When Your Kids Won’t Put Their Phones Down, with Oprah & Addiction Specialist Dr. Anna Lembke

14:53Dr. Anna Lembke:Okay, great. So dopamine is a chemical that we make in our brains. it is what's called a neurotransmitter. And neurotransmitters are the molecules that bridge the gap between neurons. So neurons are these long spindly cells. They're like wires in our brains that conduct these 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. So dopamine is one of many brain neurotransmitters.

15:30Dr. Anna Lembke: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, you know, for most of our existence, we had to move our bodies to go get a berry bush.

15:52Oprah Winfrey:And that's why exercise is so important. That's why exercise just really resolves a lot of these issues. Yes. Because if you can move, if you're outside, if you're walking, even just, as you say, it's just even just a walk, 30-minute walk.

16:10Dr. Anna Lembke:Yes, yes.

16:10Oprah Winfrey:Can change the dopamine in your brain. Yes. Yes.

16:12Dr. Anna Lembke: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.

16:25Oprah Winfrey:And this is what everybody who's listening and watching us needs to know, that we're talking about your kids, but it's also you get your little dopamine hit every time you get a little like or you get a comment that says something flattering to you.

16:38Dr. Anna Lembke:Or just watching short-form video, right? Watching those short-form videos. That absolutely lights up that reward pathway, 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, you know, chemical changes. And then you go back to normal, yeah. Right. Well, yes. We always want to go back to our set point, right?

17:16Dr. Anna Lembke:Or our homeostatic baseline. But what happens is that through that process of the brain adapting to that temporary increase in dopamine firing, that essentially what can happen with addiction is that the brain over-adapts, over-compensates, 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. And feel okay. Yeah, and feel okay.

17:53Oprah Winfrey:That's what the kids on the iPads are trying to do.

17:55Dr. Anna Lembke:That's exactly right. Yeah, that's what they're trying to do. That's exactly right.

17:58Oprah Winfrey:After a quick break, Dr. Limke answers questions for mothers who feel overwhelmed by their children's screen addictions. We'll be right back. eczema is unpredictable but you can flare less with ebglyss a once monthly treatment for moderate

18:11Dr. Anna Lembke:to severe eczema after an initial four month or longer dosing phase about four in ten people taking ebglyss achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks and most of those

18:21Oprah Winfrey:people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing ebglyss libra kizumab lbkz a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EBCLIS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe.

18:49Oprah Winfrey:Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, Tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.

18:58Dr. Anna Lembke:Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979.

19:05Oprah Winfrey:Hey there. Welcome back to my conversation with Dopamine Nation author, Dr. Anna Lemke. She's a Stanford psychiatrist and has a warning for parents about children in tech. Let's get back to it. Well, 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.

19:29Dr. Anna Lembke:Hi, Oprah. Hi, Dr. Lemke. Thank you for having me. So I have two girls. They're 10 and 3. 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 you need to do your homework. It's not iPad time. She does have her moments of, you know,

20:04Oprah Winfrey:getting upset, throwing a tantrum, being resistant to having the iPad being taken away. And it's more worrisome during the weekend. And she will use that tool also for transitions

20:17Dr. Anna Lembke:like in the car, for going to any of her activities after school, like cheer practice or whatnot.

20:23Oprah Winfrey:So after hearing you talk for a bit, it seems like she's using this as an emotional tool to cope. So, and when it is taken away from her, she's quite anxious.

20:35Dr. Anna Lembke:So part of me is wondering, is she showing signs of addiction? And then another part of my question is my three-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 to not happen to the three-year-old? Okay, great. Well, thank you for being willing to, you know, 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.

21:22Dr. Anna Lembke:Yes. 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. Okay, so I think this is

21:42Oprah Winfrey:a really important piece that people think if it's not the phone that the that the ipad is better

21:48Dr. Anna Lembke:yeah that's how any tablet or even that they know what their kid is doing or what 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.

