The Peaceful Parenting Podcast

In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, Jennifer Anderson, registered dietitian and founder of Kids Eat in Color, shares how parents can help kids develop a healthy relationship with food and their bodies—without shame, restriction, or diet culture. Plus, practical tips for school lunches and making family meals easier and more affordable.
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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
We talk about:
03:00 What does a healthy relationship with food and our bodies look like?
05:00 Protecting kids from body image and weight concerns
07:00 Boys, body image, and the pressure to look “ripped”
09:00 Talking to kids who are worried about being in a bigger body
12:00 Helping kids develop a healthy relationship with food
14:00 Treats, limits, and avoiding shame or moralizing around food
21:00 Can kids really regulate how much they eat?
24:00 Neurodivergence, interoception, and mindful eating
30:00 Emotional eating, comfort, and food as connection
32:00 Simple strategies for packing school lunches
37:00 Feeding a family when time, money, and energy are limited
39:00 Why simple dinners are good enough
42:00 Jennifer’s book and pre-order bonuses
44:00 The parenting advice Jennifer wishes she’d known earlier
Resources mentioned in this episode:
* Jennifer’s Book Feed Them Well: A Guide to Raising Healthy, Confident Eaters
* Search “Kids Eat in Color” to find Jennifer on all social media platforms
Connect with Sarah Rosensweet:
* Instagram
* Facebook Group
* YouTube
* Website
* Join us on Substack
* Newsletter
* Book a short consult or coaching session call
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Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Jennifer Anderson, nutritionist and founder of Kids Eat in Color. Jennifer has a new book coming out all about helping kids develop a good relationship with food and with their bodies. That’s what we’re talking about in today’s episode.
Along the way, we also touched on some great tips for packing school lunches and making meals easier and more affordable. There’s so much conflicting information out there about feeding kids, and with their physical and mental health at risk, knowing what to do can be very stressful for parents. I love Jennifer’s common-sense and relaxed approach to eating and feeding, and I hope you do as well.
If you like this episode, please share it with a friend so more parents can learn about peaceful parenting. If you’re a fan of the podcast, you can help us out not only by sharing it, but by leaving a review and a five-star rating in your podcast player app. While you’re there, don’t forget to follow the show so you don’t miss an episode. If you’d like to support us even more, you can become a supporter on Substack to help us offset the cost of making the show. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
Okay, let’s meet Jennifer.
Hey, Jennifer. Welcome back to the podcast. This is your second time with us.
Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me.
Sarah: Yeah, I’m so excited. You have a new book coming out, so maybe you could introduce yourself and then tell us about your new book, which is available for pre-order and coming out in September. We will link to that in the show notes, but tell us a little bit about who you are and about your new book.
Jennifer: Sure. I’m a registered dietitian. I have two kids who have not been easy to feed, and I’m the founder of Kids Eat in Color and the CEO of Better Bites. I’m so excited to have this book coming out. It’s called Feed Them Well: A Guide to Raising Healthy, Confident Eaters for Life. I just cannot wait for parents to have this resource.
Sarah: Amazing. You were telling me before we started that the focus of your book is having kids have a healthy relationship not only with food, but with their bodies. Maybe we could start out by talking about—obviously, this could be a very long conversation—but some of the top things you’ve found that are really helpful, sort of dos and don’ts, in terms of having kids have that healthy relationship with food.
And also, what do you mean when you talk about a healthy relationship with their bodies? Maybe that’s a two-part question.
Jennifer: Yeah. I love that you framed it as a two-part question, because it is kind of a two-part question, but I feel like that’s only because in English we don’t have a way to describe the fact that these things are deeply connected in us.
When I think about a healthy relationship with food, I want to make sure kids know how to take care of their bodies. They know what a balanced diet looks like. They’re able to enjoy food, whatever kind of food it is. And also, we want kids to be able to really appreciate and live in their bodies, experience life through their bodies, and not have this deep what’s called internalized weight bias, where thin is the ideal. Thin is what everybody is shooting for. You should either be worried about how thin you are or trying to get thinner. That is a soul-sucking way of living when we’re so focused on weight and diet culture.
So we want to give kids another option. We want to give kids the ability to really appreciate their bodies, and yet we also want to do so in a way that they’re still able to care about the health of their bodies in a way that’s healthy, as opposed to just diet culture.
What I call this is embodied independence, where kids are independent. They know all the things they need to do, and they’re also embodied. They’re living in and experiencing their bodies.
When we think about what we want to do and what we want to not do, we want to model what we want kids to do, ideally, and this is in every single area of parenting, including eating. That’s where the independence comes from. We’re modeling, and we’re also providing the boundaries and opportunities for them.
I always tell parents, “You are in charge of your restaurant at home. You’re the head chef. You’re going to set when your restaurant hours are, you’re going to set what’s on the menu, you’re going to set all these things.” As you’re doing that, you are teaching your child what is part of a healthy lifestyle.
On the other side, we’re thinking about their relationship with their body. We want to minimize internalized weight bias, and that means we’re not discussing body sizes or body shapes. We’re not weighing ourselves in front of our kids. One of the most powerful things you can do as a parent is to not discuss your body size or shape and not discuss any weight-loss attempts at any point, if that’s something you ever engage in. Those two things are huge risk factors for disordered eating and eating disorders. If we could just not do that, that would actually be huge.
Sarah: I feel like that’s actually a real gift my mother gave me. She never talked about her weight or diets or her body, really, at all. And I feel like I’m one of the few people I know who—I’ll say at least until perimenopause recently—had no body-image issues for my whole adult life. I think that really did stem from being raised without that being a thing that people were talking about.
Jennifer: Yeah, absolutely. It was discussed in the groups that I grew up in. At the same time, my parents were like, “No, you are not allowed to look at beauty magazines or teen magazines.” I don’t remember really pushing back on that as a teenager, but now I am so grateful because, whether it’s social media now or teen magazines or so many other things, so many of them are focused on body image: how thin you are, how to get thin, how to stay thin, all this stuff. And that stuff is just toxic.
Sarah: Yeah, and it used to just be for girls, right? And now boys are—I have so many clients who’ve said their son wants a six-pack, and they’re eight or nine years old and won’t take off their shirt to go swimming.
Jennifer: My kids are right now into parkour, and it’s interesting to watch because we’ve been very careful about what we’ve said about them. They’ve recently started talking about six-packs and strong cores and all that because, in reality, my son is like, “I need a stronger core because that will help me flip better.” And he’s 100% right that his core strength is going to determine his success in this sport in a lot of ways.
At the same time, getting ripped is not the phrasing that I would really prefer because so much of that is focused on image, right? And yet this is what they’re hearing. My kids are 11 and 13, but it really started last year, when they were 10 and 12, where they’re just kind of being exposed to these ideas of fitness.
So when we think about kids understanding this, yeah, we have to have them understand their physical fitness, and then we also have to help them understand that it’s not about looks. It is about how we feel. It’s about what we can do. It’s about how we can serve people. It’s about so much more than just how we look.
So as I think about my kids getting ready to do these things and doing these things, I’m going to continue to focus on, “This will help you flip,” not, “This will help you look ripped.”
Sarah: Talk a little bit more about some of the dos and don’ts about the healthy relationship. We’ve sort of focused on our bodies. Actually, you know what? Before you do, I want to ask you about something else first, so we’ll stay on that for another second.
If you have a child who is in a bigger body and they’re concerned to obsessed about being in a bigger body and feeling like that’s, quote, “bad,” how do you talk to them about that?
Jennifer: So I think the first thing is—and I have a framework in the book that, even though it’s kind of cheesy, I call the LOVE framework—we want to listen. We really want to listen, and then we want to validate. Because if a kid is coming to us and saying, “I’m fat. I want to lose weight,” one, we don’t really know what they mean by that. We don’t know where that came from. Are they being teased? Did they hear something? Are their friends all trying to lose weight? We have to listen and understand.
And then we have to say, “Yeah, you feel like you want to lose weight. You’re feeling bad right now. You’re telling me that your body is rounder than your friends’.” As we validate, we want to use neutral, factual language. If they’re describing their body in negative terms, we don’t want to say, “Oh no, you’re wrong,” because that’s not right, and it’s also not bad to be in a bigger body. And so if we’re like, “Oh, no, no, no, you’re not fat,” that’s not helpful because we’re just invalidating their whole experience, and we’re also reinforcing the idea that fat is bad.
Instead, we want to be like, “Oh yeah, you’re right. I’ve noticed that in our family, we all have softer tummies. We all have rounder tummies.” When we’re using basic descriptive language that’s not negative, we help them reinterpret their body in a way that is more neutral, where we can then eventually move away from this judgment of body size and shape to an acceptance of body size and shape, where that’s just not part of what we’re talking about. It’s just like, “Oh, it’s neutral. This is just a body,” and let’s move on to something more interesting.
And then, after we’ve listened and validated, we really want to see if there’s something that we need to take action on. We’re saying, “Okay, do I need to help my child learn coping skills for being bullied? Do I need to talk to the school? Do I need to talk to their friend’s parents? What is my role now in figuring out what needs to happen? Is my child showing signs of having disordered eating? Have they put themselves on a diet?”
Those are the sorts of things where you want to take it seriously. If they’re restricting themselves from different foods or they’re doing things to try to change the size of their body, then is the time to involve a professional. Whether it’s a counselor, an eating disorder therapist, their doctor, whoever it is, that is the time. I know it’s hard when we think, “Oh my gosh, my kid potentially has disordered eating or an eating disorder.” That can fill parents with a lot of guilt and fear and shame and all that sort of thing. Don’t let that stop you from getting your child help as soon as possible.
Sarah: Yeah, this is not a DIY project.
Jennifer: Yeah, it’s not. Now, of course, you can be DIY-ing it all the way up to that point, but at the point where you see a big red flag, go bring somebody else in.
Sarah: So what are some tips for helping kids have a healthy relationship with food?
Jennifer: I love to talk about food factually, the same way we would talk about bodies. It’s like, “Oh, these are the names of foods. They’re hard, they’re crunchy, they’re savory, they’re sweet, they’re delicious,” as opposed to this sort of, “These are healthy foods, and these are not healthy foods.”
It adds a level of complication that is too simple and also contributes to a very rigid perspective of food and eating. Potentially, that can even leak over into how people think of their bodies.
Sarah: Yeah, because it just occurred to me—I was reflecting before, when I was thinking of questions to ask you—that I do know someone who talks to their child about, “We have to eat healthy food before we eat the unhealthy food.” And why would you ever want to tell your child that you’re giving them something unhealthy anyway? “Have this dangerous toy.” You know?
