patron is Sophie Winkleman, an actress and member of the British royal family by marriage. Sophie, thank you so much for joining us from London. Thank you.
Sophie Winkleman on EdTech and Schools
SOPHIE WINKLEMAN: Thank you very much for having me. Honored to be here.
OPRAH WINFREY: Why did you get involved and what are you hoping to achieve?
SOPHIE WINKLEMAN: I got involved from basically lockdown and seeing how terribly my children and every other child I was in contact with — their parents were learning online and on screens. I also became patron of an education charity and I visited many, many schools around Britain and I felt in a position after that to see what worked in the classroom and what doesn’t work in the classroom.
Schools where tech was used extremely moderately — in fact, just for IT lessons — the children were engaged, they were learning well, they had good relationships with their teachers. They would work in a calm way with books and handwriting. These schools stood out a mile, whether it was a free school or a private paying school. These were at the top of the heap.
And then loads of other schools — strangely, especially very expensive schools — drank the EdTech Kool-Aid and splattered the classrooms with devices. And it was done in a very proud, “aren’t we cream of the crop” kind of way. And initially parents were thinking, “Yeah, my kid’s going to be Zuckerberg at 25. They’re going to be on screens all day. They’re going to know the ins and outs of this thing.” And yay. I’m looking forward to this because this —
OPRAH WINFREY: — used to be what everybody wanted. You wanted your kid to go to a school that was tech savvy.
SOPHIE WINKLEMAN: Exactly. And the school presented it in this futuristic, shiny, progressive way. And to be fair, a lot of them probably did think that it was the future of education. But then when their children started getting agitated and angry and not concentrating and going to sleep later and getting headaches and then playing games after all the online homework, parents started going, “Whoa, really? Is this definitely the future of education? And haven’t all these companies presented us with a solution where there wasn’t actually a problem?”
I mean, clearly huge class sizes are a problem and teacher overload in terms of social behavior and stuff — that’s a huge problem. But books and handwriting and teacher-led learning was not a problem.
OPRAH WINFREY: And we all found out later that many tech execs send their own children to schools that don’t allow screens.
SOPHIE WINKLEMAN: Precisely. It’s a very sad, hypocritical, big old secret that the mega tech giants understand that the human capital is now attention and focus, and they send their children to schools where they learn 10-page poems and learn every musical instrument under the sun, because they know that’s going to be the future gold of human imagination and mind.
OPRAH WINFREY: So what’s your most important message now that you want parents and educators to know?
SOPHIE WINKLEMAN: I want educators to know that parents aren’t buying this anymore. They’re not okay with it. Hugh and I are fighting the British education system at the moment, which wants to put all national exams online, which would have a disastrous trickle-back effect of meaning that children are on screens for their entire school day because the parents wouldn’t have to provide books. They’d say, “Sorry, the exams are online. So let’s get the kids super savvy about what they’re going to be doing.” So we’re fighting that.
I want to give parents a voice to say, “Sorry, how is this better than reading a book and handwriting a response?” None of the schools can ever answer that. They give all sorts of slogany responses saying, “It’s the future.” No, it isn’t. The future is children who can’t think properly and deeply. That’s not the kind of future I want to be a part of.
OPRAH WINFREY: And I know you have two school-age daughters. What’s your biggest concern for them in this moment?
SOPHIE WINKLEMAN: The biggest concern for me with them is that they don’t get books anymore. They don’t read novels for English, they don’t have textbooks for any of their subjects. They come home and everything is online, whether it’s bite-sized videos or online PowerPoints. It’s all very agitating, shallow, flimsy and maddening. I can see they’re not learning. I can see their physical health is suffering. They’re getting very stressed out by this way of education. And I want parents to take to the streets and start revolting.
Dr. Lembke on Technology in Education
OPRAH WINFREY: Dr. Lembke, I know you’re also involved with Hugh and Sophie’s organization. What’s your take on screens in schools?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: I agree with everything that Sophie said. I think this is really important work. There are some glimmers of hope in that I and many others have been talking for more than a decade now about getting smartphones out of schools K through 12, so that kids don’t have little slot machines in their pockets, so that they can actually attend to learn and teachers can teach. And we are seeing more and more schools around the world banning smartphones from schools. So I think that’s really good news.
But still, what we have is this idea that integrating technology into the way that we teach will make the teaching better. And yet all of the data — even beyond our parental instincts — all of the data are showing that reading ability is decreasing, mathematical ability is decreasing, and even in the creative realm, kids are doing worse.