22:34Dr. Anna Lembke: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, you know, 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, you know, your digital media use because we're all struggling. And I think it's good for parents to be transparent.

23:10Dr. Anna Lembke:And then, and this should involve, you know, 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? You know, 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?

23:43Dr. Anna Lembke: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, you don't want to, the danger that many parents made, 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 kids, 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.

24:31Dr. Anna Lembke: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.

24:40Oprah Winfrey:But also what has to happen, Ida, you have to watch what you're doing with your phones and your devices. You can't tell your kid you're off of it and you have a problem and then you're sitting at the table and you're on the phone all the time or they're trying to talk to you and you're distracted because you're on the phone.

25:01Dr. Anna Lembke:Absolutely. We need to model what we want our parents, what we want our kids to do.

25:07Oprah Winfrey:If you want to extract this behavior, you've got to model the behavior.

25:09Dr. 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, right? Get a mental health care provider. And there are more and more of them, thank goodness, responding to the call.

25:49Oprah Winfrey:Yeah.

25:50Dr. Anna Lembke: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, you know, apropos, Oprah, you're talking about Ida needing to model the behavior. 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 house, devices in every bedroom, you need to change that. You absolutely, and you might even need to think about limiting Wi-Fi to the house, right? So these are structural and environmental changes.

26:29Dr. Anna Lembke:You can't just say something, and not that you would say this, 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 can't expect ourselves to stop the behavior when we live in an environment that's constantly inviting us to consume.

27:02Oprah Winfrey:Yeah, I'm hearing about parents creating tech-free pods with, you know, landlines.

27:07Dr. Anna Lembke:Yeah, tech-free pods. A lot of young people now are embracing older tech. They're getting film phone cameras, right? They're playing vinyl records. Much of this is coming from Gen Zers who themselves are recognizing... That there's a problem. That there's a problem, right? And that's the other piece. One more thing I have to say 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. So, of course, your daughter is exhausted at the end of the day. It's exhausting to be a 10-year-old, right? 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.

27:51Dr. Anna Lembke: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, right? 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

28:14Oprah Winfrey:take away the ipad so she had asked the question do you think my child is showing signs of addiction

28:18Dr. Anna Lembke:yes yes yeah yeah i mean i'm i i don't like to diagnose people who are not my patients but you know what you're describing is similar to the types of of you know addiction to digital media that I do see in clinical care.

28:35Oprah Winfrey:Does this sound reasonable to you? Yes, for sure. And 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. We're going to send you this book so that you can understand, okay? 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. Limke said is so important. Ten years old, you can still get in there. There's still hope, you know.

29:15Dr. Anna Lembke:Well, there's always hope. I just want to say that's a message I really want to get. There's always hope at every stage of life. But you as a parent.

29:23Oprah Winfrey:There's always hope. But this was 17, 16. You have a much harder time. It's harder.

29:28Dr. Anna Lembke:Much harder time.

29:29Oprah Winfrey:Thank you, Ida, so much. Yeah, thank you, Ida.

29:32Dr. Anna Lembke:Thank you. Thank you both. Yeah, nice to meet you.

29:35Oprah Winfrey:Catherine is joining us from Toronto. Catherine, what's going on with your family? Hi. Hi, ladies. Thank you for the work that you do.

29:42Dr. Anna Lembke:And Oprah, of course, such a big fan.

29:44Oprah Winfrey:Thank you.

29:44Dr. Anna Lembke: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.

30:25And 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.

30:36Dr. Anna Lembke: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. Lemke, 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, you know, close to my kid's age before.

31:19Dr. Anna Lembke:Like, what did you do in your home to manage this? Yeah. 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. And are you better now? Are you better? Yeah, I am. Thank you so much. That's great. But I mean, I think this is really an important point that we blame ourselves often as parents with these issues. And yet even like the perfect parent with all of the time in the world, it's still really, really hard.

