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

The Oprah Podcast

Harpo

Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2026

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 Patron of Close Screens Open Minds 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

Transcript

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0:00.0	Your child's device is a drug to them.
0:05.0	And so trying to remove the drug is like your child is in the midst of taking that drug
0:10.0	and you're trying to take that drug away from them,
0:12.0	and you're going to have, you know, meltdowns.
0:15.0	You say, the smartphone is the modern-day hyperdermic needle delivering digital dopamine 24-7.
0:25.6	We are living in an unprecedented time of overwhelming abundance, where we've drugified almost every human experience.
0:37.9	Hello, and a warm welcome to you.
0:40.3	Thanks for being with me here on the Oprah podcast.
0:43.1	Recently, I saw this headline in the New York Times, America's children are unwell.
0:49.8	The Washington Post declared, managing technology has become an overwhelming part of modern parenting.
0:57.0	And I bet that resonates with a lot of you. So I wanted to dive deeper into tech diction
1:01.3	in children because I know that this is not just a headline amidst the hundreds of bits of bad
1:07.3	news that we're inundated with every day. I got a call from one of my cousins
1:11.9	in Jackson, Mississippi, who watches the podcast and saw our episode on Gin Z Tech Addiction.
1:20.8	And she said that when she tried to take away her child's device, her child became so violent that she was really shaking up about it and
1:31.6	really so concerned and asked me, what am I supposed to do? And that's why I invited Dr. Anna Limke here to be
1:42.5	here. She's a psychiatrist and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine
1:48.3	Dual Diagnosis Clinic. That's a lot to say. It's a mouthful. It's a mouthful. But her New York Times
1:55.2	bestseller, Dopamine Nation, finding balance in the age of indulgence, has sold over 1.5 million copies. And there's a reason
2:04.7	for that because it's resonating. It's resonating with parents. It's resonating with people
2:10.3	who've suffered from addiction themselves. It's resonating with people who are concerned about
2:15.8	where we are in our culture and where we're going,
	...

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