I think we really have to look at this and say, “Okay, we all kind of thought getting technology and cool screens and pads and things would make our kids digitally literate, ready for the 21st century.” But actually it’s going in the opposite direction. And what we’re creating is a generation of distracted kids who don’t know how to learn, because learning occurs in that moment of friction and delayed gratification. It is the not knowing that allows our brains to create new synapses, which is the definition of learning something.
And so again, we have to get back to having slow tech spaces in the schools where kids can experience frustration tolerance and have to actually have enough time and space to have a thought and learn how to express it and write it down on their own.
OPRAH WINFREY: Do you feel it’s getting easier to get this message out because more and more parents have become equally as frustrated as you and Hugh?
SOPHIE WINKLEMAN: I think it is getting easier just because results are going down so blatantly all across the world. And it’s getting easier to just say, “This way of learning is really not working.” But we’re fighting. I think Emily Churkin calls EdTech “big tech in a school uniform.” And it’s a multi-billion dollar industry, EdTech now. And so we have parents saying, “Sorry, books and handwriting are a better way to learn.” Of course you can do your technology education, but EdTech is a very different beast. It’s a huge business and it’s not doing our children a good service.
I’m just very grateful. I think this will be the turning point — being with you and talking about it on this — because millions of people watch you. So I’m terribly grateful.
OPRAH WINFREY: I hope that it is a beginning of something that really lends itself to allowing other people to understand that we’re in trouble. We’re in trouble. Thank you for being the voice for that. Thank you, Sophie, very much.
SOPHIE WINKLEMAN: Thank you for having me.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Thank you for joining us.
Guardrails, Regulation, and Final Advice
OPRAH WINFREY: I learned from reading Dopamine Nation that just about anybody can be powerless against these digital forces that we’re all up against. And the interesting thing is we regulate cigarettes and we regulate alcohol and there is some regulation to gambling for children. Australia is now putting an age limit on social media. So why don’t we put guardrails around this? Why aren’t we aware that this is happening to our kids?
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: We need to do just that. We don’t let — we need guardrails. Because kids aren’t allowed to buy cigarettes or alcohol or go into casinos and gamble. We recognize that the developing brain is especially vulnerable. That’s what you said earlier.
OPRAH WINFREY: We’re not serving them ice cream for breakfast.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: We know that. Yeah, we know that. So we need these guardrails. And I applaud Australia and I applaud other countries like South Korea that have gotten smartphones out of schools. I applaud states here in the United States that are moving to create these guardrails. We have to try things out. And we also importantly have to hold the corporations that make and profit from these digital drugs accountable. They are deploying a harmful product for kids. And that shouldn’t be allowed. That shouldn’t be okay.
OPRAH WINFREY: So your final word. What’s the most important advice for parents or families grappling with tech addiction? I go back to what you said in the very beginning — to understanding that this is a drug.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Right. Yeah, I agree. And I always want to say to parents, take a deep breath, okay? And stay hopeful. This is a problem that is insidious and typically develops over days to weeks to months. It’s going to take days and weeks to months to get out of it. It’s not going to be a snap of the fingers.
OPRAH WINFREY: You can’t just pull that phone away and think, that’s it.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: No, no. Get help from a mental health provider if it’s too much for your family or for you to handle alone. But get in there. Don’t just give up and say, “It’s too late for my kid,” or “There’s nothing I can do.” Get in there. Fight at your school. Get EdTech out of schools. Fight for these guardrails on a legislative level. Hold corporations accountable. Let’s energize. We can do it.
OPRAH WINFREY: But in the immediate, recognizing what you said at the beginning of this conversation — that your child’s device is a drug to them — and so trying to remove the drug is like your child is in the midst of taking that drug, and you’re trying to take that drug away from them.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: Right.
OPRAH WINFREY: And you’re going to have meltdowns, and you’re going to have a lot of anger and dysregulation.
DR. ANNA LEMBKE: That’s right.
Closing Remarks
OPRAH WINFREY: That’s right. Hope you read it. Dopamine Nation. Important for all of us at this time to understand what’s happening to our minds on our tech devices and the minds of our children.
Dr. Lembke, you are a gem for us in this age. Thank you, thank you, thank you for helping us get through it and understanding ourselves. Thank you for the information. And thank you to Ida and Katherine and Kelly and Sophie Winkleman. Thank you so much.
Dr. Lembke’s book, Dopamine Nation, 1.5 million have already found it to be really inspiring and helpful to them. It’s available wherever you buy your books. If you want to understand what’s actually going on in the brain and the hit of dopamine your children are getting from their screens, it may help you navigate your children’s use of tech. I strongly urge you to read it.
Until next time, go well. You can subscribe to the Oprah Podcast on YouTube and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. I’ll see you next week. Thanks, everybody.
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