32:07Dr. Anna Lembke:And then if on top of that, let's say you're, you know, you're a single parent or you have cancer or, you know, you're working at double jobs or whatever's going on. Then you have a whole added layer where it's just, I just want to acknowledge really, really tough for parents, even very hard, you know, well-intentioned parents who really care. So your son, he's 13 is that cusp where it just starts to get really, really hard to take the device away because kids are manipulative, sneaky, you know, 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 what have you.

32:53Dr. Anna Lembke:Have friends. Yeah.

32:55Oprah Winfrey:Yeah. That's why our previous guests with a 10 year old, you were saying easier to get in there in 10 than 13. Okay.

33:01Dr. Anna Lembke:So once you've entered these teenage years where you've sort of got these, they're like off living their own lives. This is where open dialogue really becomes core. Having, again, and I emphasize this with Ida, but sitting down with him, again, a time you're not dysregulated, he's not dysregulated, even schedule on the calendar, we want to have a family meeting. I like to call it a family meeting. Yes. Because it's like we're a family.

33:26Oprah Winfrey:Because they get to participate.

33:27Dr. Anna Lembke:Yeah. And being in a family is hard.

33:29Oprah Winfrey:And also you know that your opinion matters and you're contributing. Good point. We're all contributing to the whole. Yeah, that's right.

33:34Dr. Anna Lembke: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. And 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, right? 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.

34:18Dr. Anna Lembke: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 lying, his disrespecting, and talk about how it very well may be linked to his over-dependent slash addictive use of digital media. And what you can then do is, again, advise him, you know.

34:50Oprah Winfrey:This is done in a very loving way. This is done from a space of love and not accusatory.

34:56Dr. Anna Lembke:Right. And then what I'm getting to here is setting boundaries.

35:00Oprah Winfrey:Yeah. Because you're doing it from this is what I'm seeing. Yeah, this is what I'm seeing.

35:04Dr. Anna Lembke:tell me what you're seeing right tell me what you're seeing in comparison to to who you used

35:09Oprah Winfrey:to be or what you used to yeah believe yeah and then you know and elicit from him what he what

35:14Dr. Anna Lembke:he's again this is a sort of we're saying that and then the offer of help would you like to get some help with this problem that that we're observing you would like to see a mental health counselor what if he says i don't i don't think i have a problem oh he probably will say that 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 don't.

35:38Oprah Winfrey:So I like this idea, too, very much of saying you're becoming someone, like you were talking about parents saying, I don't recognize my child.

35:44Dr. Anna Lembke:Right.

35:45Oprah Winfrey:This part of his personality you don't even recognize. So I think your vulnerability and honesty as you're offering here, Dr. Limke, is going to be very crucial to how the conversation goes. Yeah. Because he sees your honest concern. Right. Your pain and your desire for the whole family to be whole. Right. 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. Right, right, right. Does this sound reasonable to you, Catherine?

36:22Dr. Anna Lembke: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? Right. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. You know, Catherine, you as the parent could always step in and say, we're going to take the phone away, like what we talked about with you. You could do that. And again, depending upon the severity of his behaviors and, you know, 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 just simply not in a circumstance where they're going to be able to do that.

37:01Dr. Anna Lembke:So that's where I think at least opening up the dialogue, you know, again, identifying what you see that's distressing, eliciting from him what he thinks is problematic.

37:13Oprah Winfrey:And he's already broken his word. You all had rules. You set out with rules. Yeah. And he didn't honor the contract.

37:20Dr. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 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.

38:10Dr. Anna Lembke: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, you know, actually taking the device away.

38:23Oprah Winfrey:Yeah.

38:24Dr. Anna Lembke:Sounds reasonable. Thank you so much. Yes. Beautiful. You're welcome. Thank you so much.

38:30Oprah Winfrey:Kelly is joining us from Massachusetts. Kelly, your story. Hi. Oh, I love the warm fire. I love that. Hi. Yes. So I have an 18-year-old son who's a freshman in college. and, you know, like you've already mentioned, how it's a tougher age to manage that stuff. When he was home, he was busy with school and busy with sports and really didn't have much time. You're no longer managing anything now. You're just a consultant. Yeah. I'm not. Yeah. He has so much more time on his hands too with college only being, you know, 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.