Jennifer: Yeah. “Don’t play with the dangerous toy until you’ve played with the safe toy.” I completely agree with that, and I think it comes from a very well-meaning place where, again, we’re wanting to pass on this information that empowers kids to nurture their bodies for the rest of their life.
So it’s all coming from a good place. We just have to think that kids will internalize this sort of, “Wait a second. You’re giving me all this healthy food, but then we have this unhealthy food. Why are you giving me unhealthy food? And also, am I bad if I eat this unhealthy food? Should I feel guilty? Should I feel afraid of it?” There are a lot of things that kids can take from these conversations.
Now, it doesn’t mean that if you’re using this language, you have ruined your child or you have given your child an eating disorder. I am telling you, kids are not that easy to ruin. And you can give them new skills, though, which is just to understand every food does something different in your body, and we can listen to our body to find out what’s right for us. Because let’s say you have an allergy. Yeah, there are some foods that are truly unhealthy. You’re going to have a really bad reaction. And there are also foods where, if you eat too much of them—and this is truly just about every food, including water—if you eat too much of it, you can also become unhealthy.
You can’t just live on broccoli. I promise you. That’s not healthy. And we see this in people who become really obsessed with healthy eating. They become very unhealthy. They’re unable to maintain their physical and mental health and social health. It affects all their relationships. So I like to get away from this unhealthy/healthy thinking.
And it is so healthy to be able to sit down and enjoy a bowl of ice cream. We’re visiting my parents right now, and my two kids had these big bowls of ice cream, and also the two baby cousins, who are two and not even quite one yet, my mom was giving them ice cream too. I was like, “This is such a grandma move right now.”
But here they are, they’re all together enjoying their ice cream, and the two-year-old had sprinkles for the first time. It was just this really amazing bonding moment. I don’t want my kids, in the back of their heads, to think, “Oh my gosh, I shouldn’t have eaten that much ice cream,” or, “I shouldn’t have eaten that ice cream,” or, “That was unhealthy for me.” I just don’t want that for them.
Sarah: Yeah. You want to enjoy the food that you’re eating, no matter what the food is. So how do you talk about it then? I’ve heard some people say “sometimes food,” like, “This is food that we don’t eat every day.” How do you talk about or differentiate?
Jennifer: You can model that, and I like to do what’s called predictable parenting, where you’re just going to be really consistent about whatever you’re going to do, and you’re going to help your kid get in touch with their hunger and fullness cues. So you’re going to serve them meals, but you’re also going to be like, “Sorry, you can’t have a snack right now because dinner’s in 30 minutes.”
You’re going to have a really predictable routine of meals, and that has the purpose of developing their embodiment, which is actually being able to tune in and listen: What is going on inside of my body? What does it need? How do I respond to it? One thing you do is just have an eating routine. That actually goes a really long way in helping kids have a good relationship with food.
Then you want to talk about food neutrally, and you want to model what a balanced diet looks like. If you really own your role as the restaurant owner, you’re not going to be making multiple meals. You’re going to be making one meal for the family, in most cases, and you’re always going to make sure there’s at least one food on there that your child’s comfortable with. It doesn’t have to be their absolute favorite food, but it’s got to be something that they’re comfortable with.
Sarah: Something they’ll eat.
Jennifer: Yeah, something they’ll eat, in most cases. Although kids are eating eggs several times a week for their whole life, and then one day my son’s like, “I don’t like eggs. I’ve never liked eggs.” I’m like, “That’s just so not true.” So you never know, which is why I say something they’re comfortable with, something that they almost always eat.
Then you can model what a balanced diet looks like. You’re probably not going to serve candy for meals. Maybe you add a little candy onto a meal or snack, and that’s a strategy people often use, and that’s fine. But you’re going to show that every single meal—or most meals—has a fruit or a vegetable. I like to think of it in terms of a protein food that also has fat, an energy food, which is a carbohydrate-rich source, and then also color, which is fruits and/or vegetables. That’s kind of how I think of a balanced meal.
We want to model that for kids for most of their meals and most of their snacks. They will absorb what that means. And so without saying anything, without being like, “Oh, this is a sometimes food. This is an always food,” you’re going to show them that it’s only there sometimes.
Sarah: Right.
Jennifer: And you’re also going to show them that other foods are there all the time. Now, as kids go out, they’re going to get hyped up on candy and sweets. It’s not like these are going to be, quote, “neutral foods.” They’re not. Maybe when they’re in preschool, but by the time they’re six and in school, with friends and parties, they know that these other foods are different. They know.
On social media, I’ve heard, “Oh, we can never restrict kids. We can never say anything that suggests they’re different.” I’m sorry. Hyper-palatable food—meaning candy, things with added sodium and sugar and fat—they are so different.
Sarah: Right. Your brain knows they’re different.
Jennifer: Yeah. The kids know they’re different. So we don’t have to hide the fact that we know they’re different. We can also set some limits, but we just want to be consistent about them. Like, “Oh, you can have two cookies.” Sometimes we might want to give kids more cookies. You might even say, “Hey, I want my kid to be able to choose how many cookies they have.” That’s all totally fine, and it’s all within the bounds of something that’s going to help kids have a healthy relationship with food and their bodies.
Sarah: I mean, I guess it depends, too, on the access, right? Like you were saying, you’re the executive chef of your restaurant. What we did, which I think worked pretty well, was we only occasionally had—I’d buy ice cream once in a while, and we’d eat it until it was gone. Or we’d have chips once in a while, or we’d make cookies once in a while. They sort of had, not 100% free access, but everybody would eat it, and then it would be gone, and then we wouldn’t have that stuff in the house anymore.
But the funny thing is—I mentioned to you before that two out of my three kids have been moved out of the house for a while—and I figure now my 19-year-old, I can buy chips and she can decide to eat them or not. So they come home and they’re like, “When did we become a chips household?” I feel like at a certain point you can just have in your house whatever you want and your kids are adults. But it’s hilarious because they’re like, “And bacon? When did you start buying bacon regularly?”
Jennifer: Right. And I think ultimately they’re going to grow up. They’re going to decide what they have in their house, and you’re going to decide what’s in your house. We just want to kind of get them to that point where they can enjoy all foods without any guilt.
Like, yeah, you made cookies and you enjoyed them together, and then that was that, and then you didn’t have them around for a while. You weren’t sitting there saying, “Oh, well, cookies are bad for you, and so we only have them sometimes.” No, cookies aren’t bad for you. They’re only bad for you if you’re eating so many cookies that it’s pushing out all the other food that you need.
Sarah: Yeah. So that reminds me of why I brought that up, which was that you can’t really ask kids to self-regulate, in my opinion—tell me what you think—if that food is available all the time in your house. Most kids, I think, would have cookies all the time if the cookies were just freely available 24/7. So I don’t know. Tell me what you think about that.
Jennifer: Yeah, this is a great question. If you go on social media these days, you’ll see people who are like, “Kids can totally regulate. Kids know when they’re hungry and full. Kids can listen to their hunger and fullness cues.” After doing so much research for this book and also having parented—I don’t have as much experience as you, but I’m at 13 years—I agree some kids can regulate, but a lot of kids cannot.
And here’s the reason. It’s because, again, that hyper-palatable food has a different effect on their brain than other foods. And if it was an ultra-processed food, meaning it’s a food that was kind of created in a factory or the recipe was designed by a multinational snack corporation, they have done so much research to find out the exact recipe that’s going to make people eat the most of it, override their hunger and fullness cues, and therefore buy more of it.
Sarah: Or even their enjoyment cues. Like people eating things and eating, and they’re not even really enjoying it anymore.
Jennifer: They are overriding their body, and I think it’s unfair to ask children to try to regulate that and to put that on them. Again, some kids are good at this, and if that’s one of your kids and that’s just how they work, fine. That’s fine. You don’t have to set limits.
The key, whether we’re letting kids eat as much as they want or we’re setting limits, isn’t whether we’re setting limits or not. It’s how we’re setting the limits. So if I want to set a limit on cookies, what I want to say is, “We’re all having two cookies today,” and that’s it. I’m not saying, “Because it’s a sometimes food,” or, “Because it’s bad for you,” or, “Because if you eat too much you’re going to gain weight,” or, “Because you don’t have self-control.” I’m not saying any of those things.
What the research has shown, and what’s just been observed, is that kids who have a higher weight hear more of these qualifications from their parents: “Because of this,” “Because you...” “Because that’s just too much.” That part is where you’re adding on guilt, shame, and worry, and that’s what we want to avoid. So when we just say, “Hey, everybody’s having two cookies,” that’s just the facts. I’m going to enforce it, but I’m not adding anything to it. It’s in the addition that we run across problems.
Sarah: Right. More like moralizing. That makes so much sense. I like how you said some kids can regulate and some kids can’t, in terms of the amount that they’re eating and the kinds of food that they’re eating, because I really did follow all of that sort of intuitive feeding advice for kids. And I did have one child who really had a hard time regulating whether they’d eaten enough, or eating past the point of fullness, and the things that they wanted to eat.
It wasn’t until I discovered through some research the connection between ADHD and feeding and found that there are some kids where you can sort of let them more intuitively know what their body needs and wants, and other kids you have to teach mindful eating, which is what we found really solved the issue. Because I was afraid to say anything, you know, because I didn’t want to make this kid feel bad about themselves or their body. But as soon as we had a way to talk about it that was about mindfulness rather than that sort of intuitiveness—I don’t know if you see those two things as different, but that’s sort of how I came to think about it.
Jennifer: Yeah. So here’s the thing with intuitive eating. It was a model, and it’s the name of a book. It was a model designed for adults—a very specific group of women, in fact—to come out of diet culture and to get back in touch with their bodies. Of course, that’s a huge simplification, but it was never designed for children.
And you may have heard of the division of responsibility in child feeding. That was also designed by a dietitian and eating disorder therapist for the purpose of helping private-practice eating disorder clients—children. But the thing is, that’s a very specific group of people in both cases. So to take a model that was designed for a specific group and now say this is applicable to all children, I don’t think is fair. It’s not evidence-based, and it’s something that I’ve really had to do a lot of thinking about over the past two years.
Also, seeing so many kids grow up over the years and helping so many families in the Better Bites programs and things, I’ve been thinking, yeah, this model of always letting your child decide how much to eat, or how much to eat of what foods, actually is not great for many kids.
Sarah: Yeah, it wasn’t great for one of mine.
Jennifer: Neurodivergent kids especially, whether it’s ADHD or autism or something else, sometimes don’t have as strong of a sense of interoception. And this is true even of some neurotypical kids.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jennifer: So the interoceptive sense is the ability to tell: Am I hungry? Am I full? Do I have to go to the bathroom? Am I hot? What is going on inside of my body, and do I know how to respond to it? Do I know how to make sense of that experience?
