Michaeleen Doucleff, Ph.D.
Bestselling author, biochemist, and award-winning NPR reporter
Heidi Stevens
Chicago-based writer and Director of External Affairs for the University of Chicago’s TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health
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
Note earlier-than-typical start time.
Bonus Book Giveaway: FAN is giving away copies of Dopamine Kids to randomly selected Zoom attendees. Details on the webinar registration page.
Nearly everything you’ve heard about dopamine is wrong. It’s not the molecule of happiness — it doesn’t give us pleasure; it gives us motivation. Today, unprecedented “dopamine surges” pull us toward technology and ultraprocessed foods like magnets, many times a day, and neuroscientists have now begun to understand how these surges alter our choices, habits, and moods — driving adults and kids toward activities that bring no real enjoyment and leave us feeling sad, lonely, anxious, and depressed.
When Michaeleen Doucleff, Ph.D. (FAN ’21), set out to address her own family’s screen time and dependence on processed foods, she discovered that study after study refuted nearly everything the media claims about dopamine. She took that new neuroscience and merged it with practical experience to shift the power dynamic back to families — so that instead of devices and foods controlling us, we control them. The result is 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, a five-step operating manual for habit remodeling that helps parents create boundaries, replace screen time with equally enticing alternatives, remove triggers, and celebrate new choices — ultimately weakening the neurological pull of devices and making dopamine work in a family’s favor.
Doucleff’s research culminates in a four-week plan to build screen-free sanctuaries that protect conversation, focus, sleep, and adventure. Where Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation sounded the alarm about screens, Dopamine Kids is the handbook for solving the problem — teaching kids a healthy relationship with technology and food while meeting their genuine biological and emotional needs. Doucleff has a chemistry doctorate from UC Berkeley, a postdoctoral fellowship at the NIH, more than a decade covering children’s health for NPR’s science desk, a Peabody Award, and the New York Times bestseller Hunt, Gather, Parent.
Doucleff will be in conversation with Heidi Stevens, Director of External Affairs for the University of Chicago’s TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health. She writes a weekly nationally syndicated column, “Balancing Act.” Stevens has been a FAN board member since 2021.
This event is suitable for youth ages 12 and up. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
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