39:09Oprah Winfrey:Like it was, 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. And so he uses it as a bit of a coping mechanism as well. And so I'm just trying to figure out like, how am I supposed to help him with him not being in the house? Like, how do I guide him to stop using technology so much?

39:31Dr. 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, you know, digital habit. So you're not alone.

40:01Oprah Winfrey:Yeah, you're not alone. Yeah, I know.

40:04Dr. Anna Lembke: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, 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 important concept. Back to some of my earlier advice, sitting down with your son, a really transparent discussion about what you're observing that's different from before he went away to college.

40:48Dr. Anna Lembke:talking about does he observe the same thing, offering him help. I mean, if he has depression and anxiety and he's not getting help for that, strongly recommend you hook him up with the, you know, either your own resources for mental health or school. Most colleges have very good mental health resources, but I would, you know, again, get in there and not just sort of assume that it's going to get better naturally on its own. And Kelly, the reason that I would especially emphasize this is because, 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.

41:37Dr. Anna Lembke:They're on their devices less, right? College becomes this kind of opening to the world. but if your child is if they're having the opposite experience i i think you you know the alarm bells should be ringing and you should really be thinking about oh wow you know yeah how can we help and in some instances son had to drop out of college at 19 because he became so obsessed with the the devices yeah i was just and then when she tried to take it away from him

42:04Oprah Winfrey:he ended up you know trying to fight her and beat her up and it's just so it's a it's a real thing What you've observed is not some play thing. It's a real thing.

42:15Dr. Anna Lembke:Right.

42:15Oprah Winfrey:It's a real thing.

42:16Dr. Anna Lembke:Yeah, and kids can get incredibly isolated. They're up all night playing video games, watching YouTube, sleeping during the day, getting suicidal. So, I mean, 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, you know, no way to make any specific recommendations, but just to give you a sense of kind of the range of issues that that. 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 Catherine.

42:56Oprah Winfrey:You know, they start lying about it and and making up stories about it and using other ways to get around it. And so we're going to send you dopamine nation. Perfect. OK, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Kelly. Yeah, thanks, Kelly. Next, British actress and member of the royal family, Sophie Winkleman, joins us. Why, she believes that tech in schools has been a disaster for students and is destroying the education system from within. Stick around. We're coming right back. Thanks for joining me on the Oprah podcast. I'm talking with Stanford addiction specialist, Dr. Anna Lemke, who has some really poignant advice for parents.

43:34Oprah Winfrey:If you know someone who's worried about their children's dependence on their devices, please share this link with them to this episode. It could be so helpful. Here's more of our conversation. 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. 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.

44:10Oprah Winfrey:And so it was extremely surprising and extremely depressing. when you get emails from the school about, or the new school you've sent your kid to saying proudly, and we give all our children their own Chromebook or their own iPad. And you just think, what, how? How could that be a good idea? If school is for anything, 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. Well, Hugh Grant is a patron of an organization called Close Screens, Open Minds, which advocates to get screens and tech out of the school curriculum.

45:08Oprah Winfrey: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 very much for having me. Honored to be here. Why did you get involved and what are you hoping to achieve? I got involved from basically lockdown and seeing how terribly my children and every other child I was in contact with their parents was 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.

45:47Oprah Winfrey:And 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.

46:27Dr. Anna Lembke:They're going to be, you know, on screens all day. They're going to know the ins and outs of this thing. And yay, I'm looking forward to a very...

46:33Oprah Winfrey:Because this used to be what everybody wanted. You want your kid to go to a school that was tech savvy. 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. Oh, yeah. 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,

47:03Dr. Anna Lembke:parents started going, whoa, really?

47:06Oprah Winfrey: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. And, you know, we all found out later that many tech execs send their own children to schools that don't allow screens. Precisely. It's a very sad, hypocritical, big old secret that the Medgar tech giants understand that the human capital is now attention and focus.