Some people describe being anxious as being very, very hot. Like, what do you do if you’re very, very hot? They have to learn over time, “Oh, that also means I’m anxious. Therefore something is worrying me. Therefore I need to address the thing.”
So for a lot of kids, we have to walk them through that experience. One of the most powerful ways we can do that is by narrating our internal experience, where we’re saying, “Oh, I’m cold. You see these goosebumps on my arm? That’s telling me I’m cold, and I’m kind of shivering. I’m going to put on something else. Oh, that makes me feel warm.”
Or, “I hear my stomach grumbling, and I feel empty, and I feel kind of grumpy. That’s telling me I’m hungry, and so I’m going to plan to eat a snack. I have snack in 15 minutes,” or, “It’s time for a snack right now.” And then as I’m sitting at the table, saying, “Oh, you know, I’m starting to feel my tummy fill up.” At some point you’re like, “Ah, I’m feeling full now. I’m going to stop eating.”
But like you’re saying, for some kids, we actually have to teach them explicitly. Some of these kids are going to have a harder time potty training. They may have a harder time learning a lot of things and how to respond to their body because they have to be taught explicitly.
Fortunately or unfortunately, that kind of falls to us to help them because we’re the ones who are with them so much of the time, and they’re most likely to be relaxed around us and able to learn. The more we can narrate our experiences—although that can be exhausting, I know—the more they can start to make those connections.
Sarah: That makes a lot of sense. And I think also the interoception thing that you mentioned is really a big part of it. Then there’s also that eating can be very regulating in terms of the chewing action and being able to differentiate hunger from boredom. There are so many things that some people or children just know, and some people or children need to be, as you said, explicitly taught those things.
Jennifer: Yeah. It’s just something that they don’t know, and their body doesn’t automatically make those connections. And that’s so true, especially with chewing.
If you find your child is eating a lot when they’re bored or when they’re lonely or when they have negative feelings or hard feelings, one of the things you can really fall back on is your eating routine, where you’re like, “Okay, we’re going to eat our meals at these times. We’re going to eat our snacks at these times.” It kind of keeps everybody on the same page in terms of when we’re eating.
And then it’s a little bit harder to say, “Oh, I’m going to use food to help my kids soothe themselves,” because that’s really tempting when we know, “Hey, if I just give them a snack, they’re going to calm down.” I’m definitely a big fan of occasionally using food as a pick-me-up because what a great tool. We could be feeling bad, and then we can eat something, and all of a sudden we can feel so much better.
Sarah: My daughter this morning had to have some blood work done, and she texted me, “The blood work hurt my arm so much. My arm is just killing me, and so I bought myself an almond croissant to feel better.”
Jennifer: Ah.
Sarah: I said, “Great self-care.”
Jennifer: Yes. Great self-care. At the same time, if that’s our only tool, then we’re in trouble. And so I think we have to kind of help our kids. I’m never down on somebody, or myself, for eating just for the purpose of feeling better or just for the purpose of enjoyment. We think about receiving meals from people in tricky times in our lives, or eating something that someone gives us even when we’re not hungry. It can still build connection and be such an uplifting experience.
Sarah: Well, and food is so nurturing, too. Again, before we started our recording, I was telling you how my 22- and 25-year-olds, who don’t live at home anymore, I really use food as a way to show my care and love for them when they no longer, quote, “need it,” right? Like making them food.
Once last year, I made a lasagna and took a picture of it and sent it to them and called it “son bait.”
Jennifer: That’s right.
Sarah: So yeah, food really is nurturing. And I think what I’ve come to think about it is, as long as you just don’t do that all the time, right? Have seconds when you’re not hungry because it’s your favorite food, as long as you don’t do that every single time you eat.
Jennifer: Yeah. I think having the ability to be flexible goes so far in our well-being. When we’re really inflexible, sometimes our life circumstances call for inflexibility. If we have very tight deadlines for when we can eat and when we can’t eat, or maybe we’re working through a health issue or something like that where we just really have to be a little bit more mindful of what we’re eating, maybe we have a little bit less flexibility.
But if we’re out of that season, we’re in a different time, then we can be more flexible during that time. I think the key is we’re not over-moralizing this experience. Instead, we’re enjoying it, we’re participating in it, and we’re learning to connect to real life, not just eating away all of our hard times or avoiding all of our hard emotions or things like that.
Sarah: That makes so much sense. Okay, let’s shift gears a little bit. I’m talking to you—I know school has already started in some parts of the country, and it’s starting in the next few weeks in other parts of the country. And with school comes packed school lunches.
Jennifer: Right.
Sarah: And I think every parent out there is like, “Oh, I’ve got to start making lunches again.” So do you have any sort of hot tips for things that you find—are there ways to cut corners to pack lunches that kids will eat, that are healthy and nutritious, and also don’t take a ton of time or money to do?
Jennifer: Sure. So when I’m packing lunches, first I just kind of start with the same formula, which is a protein food, an energy food—which is what I call a higher-starchy carbohydrate food—and then the color, the fruits or vegetables.
If you want to really cut corners, get yourself a lunchbox that only has three containers. That’s one of my big tips. A lot of these fancy bento lunches have four, five, six containers of food, and then often people feel pressured to fill it with six different kinds of foods. That’s just a lot for you to think about. I have all the different lunchboxes because it’s part of my job, and we often send ones that have a few more compartments, but that can be stressful. I’ve definitely felt that, where I’m like, “Just give me three containers.”
Also think, “Is there something that I can use from dinner or another meal that I made earlier in the week in this lunchbox?” The more you can incorporate that, the better. Or, if you can’t, see if you can make it during your dinner meal. When you’re already in the kitchen, things are already a mess. It might look like a bomb went off in your kitchen, where there’s a half-made lunchbox, there’s a half-made dinner, but if you’re the sort of person who can kind of manage that chaos, then do it then, because then you only have to clean up once. It’s already chaos; you’re just adding a little bit more chaos.
And you can also train your kids to help you, depending on your kids, of course. That can be a way for them to help save time for you. And then also kind of lean into maybe a baby carrot or a cucumber that you just chop, chop, or stuff where you’re cutting it up but it doesn’t feel that hard for you.
I think so much of what’s hard and easy—I was kind of talking to my Instagram audience about this recently—is individual. Making meatballs to me is a bridge too far. That just feels so hard and tedious. And a lot of people are like, “Oh my gosh, it feels so easy to me.” So I think a lot of this is what feels hard and what feels easy to you, and kind of run with that. Don’t compare your child’s lunchbox to everybody else’s.
If your kid is going to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day, if you can send peanuts, or a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich every day, go ahead. Send them with the same lunch every day if they’re the kind of kid who just needs the same lunch every day. If your kid needs a different lunch every day, obviously that’s a little trickier.
But also, if you can say, “Okay, can I use something from dinner?” that can really help. My kids have also learned that they kind of like soup at lunch, and I freeze it in one-cup segments, little portions. They know how to take it out of the freezer, put it in the microwave, heat it up, and put it in the thermos. That’s something that I was able to train them to do.
So any prep that you can do outside of it, when you’re already doing something else, is just going to save you a little time. And then if you can also save time with cleanup by doing it at the same time as dinner, that can be really helpful. We have a whole bunch of under-15-minute lunches in my Everyday Lunches e-book, as well as mix-and-match guides.
Sarah: Okay, nice.
Jennifer: And they can be really fun. I think engaging your kids, too—finding out what are they going to actually eat, asking them questions. “Does this lunch look okay?” If it comes back uneaten, ask them what was wrong with it so that you can kind of iterate on lunches as well.
Sarah: I once accidentally sent a thermos full of hot water with one of my kids to school. I forgot—I think it was probably macaroni and cheese that I was putting in it—and I forgot to put the macaroni and cheese in.
Jennifer: Oh my gosh. There are so many times that I’ve messed up on lunches in one way or another. You do the best you can, you know?
Sarah: Yeah. I mentioned before when we were talking about lunches that making food—and I’m somebody who cooks a lot, and I’ve made a lot of food for 25 or 26 years now with kids—it does take a lot of time and money and energy to make, I’m going to say, “nice food,” whatever that means to you. But the food you feel good about serving your family.
If you’re short on time, money, energy, or one, two, or three of those things, what’s the best use of resources, do you think, for feeding families if you’re short on some of that stuff?
Jennifer: First, go for frozen fruits and veggies. Just go right there, because that is no compromise whatsoever. It’s just a different form of the same food.
Sarah: They’re often cheaper too, I find. Especially frozen fruit is a lot cheaper than fresh fruit.
Jennifer: Yeah. Lean into that first. Also, find some cooking methods that are easy. The other day I put a bunch of chicken thighs in the Crock-Pot and poured some salsa over it. It was delicious at the end of the day. It took me five minutes, if that. I’m trying to think of what I served with it. I think it was leftover rice or something that was already leftover, something I could just quickly heat up in the microwave.
I can’t remember what we did for veggies, but I could have also added on the side of that just a couple bags of frozen peas, and we would’ve been good, right? So some bread and some frozen peas. I had a meal that took me maybe 15 minutes to make, very economical. It’s really kind of looking for those time-saving prep methods and then saying, “Okay, what can we do?”
Sarah: Yeah. One thing I always talk to overwhelmed parents about is trying to just really, really simplify dinner. Coming home, daycare pickup, everyone’s tired, blah, blah, blah. And I always have this funny story. Once when I was pregnant with my third, and my other two were two and five, my husband had an out-of-town job for four months, and I was in school full-time.
Jennifer: Oh my God.
Sarah: It was exhausting. And I would make eggs for dinner a lot.
Jennifer: Oh my goodness, yes.
Sarah: Eggs and baby carrots and toast were the go-to dinner, to the point where one Saturday morning I said to my sons, “Who wants some fried eggs for breakfast?” And my two-year-old said, “Silly Mommy, fried eggs are for dinner.”
Jennifer: I love that. Oh my gosh, we went through years and years and years where at least once a week we had eggs and toast and baby carrots, or some microwave peas or something from the freezer.
Canned soup is an okay dinner. There are so many things that I think people are feeling kind of hard on themselves about. Don’t listen to other people’s rules. What is working for you right now? Go with that.
Sarah: Yeah, like pesto pasta and jarred spaghetti sauce and noodles and apple slices. And I think sometimes it’s hard for parents, too, because they like to cook and they want to make nice food for themselves, right? But something has to go.
Jennifer: Yeah. Something’s gotta go, man. Making something nice for yourself—do it when you have a chance, but otherwise it’s okay to let that go for now. You’ll get it back.
