When Your Kids Won’t Put Their Phones Down, with Oprah & Addiction Specialist Dr. Anna Lembke
3/3/202659 min
Millions of parents and educators are in an overwhelming struggle to get children and teens to put their smartphones down or stop watching a screen on a tablet. To uncover what is at the root of an issue that is wreaking havoc at home and at school, Oprah sits down with Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist and Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Dr. Lembke, author of the New York Times mega-bestseller Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, explains why smartphones and tablets should be thought of as providing “digital drugs,” while describing the devastating impact these “drugs” are having on the still-developing brains of young people. Dr. Lembke and Oprah answer questions from mothers who are desperate for help managing their children’s screen addictions. Plus - British actress, Royal Family Member and education advocate Sophie Winkleman joins from London to talk about why she believes tech in schools has been disastrous for students and is destroying the education system from within. 'Dopamine Nation' by Anna Lembke Chapters: 00:00:00 - Welcome Dr. Anna Lembke, author of “Dopamine Nation” 00:03:00 - Reframing digital media as a drug 00:08:30 - Smart phones are modern day hypodermic needles 00:09:15 - Addiction definition 00:12:10 - Kids experiencing craving and withdrawal 00:17:00 - Mom of 2 girls wants to know if they are addicted 00:27:15 - Managing teens devices 00:36:15 - How to help college-aged kids 00:42:00 - Actress Sophie Winkleman on ed tech 00:45:00 - Screens in schools 00:48:00 - Distracted kids don’t know how to learn 00:50:00 - Regulating tech for kids Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@Oprah?sub_confirmation=1 Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: https://www.instagram.com/oprahpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/ Listen to the full podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLI https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsOprah Winfrey· Host0:00
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, and you're gonna have, you know, meltdowns. [screaming] You say, "The smartphone is the modern day hypodermic needle delivering digital dopamine twenty-four seven."
Anna Lembke· Guest0:26
We are living in an unprecedented time of overwhelming abundance, where we've drugified almost every human experience.
Oprah Winfrey· Host0:36
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 techdiction 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, uh, tried to take away her child's device, her child became so violent that she was really