47:45Oprah Winfrey: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. So what's your most important message now you want parents and educators to know? I want educators to know that parents aren't buying this anymore. They're not OK 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 trickleback effect of meaning that children are on screens for their entire school day because the parents wouldn't have to provide books.

48:26Oprah Winfrey: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 response? None of the schools can ever answer that. They give all sorts of sort of slogany responses saying it's the future. No, it isn't the future. Children who can't think properly and deeply, that's not the kind of future I want to be a part of. And I know you have two school-aged daughters, and what's your biggest concern for them in this moment? The biggest concern for me with them is that they don't get books anymore.

49:05Dr. Anna Lembke: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, you know, online sort of PowerPoints.

49:17Oprah Winfrey:It's all very agitating, shallow, flimsy, and maddening. I can see they're not learning. I can see their physical health is suffering.

49:26Dr. Anna Lembke:They're getting, you know, very stressed out by this way of education. And I want parents to take to the streets and start revolting. Dr.

49:35Oprah Winfrey:Libke, I know you're also involved with Hugh and Sophie's organization. What's your take on screens in schools?

49:41Dr. Anna Lembke:I agree with everything that Sophie said. I think this is really important work. there are some glimmers of hope in that, you know, I and many others have been talking for more than a decade now about getting smartphones out of schools, K through 12, you know, 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.

50:32Dr. Anna Lembke: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. This, I think we really have to look at and say, okay, you know, we all kind of thought, you know, 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.

51:26Dr. Anna Lembke:It is the not knowing that allows our brains to create new synapses, which is the definition of learning something, right? 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.

52:01Oprah 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? 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 Cherkin calls EdTech big tech in a school uniform and it's a multi-billion dollar industry, ed tech now. And so we sort of parents saying, sorry, books and handwriting are a better way to learn. Of course, you can do your technology education, but ed tech is a very different beast.

52:42Oprah Winfrey: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. 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 for having me. Thank you for joining us. You know, I learned from reading Dopamine Nation that just about anybody can be powerless against these digital forces that we're all up against.

53:19Oprah Winfrey: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?

53:43Dr. Anna Lembke:I mean, we need to do just that, right? There needs to be guardrails. Yeah, kids don't, they're not allowed to buy cigarettes or alcohol or go into casinos and gamble. We recognize that the developing brain is especially vulnerable.

53:57Oprah Winfrey:That's what you said earlier. We're not serving them ice cream for breakfast.

53:59Dr. Anna Lembke:We know that. Yeah, we know that. So we need these guardrails. And, you know, 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, you know, create these guardrails. We have to try things out. We have to. And we also importantly have to hold the corporations that make and profit from these digital drugs accountable, right? Like they are deploying, you know, a harmful product for kids. And that shouldn't be allowed. That shouldn't be okay.

54:39Oprah 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. Right. Yeah.

54:53Dr. Anna Lembke:I agree. And I also, 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, right? It's not going to be a snap of the fingers. You can't just pull that phone away and think that's it. 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 ed tech out of schools.

55:37Dr. Anna Lembke:Fight for these guardrails on a legislative level. Hold corporations accountable. Like, let's energize.

55:43Oprah Winfrey:We can do it. 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. And you're going to have, you know, meltdowns and you're going to have a lot of anger and dysregulation.

56:10Dr. Anna Lembke:That's right.

56:10Oprah 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. Lemke, you are a gem for us in this age. Thank you.

56:27Dr. Anna Lembke:Thank you.

56:27Oprah Winfrey:Thank you for helping us get through it.

56:29Dr. Anna Lembke:Yeah.

56:29Oprah Winfrey:And understanding ourselves. Yeah. Thank you for the information. And thank you to Ida and Catherine and Kelly and Sophie Winkleman. Thank you so much. Dr. Lemke'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.

57:10Oprah Winfrey:I'll see you next week. Thanks, everybody.