That’s the other thing. We feel like, “Oh, I don’t want to give up this part of myself.” You’re not giving it up. You’re just saying, “Hey, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do other things right now, and then at a different stage I will do that again.” I’m actually cooking a lot better now that my kids aren’t holding onto my feet and fighting while I’m trying to cook.
Well, they still do that, but they’re not really getting in the way of cooking. It’s so hard to cook with little kids around.
Sarah: Totally.
Jennifer: I always say I would notoriously let my kids make a huge mess while I was making dinner, and I call it a “time loan.” They’re making a huge mess, but I was able to actually get dinner on the table. I got that time, and then, yeah, I’ll have to pay it back. I’ll have to clean up their mess when they were really little, but it’s worth it.
And I will also say, if you’re having a really hard time budget-wise, but you still have some time to cook, I have a meal plan that’s specifically designed to save money. It’s all about making the most of the food, using up all leftovers and preventing waste and all that, so that you can really spend significantly less—
Sarah: Yeah, I think I saw that a few years ago. We’ll link to that. You’ve had it for a while, right? It’s called Affordable Flavors.
Yeah, we’ll link to that in the show notes. One thing I’m just remembering that we did when my kids were little is there was another family—this woman who had kids around the same age—and we lived a few blocks away. Once a week, we would make double dinner and give it to the other one.
Jennifer: I love that.
Sarah: Yeah. She was Japanese and a really nice Japanese cook, and my kids actually, to be totally honest, weren’t huge fans of her dinners, but my husband and I certainly were.
Jennifer: Oh, that’s great.
Sarah: Yeah. But it was really nice. Once a week, you didn’t have to make anything because somebody gave you dinner. And it’s not very hard to make double of your own dinner. So if anyone has a neighbor that they could do that with, it was really a nice thing to do.
Jennifer: Yeah. That’s a great idea.
Sarah: Well, thank you so much. Tell us about your book launch. We’ll put any links in the show notes, but you told me before that you had some prizes and things for the pre-order.
Jennifer: Yeah. So there are a bunch of pre-order bonuses. As soon as you buy the book, you can upload either your receipt or, let’s say you requested it from the library, you can upload just proof of that request. I have some printables—how to talk to kids about red foods, orange foods, yellow foods—that are super popular. I usually sell it, but I’m giving that away as a pre-order bonus.
There are also mealtime conversation cards coming. There is a live call with my mom that I’m going to be doing that’s also recorded, so depending on when you hear this, it’s still available. There are also conversations like, what do you say if your kid comes back and says, “I’m fat”? What are some scripts? There are some scripts for that. There’s also my bedtime snack chart. There are a lot of tools where you’re like, “Okay, I want to make some improvements in different areas.” There are pre-order bonuses that give you tools for almost every area that you could want to apply.
And then I’m also doing a really fun book tour where I’m meeting with child feeding and food specialists from all over the United States over time, and I’m going to be posting my interviews online for everybody to see. It’s almost like a short-term podcast kind of demo. It’s going to be a lot of fun for people to follow along.
Sarah: Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on. One last question, which I ask all my guests—and I’ve asked you this before, so I can go back and compare and see if you answer it the same way—which is: If you could go back in time to your younger parent self, what advice would you give yourself? It can be about anything. It doesn’t have to be about food or feeding.
Jennifer: Sure. So now that I’m 13 years in, I think the one thing that would’ve been so helpful for me to know is: It’s not my job to make my kid happy. It sounds so simple now, but I’m like, no, it wasn’t my job to try to make them stop crying. It was my job to just hold a boundary and be there.
And when I stopped, when I just kind of let go of that idea of trying to make them happy, oh my gosh, the weight, the drama—it just went away. It’s like, “Oh, it’s okay for you to be unhappy. That’s you and your feelings over there, and I’m here to support. I’m here for you.” And also, it’s not my job to fix that.
Sarah: Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much. Best place for folks to go and find out more about you and what you do?
Jennifer: Kids Eat in Color, whether that’s kidsincolor.com or on your favorite social media. I’m there.
Sarah: All right. Thank you so much, Jennifer.
Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me.


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In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, my guest is therapist Morgan Pommells. We explore the lasting impact of having an emotionally immature parent (EIP), including how to begin healing and how we can break the cycle with our own kids. We also talk about boundaries with our EIP parent, why children's big emotions aren't personal attacks, and what every child truly needs to thrive.
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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
We talk about:
00:00 – Introduction to Morgan Pommells
02:30 – What is an emotionally immature parent?
07:15 – Emotional immaturity vs. narcissism: What’s the difference?
09:00 – Why emotionally immature parents are often critical
10:30 – The biggest impact on children: Growing up without a strong sense of self
12:00 – How childhood with an EIP affects adult relationships and self-worth, and our own parenting
15:30 – Healing from emotionally immature parenting
18:30 – Why your child’s big emotions are actually a sign of safety
19:00 – Navigating relationships with emotionally immature parents as an adult
27:00 – Teaching children that feelings aren’t dangerous
27:45 – Emotionally immature grandparents: Do the patterns continue?
29:15 – The power of delighting in your child
32:45 – What if your parenting partner is emotionally immature?
35:00 – The parenting mistake we all make: Taking children’s emotions personally
36:00 – Morgan’s advice for every parent: Heal your own wounds before they parent your children
38:00 – Where to find Morgan and closing thoughts
Resources mentioned in this episode:
* Morgan’s Masterclass Protect Your Peace
* Morgan’s IG @morganpommells
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Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast.
Today’s guest is Morgan Pommells. Morgan is a therapist and coach who helps the adult children of emotionally immature parents stop seeing themselves through their parents’ eyes and finally come home to who they really are.
Morgan and I discuss what an emotionally immature parent is, how that is—and isn’t—different from narcissism, and how people grow up to parent this way. Morgan also shares how having an emotionally immature parent affects us as children, how it continues to affect us once we’ve grown up, and how we can heal from having been raised by an emotionally immature parent.
We also talk about the opposite of emotionally immature parenting and what our kids need in order to grow up whole and healthy.
Morgan has so much wisdom, and so much of our work overlaps. I think you’re going to learn a lot from this conversation, and I think you’re really going to enjoy it.
If you like this episode, please share it with a friend so more parents can learn about peaceful parenting. If you’re a fan of the podcast, you can also help us out by leaving a five-star rating and review in your podcast app. While you’re there, don’t forget to follow the show so you don’t miss an episode.
Let’s meet Morgan.
Sarah: Hi, Morgan. Welcome to the podcast.
Morgan: Hi! Thank you for having me.
Sarah: I’m so glad to have you on. We’ve been trying to schedule this for a while, and I think this is such an important topic for parents. I’m so glad we finally got to sit down and have this conversation.
Morgan: Me too. It’s a super important topic for parents.
Sarah: Tell us a little about who you are and what you do.
Morgan: I’m a therapist and coach in Ontario, Canada, and I specialize exclusively in working with the adult children of emotionally immature parents. Whether that’s through workshops or one-to-one work, everything I do revolves around helping people heal from having emotionally immature parents.
Sarah: So tell us: what is an emotionally immature parent?
Morgan: Great question.
An emotionally immature parent is someone who really struggles to manage their own painful internal emotions. Those emotions tend to spill out onto everyone around them instead of being worked through internally. These are parents who might struggle with shame, rage, or fear of abandonment, and instead of taking responsibility for those feelings and working through them themselves, they become everyone else’s problem.
They take those emotions out on their children. They may recruit their children into never leaving them because they’re terrified of being abandoned. The child becomes responsible for soothing and managing the parent’s anxiety, which is really the opposite of what a healthy parent-child relationship is meant to be.
Sarah: Yeah.
What causes somebody... I guess you don’t become emotionally immature—you just never emotionally mature. What causes that lack of emotional maturation? How does somebody become an emotionally immature parent?
Morgan: There are a couple of different pathways.
A lot of emotionally immature parents have their own relational trauma. If we experience something deeply overwhelming at a young age and don’t have the capacity to metabolize it at the time, we can become emotionally stuck there. Our biological age keeps moving forward, but our emotional development doesn’t necessarily come with us. Our emotional defenses stay frozen at that younger age.
In other cases, someone may have had the capacity to become emotionally mature, but emotional immaturity was all that was ever modeled for them. They don’t have another template. They don’t know a different kind of parenting exists because they’re simply working from the script they inherited.
Sarah: So far we’ve been talking about this in psychological terms, but what does that actually look like in real life?
Let’s focus on an adult child. What would a familiar interaction look like between an emotionally immature parent and their grown child?
Morgan: One of the biggest dynamics is fear of abandonment.
When their child grows up, goes away to university, finds a partner, or simply starts building their own life, emotionally immature parents can become very controlling. They can become very mean. They can use shame to pull their child back toward them and keep them emotionally close because they’re so afraid of being abandoned.
When children are younger, it usually looks like a lot of control. That parent has a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety, but instead of working through it themselves, they try to control their child. As a result, the parent feels safer, but the child feels controlled and suffocated.
Sarah: So they’re almost externalizing their own feelings?
They feel scared, so they make their child feel scared? Or is that too simplified?
Morgan: No, in some cases that’s exactly what’s happening.
If you have a parent who’s very anxious or very fearful, it can actually feel safer if everyone around them is afraid too. You don’t want to be the only person who’s scared of the big, bad threat you believe is coming. So if you can get everyone else to be afraid, at least you have company in that fear.
When children are younger, though, it often looks a little different. A parent might be deeply worried about how their child is doing at school or how they’re perceived by other people, so they try to control what the child says, wears, or does because that helps soothe the parent’s own fear.
Sarah: So that’s because they’re worried about what people think of their child because it reflects back on them?
Morgan: Yes, that’s certainly part of it.
There can be a real element of impression management with emotionally immature parents. Many of them are very concerned with how they appear to other people. Sometimes they experienced a genuine threat in their own childhood because some important family rule was broken. As a result, they become determined that their own child will never break that same rule because they believe that’s what keeps both of them safe.
Sarah: I also think it’s about attachment.
If people don’t think well of you, then you don’t get your needs met.
Morgan: Exactly.
If someone doesn’t think well of you, if they see you as a threat, or if they see you as different, that can feel incredibly dangerous.
Emotionally immature parents tend to like sameness. They want their children to think the same way they do and view the world the same way they do. They often use different techniques to influence their child’s thinking because differences feel threatening.
Ultimately, we’re talking about people who are acting from a deep desire to feel emotionally and psychologically safe. The tragedy is that the methods they use to create that safety can be profoundly damaging to their children.
