'Dopamine Kids' love reading without backyard chickens

Michaeleen Doucleff set out to examine her family’s relationship to — reliance on, really — screens and junk food.

- Heidi Stevens, Tribune News Service

Why was she checking texts at every stop sign when biking with her daughter, Rosy? Why was she mindlessly devouring Pringles? 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 gray gloominess that I felt,” Doucleff continues, “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.” 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.”