Sarah: How is this different from narcissism—or is it?
Morgan: That’s a huge question.
You can absolutely have an emotionally immature parent who is also quite narcissistic, but you can also have an emotionally immature parent who isn’t narcissistic at all.
A narcissistic personality structure is just one presentation. Another emotionally immature parent might be incredibly anxious. There are different expressions of emotional immaturity, so it isn’t an either-or situation.
It’s also important to remember that emotional immaturity exists on a spectrum. You can have very mild emotional immaturity—and, honestly, all of us demonstrate emotional immaturity at certain moments in our lives. Then, at the more severe end of the spectrum, you might see something like narcissistic personality disorder, where someone relies heavily on emotionally immature defenses.
So it isn’t that emotional immaturity and narcissism are the same thing. Narcissism is one possible way emotional immaturity can present, but it’s certainly not the only one.
Sarah: Are there people who are emotionally immature all the time?
Morgan: Yes. When we talk about EIPs—emotionally immature parents—we’re talking about people for whom emotional immaturity is the rule rather than the exception.
All of us are going to have emotionally immature moments. Usually, those happen when something feels very threatening because we’re trying to keep ourselves safe. We want control in that moment. One very common emotionally immature defense is denial. Think about hearing that someone has passed away. One of the first things people often say is, “No.” That’s denial. We’re trying to metabolize something incredibly painful.
But those are moments. They’re moments we can eventually reflect on, learn from, and grow through. We can become more emotionally mature if we choose to do that. With emotionally immature parents, though, emotional immaturity isn’t just a reaction to certain situations—it’s their baseline, regardless of the context or the type of threat they’re facing.
Sarah: That makes sense.
One thing you talk about is emotionally immature parents being critical. Tell me about the critical parent.
Morgan: There are really two different versions of that.
One type of emotionally immature parent is highly critical because they’re deeply afraid that their child won’t be okay if they don’t follow the parent’s rules. They believe, “You need to get into a really good university. You need a really good job. You need perfect manners because otherwise people will be mean to you. They won’t give you opportunities.” Underneath all of that criticism is genuine terror and, in many cases, genuine love for their child. The problem is that the way they’re trying to soothe that fear creates rupture and disconnection in the relationship.
Then there’s another group of emotionally immature parents who have internalized a tremendous amount of self-hatred through their own trauma. They don’t know how to metabolize that pain because growing up hating yourself is incredibly painful. Instead, they project it onto their child.
They might notice a quality in their child that reminds them of something they’ve decided is ugly or unacceptable in themselves. It can actually feel satisfying to try to eliminate that quality in their child through criticism or shame—to make sure their child never becomes that way. In those cases, the criticism is really an expression of their own self-hatred.
Sarah: What are the effects on a child growing up with an emotionally immature parent?
Morgan: By far, the biggest effect is a lack of sense of self.
These are children who never really had the opportunity to discover who they are because they didn’t have a parent who was deeply curious about them. They didn’t have a parent who took a genuine interest in them, asked meaningful questions, or reflected their inner world back to them.
As children, we develop our identity in relationship with another person. We need someone to act as a mirror. But for the adult children of emotionally immature parents, you don’t receive a mirror—you receive a distortion.
Instead of hearing, “Tell me about yourself,” or, “I want to understand you,” you hear messages like, “There’s something wrong with you,” “I’m not interested in you,” or, “Your thoughts are weird, wrong, or shameful.” Over time, your sense of self becomes organized around those messages.
Sometimes the experience isn’t criticism so much as neglect. In those cases, it’s not even that you grow up believing you’re bad or shameful. You grow up feeling like you barely exist. Like you aren’t even a full person.
At the core of this wound is not really knowing who you are.
Sarah: Obviously that’s painful in and of itself, but how does that affect someone’s adult life?
How does it show up in the choices we make, the relationships we enter into, or the partners we choose? And maybe that’s actually a separate question, but I’m also curious about how growing up with an emotionally immature parent affects the way we parent our own children.
Morgan: They’re really connected.
The first thing is that when you reach adulthood without a solid sense of self, there’s almost this hunger inside you—a hunger that never feels fully satisfied. You don’t really know what you want. Sometimes you think you know what you want, and then you finally achieve it, only to discover it doesn’t feel the way you expected because something more fundamental is missing.
There’s this constant sense of never quite arriving.
Without a strong sense of self, it’s also much easier to end up in unhealthy or even abusive relationships. If you don’t know who you are, how do you know what you want? How do you know what’s safe? How do you know what your needs are? How do you stay connected to yourself?
Instead, many people become what we often call codependent. They become incredibly focused on making sure everyone else is okay. They’re wonderful caretakers, but meanwhile, none of their own needs are being met. Their own joy, happiness, and sense of aliveness get left behind.
There’s a deep emptiness because there’s nothing inside that feels solid enough to connect with.
Sarah: What about parenting? How does this affect the way we parent our own children?
Morgan: Growing up with an emotionally immature parent affects parenting in so many different ways.
For one thing, if you don’t have a strong sense of self, it’s easy to make parenting your entire identity. It becomes, “I’m just a mom,” or, “I’m just a dad,” as though there’s nothing else to you beyond that role.
But another really important piece is that emotionally immature parents tend to have very rigid rules. They hold strong expectations, and they genuinely believe terrible things will happen if those rules are broken.
If you grow up in that environment—especially without a strong sense of self—you internalize those rules. You come to believe that’s simply how the world works.
Then you become a parent, your children start doing what children naturally do, and they break those rules. They talk back. They get angry. They push limits. Those are completely developmentally appropriate behaviors, but they activate tremendous fear inside you.
You don’t necessarily realize that’s what’s happening. You may even feel your reactions are completely justified. But underneath those reactions is the terror you learned as a child. Because those behaviors weren’t allowed in your own home, seeing your children do them feels profoundly threatening.
Without realizing it, you begin responding to your child as though they’re doing something terribly wrong.
Sarah: I see that all the time with the parents I work with.
If your child does something that would have been dangerous for you to do as a child—whether literally dangerous or emotionally dangerous—it becomes a huge trigger.
Your five-year-old self is saying, “Kids aren’t allowed to do that. Kids shouldn’t do that. If you do that, you’re not going to get the love you need.”
Morgan: Exactly.
Your nervous system remembers, “Bad things happen when this happens.”
Another piece of this wound is that we often don’t realize we’ve grown up. A part of us still feels eight years old.
So when your own child is screaming, getting angry, or breaking the rules, part of your body reacts as though you’re the child who’s about to get in trouble. It says, “We’re not allowed to do this. Last time this happened, I got hurt. You need to stop. You need to be quiet.”
The difference is that now we’re the adult. We’re bigger. We’re more powerful. So we may respond with that same power to shut our child down.
For many parents, that reaction comes from a very real place of, “I get hurt when people scream. I get hurt when these rules are broken. This has to stop.”
Sarah: Yeah. Shut it down.
How does someone heal from having been raised by an emotionally immature parent? I realize that’s your life’s work, so it’s not a simple question, but where does healing begin?
Morgan: The biggest thing to understand is that this is a relational trauma, so it has to heal in the context of relationship.
As a therapist, I’m obviously biased toward therapy, but healing can happen through a coaching relationship, a healthy romantic relationship, or any relationship that offers consistent corrective experiences.
We need experiences where we express our emotions and someone stays. We need experiences where we express a need and someone genuinely wants to meet that need.
We have to update the template.
Insight alone isn’t enough. Reading about it isn’t enough. We actually have to experience someone caring about us.
Sarah: So it’s almost like reprogramming.
Morgan: Exactly.
It’s a real reprogramming process.
Our children can certainly be part of that healing journey, but they can’t become the people who heal us. We have to be very careful not to recruit them into that role.
Sarah: Can we heal ourselves by being a different parent to our children than we had? Do you know what I mean? Can it work in that direction? Could that be part of the healing process?
Morgan: Absolutely. There is something deeply healing about getting down on your child’s level and offering them the validation that you never received yourself.
At the same time, we have to be very careful not to parent our children as though they needed the parent that we needed.
Sarah: Because they’re their own people.
Morgan: Exactly. They’re their own people. They need the parent they need.
If we get caught in the idea that, “I just need to give my children what I never had,” we actually end up missing a lot about who our child is. We stop learning about them because we’ve already decided what they need. We think, “They’re crying because of this,” or, “They’re upset with me because of that,” or, “They’re struggling in school because of this. I know exactly what’s happening because this is what I didn’t get, so I’ll just keep doing the opposite.”
Meanwhile, our children are giving us a million different communications about who they are, what they’re feeling, and what’s actually going on for them, and we’re missing all of it because we’re so committed to this one version of parenting.
Sarah: I also find it can make parents pretty reactive.
I work with a lot of parents who grew up with neglect. They’re actually wonderful parents, but then their child behaves like a perfectly typical five-year-old and, internally, they’re thinking, “Wait a minute. I’m giving you everything I never got. How can you still be crying, yelling, and telling me I’m the worst mother in the world?”
Their own experience of believing, “If only I’d had this...” creates an unrealistic expectation of how their child should behave.
Morgan: Totally.
Where there’s been a lot of neglect, there’s often an internalized rule that says, “Don’t be seen. Don’t be heard. Be quiet. Take up as little space as possible.”
So when your own child takes up a lot of space—expressing big emotions, having big reactions—that can feel incredibly frightening.
What we don’t realize in those moments is that your child’s willingness to express their feelings, even to tell you they hate you, is actually a sign that they feel safe enough to do that.
It’s not your job to talk them out of their feelings. It’s your job to help them metabolize those feelings—to help make those emotions digestible for them—rather than trying to change them or shame them out of having them. They don’t need you to erase their feelings. They need you to help them move through them.
Sarah: In peaceful parenting, we talk about welcoming feelings.
What about maintaining a relationship with an emotionally immature parent? I actually kind of know the answer because I’ve taken your masterclass. What’s it called again?
Morgan: Protect Your Peace.
Sarah: Protect Your Peace. Yes. It’s wonderful. We’ll link to it because I recommend it for everyone.
But how do you think about having—or not having—a relationship with an emotionally immature parent?
Morgan: It really depends on whether you genuinely want that relationship.
Emotionally immature parents often raise their children using obligation and guilt, so you grow up without even realizing that you have choices. You’re recruited into following their expectations, and then one day you become an adult and realize you actually don’t enjoy this relationship with your parent—or maybe you don’t even want one—but it doesn’t feel like that’s an option.
So the first step is taking it up with yourself.
Do I actually want this relationship? And if I do, why?
Not from a place of pressure or with some hidden agenda. Even when people come to work with me one-on-one, unless someone is experiencing ongoing abuse, I don’t have an opinion about whether they should stay in contact with their parent. The healing work is learning to reconnect with your own sense of self, your own needs, and your own desires. I’m not going to become another authority figure telling someone what they should do.
Instead, I encourage people to ask themselves, “If I do want this relationship, what do I want it to look like?”
Boundaries don’t really exist in emotionally immature family systems. If you grew up with an emotionally immature parent, chances are you struggle with boundaries. So I ask people to imagine what it would look like if they actually got to customize this relationship.
Would you call as often as you do now? Would you attend every family gathering? Would you have a separate phone number just for them? What would you put in place to protect yourself while still maintaining the relationship, if that’s what you genuinely wanted?
Sarah: Because there may be reasons to continue the relationship.
Maybe you have a wonderful relationship with your other parent and you want to preserve that. I can imagine there are very thoughtful—not in a negative sense, but very intentional—reasons someone might choose to stay in a relationship they otherwise wouldn’t.
Morgan: One hundred percent.
And sometimes people don’t really have a choice. They may still be living with their parents. There may be financial realities to consider.
There’s also a very real psychological cost to going no-contact with a parent. It’s not an easy decision, even though a lot of online conversations make it sound simple. For the adult children of emotionally immature parents, that decision is often something they’ve wrestled with internally for years before they even consider it.
Most people don’t want to jump straight to no contact.
Instead, they’ll often begin by saying, “Let me see what happens if I put some boundaries in place first. If I’m going to have this relationship, here’s what I need it to look like.”
Sarah: Can you give an example of what one of those boundaries or parameters might look like?
Morgan: Sure.
It might be something like, “I’ll have one twenty-minute phone call every Sunday.” Or, “I don’t answer the phone during my workday because I’m working.”
Some people even block their parent’s number and only unblock it when they’re ready to call. Others use a second phone line app where all of their parent’s texts and calls go, but they turn off the notifications so they only check it when they choose to.
Boundaries can also involve where you go and what you participate in. Do you attend every wedding? Every Christmas dinner? Every family event?
Or they might involve what happens when you’re together. Maybe you’ve decided that if a certain topic comes up, you’ll say, “I don’t want to talk about that.” If your parent continues, you might say, “If we’re going to keep talking about this, I’m going to leave.” And if they continue, you actually leave.
That’s what makes it a boundary—you follow through.
Ultimately, it comes back to recognizing that this is someone you don’t feel emotionally or psychologically safe around. Once you accept that, it becomes much easier to ask yourself what you need in order to protect your peace.
People start realizing things like, “I don’t want to discuss this topic,” or, “I don’t want to stay on the phone for an hour because all they do is talk at me,” or, “I can’t answer calls in the middle of my workday.” Once you start giving yourself permission to prioritize your own safety, those answers often become surprisingly clear.
Sarah: And just to be clear, I know this is what you mean, but for anyone listening, a boundary is something you do. It’s not something you make another person do.
Morgan: Exactly.
A boundary is really an if-then statement.
“If you continue criticizing my body, then I’m going to leave.”
Sarah: Right. The boundary isn’t, “You’re not allowed to criticize my body,” because you can’t control another person. You can only decide what you’re going to do if they continue.
Morgan: Exactly. We have zero control over another person’s behavior.
Once we reconnect with ourselves, we stop asking, “How do I make my parent stop doing this?” and start asking, “Given that I can’t control them, what control do I actually have?”
I can hang up the phone. I can leave. I can tell them I didn’t appreciate what they said. I can choose not to attend the next family event. I can change the subject.
It’s always about what I’m going to do rather than trying to control someone else.
Sarah: Do you ever see emotionally immature parents genuinely change?
Morgan: Is it common? No.
Does it happen? Absolutely.
I’ve seen it happen in my own practice, and I’ve had clients tell me about meaningful changes they’ve experienced with their parents.
If someone is on the milder end of emotional immaturity and they truly realize they’re at risk of losing their relationship with their children, some parents do choose to go to therapy. They do the work. They genuinely try to repair.
But, in my experience, they’re the minority.
It takes an enormous amount of self-awareness. It requires being willing to recognize that you’ve caused harm.
Sarah: Which is exactly what’s so difficult in the first place, right? That lack of self-awareness is part of what created the problem.
Morgan: Exactly.
It’s a lack of self-awareness, but it’s also a lack of capacity to tolerate being the “bad guy.”
Emotionally immature parents often play a game of trying to identify who the bad person is, and somehow it’s always someone else.
When their adult child says, “You really hurt me when you did this,” or, “I’m still struggling because of the way you treated me growing up,” some parents become incredibly skilled at finding explanations for why it wasn’t actually their fault—why circumstances made them do it, or why the child was really the problem.
Those are parents who, at least in that moment, aren’t able to repair because they simply can’t tolerate the idea that they’ve done something wrong.
There can be an enormous amount of shame underneath that, especially if they’re already carrying years of unresolved shame from their own childhood experiences.
It takes a tremendous amount of emotional capacity to stay present with that and choose repair instead.
Sarah: One thing I saw on your Instagram really caught my attention. You were talking about how people often say, “Well, I was doing the best I could,” and you took issue with that.
I always teach that people are doing the best they can. That’s genuinely a philosophy I hold. But I would add, “Sometimes your best still wasn’t good enough.”
Would you agree with that?
Morgan: One hundred percent.
The issue I take with the phrase, “They were doing the best they could,” or, “I was doing the best I could,” is that, all of a sudden, we’ve left the adult child’s experience and shifted entirely into the parent’s experience.
The child has just brought you mountains of pain about things you’ve done, and suddenly the conversation becomes a justification. It becomes a rationalization. We’re no longer learning anything about the child’s experience because the conversation has been shut down by the statement, “I was doing the best I could.”
In that moment, it isn’t actually helpful. It’s functioning to protect the parent, which is exactly what that family system has always been organized around.
At its core, it’s almost a semantic argument. What does “doing your best” actually mean? Is it Olympic-level effort every single day? That’s not really the point.
The point is that we’ve once again centered the parent’s experience and stopped being curious about the child’s.
Sarah: Right. I think if a parent could say, “I did the best I could, and I realize it wasn’t good enough,” that could actually be very healing for everyone involved.
Morgan: Totally.
As long as the next sentence is, “Tell me more... and I can take it.”
That’s really the crucial part.
More than anything else, children need to know that their parent can survive their feelings. Whether a parent is emotionally immature or not, if a child grows up believing, “My parent can handle my emotions,” that child is much more likely to become emotionally healthy.
Too often, though, emotionally immature parents experience their child’s feelings as personal attacks. The child learns that their parent can’t survive those feelings.
And if Mom can’t survive my anger, or Dad can’t survive my frustration, then how am I supposed to survive these enormous feelings?
Sarah: That makes so much sense.
That’s exactly what we teach in peaceful parenting, too—that by staying grounded when our children have big emotions, we’re teaching them that feelings aren’t emergencies. They learn emotional regulation by watching us not become overwhelmed by their feelings.
Tell me about emotionally immature parents as grandparents. Do you see the same patterns showing up, or is the relationship with grandchildren different?
Morgan: In my experience, emotionally immature parents often try much harder with their grandchildren.
Sometimes I think that’s still connected to image management. They want to be seen as the wonderful grandparent. But they’re also older by that stage, and grandchildren represent something of a fresh start.
Here’s someone who doesn’t yet have years of hurt or disappointment with them. Here’s another opportunity to be liked, to be admired, to build a relationship. So I often see them showing up with more effort and a little more tolerance than they had with their own children. They also tend to feel less threatened because these aren’t their children to raise.
That said, many adult children become very protective of their own kids. They may decide, “Even if you’re somewhat better than you used to be, you still aren’t emotionally safe for my child.”
Sarah: Right. They’re still centering themselves.
Morgan: Exactly.
It’s still coming from a place of wanting to be seen as a certain kind of grandparent. Sometimes grandchildren become another bargaining chip—another thing the adult child supposedly owes them. Access to the grandchildren becomes another arena where the family drama can play out.
Sarah: Yeah. Holy heck.
You and I both talk about delighting in your child.
When I teach it, I explain that children learn to see themselves through our eyes, and delight is also such a powerful way to build connection. For anyone listening who hasn’t heard either of us talk about it, I describe it as letting the love you already feel in your heart actually show on your face.
Talk to me about the role delight plays in your work.
Morgan: This is something that the adult children of emotionally immature parents yearn for more than almost anything else—to simply be delighted in.
For me, delight looks like a parent who genuinely wonders about their child. A parent who lets themselves be amazed by who their child is, especially in the places where that child is different from them.
Imagine an incredibly athletic parent raising a deeply artistic child. Instead of trying to change them, that parent watches with curiosity and wonder. They’re moved by who their child naturally is.
That communicates something incredibly powerful: You matter to me exactly as you are.
There’s no agenda. There’s no performance required. Your authentic, messy, imperfect self moves me.
Every child needs that experience because it’s permission to keep exploring who they are. It’s permission to feel worthy of love, connection, and care. It creates this deeply rooted sense of, “I belong here. I exist. Who I am is good enough for this world.”
That’s the template we want our children growing up with.
For emotionally immature parents, that kind of delight can feel threatening because it requires surrendering control. But it’s really the sweetest part of parenting. It’s what children are longing for at their core.
Sarah: It’s the best.
There’s a quote—I think it’s from Pam Leo—that says every child needs to know there’s one person who thinks they’re the sun, the moon, and the stars all wrapped up into one wonderful human being.
Sometimes parents ask me, “Shouldn’t my child have a more realistic understanding of how the world works?”
And I always tell them, “The world will teach them that. You don’t have to.”
Morgan: Exactly.
The world is going to be hard enough. Your child doesn’t need you to prepare them by becoming another source of that hardness.
They’re going to encounter disappointment, rejection, and criticism out in the world. What they need is a safe place to come back to.
Knowing there’s always someone in their corner allows them to face that big, scary world much more confidently. Eventually, it isn’t even a conscious thought of, “If everything falls apart, I can always go home.”
Instead, it becomes a felt sense.
“I’ll be okay.”
That feeling becomes woven into who they are because, throughout their life, someone consistently had their back.
Sarah: I’ve interviewed several adults on the podcast who were bullied as children.
One man told me, “My parents loved me so much. I always knew they liked me. They genuinely thought I was wonderful.”
He said he was bullied terribly, especially in middle school, but it never really damaged his self-esteem because he always had that foundation at home. His parents carried him through those experiences, and they didn’t leave lasting scars.
Morgan: That gives me goosebumps.
I work with so many childhood trauma survivors and adult children of emotionally immature parents who say something very different. They’ll tell me, “I know my parent loved me, but I never felt like they liked me.”
They felt looked at with disgust, contempt, disappointment, or criticism. They didn’t feel enjoyed.
Being liked by your parent is profoundly different from simply being loved by them.
I completely agree with your guest. There really is something deeply protective—almost insulating—about growing up knowing your parent genuinely likes who you are.
Sarah: What if you recognize that your partner is an emotionally immature parent?
Morgan: The first step is to honestly assess the capacity for communication within the relationship.
Like we’ve talked about, all of us have emotionally immature moments. That’s why these conversations are worth having. You want to be on the same page about parenting. How are we going to respond when our child has big emotions? What are we going to do when discipline is needed? Can we agree on the kind of parents we want to be?
The way your partner responds to those conversations gives you important information.
If you’re consistently met with defensiveness, denial, minimization, or ridicule, that may be a sign that couples therapy would be helpful, assuming you’re continuing the relationship.
At the same time, your responsibility is to protect your child. You want to make sure that, regardless of what’s happening elsewhere, your child feels emotionally safe with you.
It always begins with trying to have those conversations and seeing whether your partner demonstrates a willingness to grow in emotional maturity—or whether you’re continually running into defenses and distortions that make genuine change very difficult.
Sarah: Is it possible for one parent’s influence to be enough to protect a child from the other parent’s influence?
Morgan: “Enough” is an interesting word because I’d want to know what metric we’re using.
Is one emotionally healthy parent better than none? Absolutely. Without question.
If a child has even one safe base, that alone provides an incredible amount of protection. It creates a buffer. It creates insulation.
That doesn’t mean the other parent’s emotional immaturity won’t affect them. It certainly can.
But we also know that one of the biggest factors in whether a painful experience becomes traumatic isn’t just what happened—it’s whether there’s anyone afterward to help you process it. Trauma isn’t only about going through something painful. It’s also about having no one afterward to help you make sense of it, regulate it, or feel supported through it.
So if a child has one parent who can help them process what happened, who can reconnect with them after those difficult moments, they’re in a much better position.
Sarah: Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, what should I have asked you that I didn’t? Is there anything important we missed?
Morgan: One thing I’m often talking about is helping parents stop taking their child’s emotions as personal attacks.
Parents frequently make these automatic connections: My child is angry, therefore they’re being disrespectful. Or, My child is shutting down, therefore I’m a bad mom or dad.
The reality is that children have a million different reasons for feeling what they’re feeling.
It’s incredibly helpful if, in those moments, you can temporarily remove yourself from the equation. Instead of immediately assuming it’s about you, get curious. Stay with your child. Ask questions. Try to understand what’s happening in their world before creating a story about what’s happening in yours.
We often assume we already know why our child feels the way they do, but we usually don’t.
Step into their world with curiosity instead.
If it is about you, and you’re a safe parent, they’ll tell you.
Then you can take that information up with yourself, talk about it together, and repair if necessary. But first, we have to give children the freedom to have their feelings.
That’s incredibly important.
Sarah: That’s beautiful.
Our work is so aligned. I’m really grateful you came on the podcast today. I’m sure parents are going to learn a lot from this conversation and want to learn more.
Where’s the best place for people to find you and your work?
Morgan: You can find me on Instagram at @morganpommells. My last name is spelled P-O-M-M-E-L-L-S.
Come on over. We talk about emotionally immature parents all the time.
Sarah: We’ll put all the links in the show notes, including your masterclass.
Is that available all the time now?
Morgan: Yes. Protect Your Peace is available anytime.
Sarah: Perfect.
Okay, final question.
What’s one thing you wish every parent knew?
Morgan: I wish every parent knew that they need to work their own s**t out, or else their s**t is going to raise their kids.
More often than not, the reaction you’re having, the story you’re telling yourself, the urgency you feel to immediately fix or stop something—that’s about your stuff.
Before turning toward your child, pause and turn toward yourself first.
Ask yourself, What just happened inside me? Why is this particular behavior so triggering? Why is this reaction bringing up something so intense?
That’s incredibly important data about you. In that moment, it’s usually much more about you than it is about your child.
Sarah: It’s so hard because I think a lot of people believe they’ve already done a tremendous amount of personal work before they have kids.
But in my own experience, and from years of coaching parents, there’s a whole layer you simply can’t access until you become a parent.
My husband and I were talking about this the other day. We had our first child when we were thirty, and we’ve often joked that if we’d started younger, maybe we would’ve had more children.
He said, “I don’t know. I probably needed more time to work on my stuff.”
And I said, “I don’t actually think your stuff would’ve shown up. Whether we’d had kids at twenty-five, thirty-five, or forty, there’s a whole layer that simply doesn’t emerge until you become a parent.”
Morgan: Exactly.
The portal hasn’t been unlocked yet.
Parenthood opens an entirely different window into yourself. It activates parts of you that often stay completely dormant until you have children.
There are aspects of yourself that may never become activated at all if you don’t become a parent. Parenting has a unique way of bringing those hidden parts to the surface.
Sarah: Think of all those blissfully happy people out there without children who don’t even know what their issues are.
Morgan: They’re living a very blissful life.
Sarah: Well, thank you so much, Morgan. It’s been such a pleasure.
We’ll put links to all of your work in the show notes, and thank you so much for coming on the podcast.


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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, Michaeleen Doucleff and I talk about her new book Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child’s Brain and Take You’re your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods. Michaeleen’s position is not that screens and ultra-processed food are “bad.” Rather, Michaeleen explains how they can take the place of things that truly bring us joy and pleasure, leaving us with an empty feeling of "what's next?" and an endless cycle of wanting. We focus on how dopamine has been misunderstood and how it actually works, how magnets like screens and ultraprocessed foods keep us stuck, and small changes you can make to start shifting things in your home.
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We talk about:
* 00:00 Introduction to Dopamine Kids and why our understanding of dopamine is outdated
* 02:15 Michaeleen’s journey from NPR science journalist to parenting author
* 05:00 Dopamine isn’t pleasure—it’s wanting: the neuroscience that changes everything
* 07:20 Why kids say they’d rather play with friends than be on screens
* 08:00 The difference between dopamine, serotonin, and real satisfaction
* 13:30 How apps and ultra-processed foods hijack the brain’s reward system
* 16:45 Why endless scrolling never feels satisfying
* 18:30 “Bottomlessness”—one of the biggest design tricks keeping us hooked
* 20:30 Why we want activities for our kids with a clear purpose and a clear endpoint
* 22:00 The veggie straw experiment that changed Michaeleen’s thinking about food
* 26:50 Magnets and cues: how screens become automatic habits
* 32:00 Why removing screens isn’t enough—you have to replace them
* 33:30 Helping kids meet their real need for adventure and autonomy
* 36:00 Small, permanent changes vs. temporary screen detoxes
* 37:30 Why the car is a great place to start reducing screens
* 38:00 Is reducing screens really more work?
* 40:15 Why laws and regulations haven’t caught up with technology
* 43:00 Why this isn’t a willpower problem
* 46:30 Can kids ever use screens in moderation?
* 49:00 Paid video games vs. free games
* 51:30 This isn’t about screens being “bad”
* 53:00 Helping kids gradually learn to use technology well
* 54:00 School Chromebooks and why parents have more influence than they realize
* 58:00 Advice Michaeleen would give her younger parenting self
* 1:00:00 Why kids have to experience offline joy before they’ll want it
* 1:01:00 Sarah’s client who removed the TV—and what happened next
* 1:02:30 Final thoughts and where to find Michaeleen
Resources mentioned in this episode:
* Michaeleen’s website
* Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child’s Brain and Take You’re your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods
* How to Stop Fighting About Video Games with Scott Novis
* The Peaceful Parenting Membership

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Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast.
Today’s guest is journalist Michaeleen Doucleff. She is the author of the book Hunt, Gather, Parent and now has a new book out called Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child’s Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultra-Processed Food.
Michaeleen’s first book is one of our favorite parenting books, and now we can add this one to the list. She walks us through how screens and ultra-processed food hook us and keep our brains stuck in a hijacked wanting cycle without giving us actual rewards and pleasure.
We eventually get around to discussing this, but I want to stress right here at the beginning that Michaeleen isn’t saying that screens and ultra-processed food are evil or that they have no place in our lives. Rather, they can take the place of things that truly bring us joy and pleasure, leaving us with an empty feeling of “what’s next?” and an endless cycle of wanting.
I learned so much from this book. I’d been wanting to make some changes in my own life with my relationship with my phone, and this book helped me understand why it was so hard and what I could do. A hint: as it turns out, we don’t understand dopamine correctly at all. Our cultural shorthand about what dopamine is and what role it plays in the motivation and pleasure cycle is totally outdated.
If you’re interested in making some positive shifts in your child’s life, in your family, and in your own life, you’re going to love this interview and Michaeleen’s book.
If you like this episode, please share it with a friend so more parents can learn about peaceful parenting. If you’re a fan of the podcast, you can help us out not only by sharing it, but by leaving a review and a five-star rating in your podcast player app. While you’re there, don’t forget to follow the show so you don’t miss an episode.
If you’d like to support us even more, you can become a supporter on Substack to help us offset the cost of making the show. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
Let’s meet Michaeleen. I hope you enjoy this conversation and get as much out of her insights as I did.
Sarah: Hi, Michaeleen. Welcome back to the podcast.
Michaeleen: Thank you so much for having me.
Sarah: When we had you on a few years ago to talk about your first parenting book, Hunt, Gather, Parent—we’ll link to it in the show notes—it ended up being one of our favorite podcasts out of the 200-some episodes we’ve done. I’m so excited to have you back to talk about your new book.
Michaeleen: Thank you so much. That’s so nice. It’s an honor to come back.
Sarah: I’m so happy to have you. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Michaeleen: I was—or I still am—a science journalist. I’ve been one now for about 16 years, and I spent 13 or 14 years as a radio correspondent at NPR. I’m still there covering children’s health, global health, neuroscience, and psychology.
Before that, I was trained as a chemist. I have a PhD in chemistry.
Five years ago, I wrote the parenting book Hunt, Gather, Parent, and I had no idea I’d ever become a parenting expert. That definitely wasn’t on my life bingo card.
When I had my daughter Rosie almost 11 years ago, I had no clue what I was doing. It just seemed like an impossible task. Then I started studying parenting around the world, and I realized there was an easier way to do things. That’s what Hunt, Gather, Parent is about.
More recently, about six years ago, I was really trying to fix my own screen problem—my own addiction to my phone. I was so obsessed with it. As I investigated neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral psychology, I started to realize, “Oh gosh, we’re really getting a lot of things wrong when it comes to screens and our kids.”
That led me to write this next book, Dopamine Kids, to clarify a bunch of myths but also update the advice because it’s really old. A lot of the advice out there is based on psychology from 20, 30, even 40 years ago.
Sarah: Or even more.
Michaeleen: Exactly.
Sarah: Exactly. And I’m going to ask you about that. So tell us, what’s the central idea behind your new book, Dopamine Kids?
Michaeleen: One of the biggest ideas is that we’re thinking about screens wrong. We think they’re these endless sources of pleasure. We think dopamine is this molecule that brings us pleasure and that the more we have, the happier we are.
But that’s really old neuroscience.
What dopamine actually gives us is the feeling of desire, wanting, and craving. It makes us obsessed.
So what screens are doing is cranking that system up. They’re increasing motivation, craving, and wanting. But if you look at what happens over time, they actually rob us of pleasure and reduce the amount of pleasure we experience in our lives.
So this idea that screens—video games and social media—are treats and rewards for kids is wrong. It’s all wrong.
What is actually most rewarding and pleasurable for kids are things in the real world because real-world experiences don’t just give us desire and wanting. They also give us satisfaction, joy, and long-lasting pleasure.
So Dopamine Kids is really a reset of what actually brings our kids pleasure in life. It also provides a toolset to retrain your kids’ brains so they naturally want and reach for offline activities and foods that make them feel good—foods that really nourish them and bring satisfaction.
It’s about rethinking our idea of pleasure. What does pleasure actually look like?
I think the media, marketing, and corporations have taught us that pleasure and wanting are basically the same thing—that we want things because they bring us pleasure.
But if you actually look at the science and the data, there are so many things out there that drive our wanting while robbing us of pleasure.
Social media is a really good example. Kids use it because they want a sense of belonging. They want to feel connected. But over the long run, social media does the opposite. It makes them feel lonelier, and yet they still want it.
I see this book as an operating manual for shaping and changing your kids’ habits into the ones you want for them as a parent, but also habits that nourish kids and bring joy, happiness, and pleasure to the whole family.
We often think limiting screens is about depriving kids of pleasure.
It’s actually the opposite.
It’s about reclaiming pleasure.
Sarah: I had Lenore Skenazy on the podcast. Do you know her work?
Michaeleen: Yeah, we’re friends.
Sarah: She was on the podcast a few months ago, and she was talking about how, if you ask kids what they want—would they rather be on screens or play with their friends?—by far the number one answer is playing with their friends, not being on screens.
Michaeleen: Yeah. I think it’s almost double.
Sarah: Exactly. And yet I don’t think most parents realize that.
Michaeleen: Right. I didn’t realize that either. I think it’s because we confuse begging, screaming, and tantruming for the screen with joy and pleasure.
Sarah: Okay, so tell us about that, because what I learned from your book is that everyone thinks dopamine is, “Ah, I just got a hit of dopamine and I feel so good.”
Michaeleen: Yeah.
Sarah: But it’s not dopamine that makes you feel good. It’s serotonin and, I think, endorphins that make you feel good.
You go into this in much more detail in the book, and I highly recommend it. It was excellent. I have to tell you, I was on an office hours call with my membership before I even knew you had written a new book, and one of my members said, “I’m reading this parenting book called Dopamine Kids, and it’s a page-turner.”
She said, “I’ve never had a parenting book that’s a page-turner, but you’ve got to get your hands on this.”
Then I looked it up and realized it was your book, and I was so excited to get it and read it.
Can you explain the basic idea? I know it’s too much detail to go into fully, but what’s the difference? What does dopamine actually do, and why isn’t it what we think it is?
Michaeleen: For a long time—really since the 1950s—neuroscientists thought we do things over and over again because they’re pleasurable.
Neuroscientists have been obsessed with getting people and animals to press buttons for over a hundred years. Rats, mice, apes, pigeons—they’ve all been part of these experiments. It’s almost like an iPad. Press, press, press, tap.
For a long time, researchers could stimulate one region of the brain—the dopamine center—and the animals would go crazy pressing the button all day long. They wouldn’t even stop to go to the bathroom. It makes you think of someone playing video games for hours. They’re just obsessed with pressing the button.
Researchers believed that because this was the dopamine center of the brain, dopamine made you press the button because it felt good and brought you pleasure. They even conducted similar experiments with people, and that very simple explanation stood for a long time.
Then, about 30 years ago, a couple of scientists came along and asked, “Wait a second. Is this really true? Do we always act because something is pleasurable?”
They designed better experiments, and what they found was astonishing. Dopamine doesn’t do that at all.
Dopamine makes us want.
It makes you want something, and it makes you want to do something over and over again. It’s like a “do it again” button in the brain.
Do it again.
Do it again.
Whenever you can, do it again.
The way the system is supposed to work is that first you want something, and dopamine motivates you to work for it. Then, when you get what you wanted, the pleasure center starts to light up.
Those are different neurotransmitters. That’s where endorphins—the body’s natural opioids—and serotonin come in.
Serotonin allows you to appreciate what you have. It’s what lets you say, “Oh, I got what I wanted. I feel really good. Ah... I can stop now. I can take a break.”
In many ways, pleasure is the opposite of dopamine because it gives you satisfaction, and satisfaction stops wanting.
There are a couple of classic examples. One is sex, which is probably the R-rated version. But another is thirst.
Imagine you’re running on a hot day. You’ve run out of water, and after half an hour or an hour, you really want something to drink.
That’s dopamine. That’s your dopamine hit—that strong feeling of desire.
Wanting can actually feel good. If I fall in love and I want to be with my partner, the wanting feels good.
But wanting can also become frustrating. If you want something for too long and don’t get it, that feeling turns into frustration.
So you’re out running on this hot day thinking, “Oh my gosh, I want water so badly.”
That’s dopamine.
That’s not pleasure yet.
Then you see a glass of water, or you get one and take a drink, and you think, “Ah, that feels so good.”
That’s the pleasure system.
Sarah: That’s where you get the serotonin and the endorphins.
Michaeleen: Exactly. And the endocannabinoids too—the body’s natural cannabinoids. A whole bunch of things kick in.
The wonderful thing about this pleasure response is that it can last a long time. It lingers. It makes you feel optimistic and gives your life a kind of glow because you’ve gotten what you need to survive.
I remember being really upset as a kid, and my mom would come over and hug me. I’d bury my face into her, and it felt so good. It was just this feeling that everything was okay again.
That’s what these pleasure molecules do.
Dopamine is saying, “Everything is not okay. I need this before things can be okay.”
They’re very different.
Sarah: Okay. This is the part I still feel like I’m only beginning to understand.
How do the makers of apps and video games—and we’ve mostly been talking about screens, but you also write a lot about ultra-processed foods—how do they get us stuck in the dopamine cycle?
What I took away from your book is that these things are so powerful because they keep us trapped in that cycle of wanting...
Sarah: What I understood from your book is that these things are so powerful because they keep us stuck in the dopamine cycle. It’s just wanting, wanting, wanting.
You said something in the book about how they’ve figured out a way to hack a weakness in our brain circuitry. Forgive me if that’s not the exact wording, but they’ve essentially hacked a weakness in the brain to keep us stuck in dopamine without ever giving us a real reward.
How does that work?
Michaeleen: First of all, both the tech industry and the food industry have admitted this for a long time. This isn’t something I’ve come up with. They’ve openly admitted it. Even the food industry says, “We want to make something you can’t stop eating.”
Sarah: Right. You read all these interviews with industry insiders, and they’re very open about it. Everybody knows they’ve admitted it. But how does it actually work?
Michaeleen: There are a lot of tricks.
Let’s start with screens because a lot of these techniques actually came from the gambling industry. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, casinos started replacing mechanical slot machines and poker machines with video versions—basically gambling apps on giant touchscreens.
They explicitly asked, “What can we do to this game to keep people playing for as long as possible?” Some people would play for 24 or even 48 hours straight. They ran massive A/B tests to figure out exactly how they could tweak the games to send people into this dopamine loop—this wanting loop—where people actually stopped wanting to win because winning took them out of the loop.
So it’s very empirical. They’ve simply tested what keeps people there.
In the book, I describe it as a kind of recipe parents can use to recognize whether an app is doing this to their child. Psychologists even have a name for this state. It’s called dark flow, where you lose track of time and where you are. We’ve all experienced it while scrolling social media. Twenty or thirty minutes go by and you think, “What just happened?” You’re in this loop of wanting because, if you actually experienced pleasure and satisfaction, you would stop. You’d stop wanting.
One of the biggest tricks is speed. The faster the cycle runs, the more it traps you. If you think about videos and video games, they’ve become faster and faster. Even children’s iPad games are just question, answer, question, answer, question, answer over and over again. That’s driving up dopamine.
But where’s the satisfaction? What’s the reward? Basically, it’s just a light on the screen.
Another trick is promising something fundamental. The dopamine system evolved to help us fulfill our basic human needs—water, food, social support, adventure, creation. These are things we needed to survive, so kids are naturally highly motivated to pursue them.
These apps promise they’ll meet those needs. Social media, for example, promises belonging. It says, “Get on here and you’ll finally feel connected. You’ll finally feel like you belong.” The problem is that it never actually fulfills that promise.
If you look at some of the leaked internal documents, you can see the algorithms intentionally withhold what people actually want. One neuroscientist explained it this way: they figure out what you’re looking for and why you’re on social media, then they give you something that’s close to what you want. Maybe on the next click they give you something a little closer. Then a little closer.
This does several things. First, you never actually receive the reward because you never get what you really need. Second, you develop this feeling of making progress—as though you’re getting closer and closer. “Maybe one more comment. Maybe five more likes. Then I’ll finally get it.”
What most people don’t realize is that we produce the most dopamine not when we get what we want, or even when we think we’re about to get it, but when we feel like we’re making progress.
That’s one of the biggest tricks.
Video games are a perfect example. Kids always feel like they’re making a little more progress. A little more. A little more. By the time they reach the next level, they’re already making progress toward another one.
There are all these different tricks designed to crank up wanting while dialing down satisfaction and pleasure because satisfaction is what gets you off the game. You think, “Okay, I’m done.”
The same thing applies to social media. If social media actually gave me what I was looking for, I’d be finished. I’d think, “I got what I needed. I’m done.”
But it never gives it to you.
It can’t.
Sarah: I started feeling kind of gross about how much time I was spending on Instagram and Facebook—really just on my phone in general. I’d think, “Oh, I need a five-minute break,” and immediately pick up my phone.
Actually, I did this before I started reading your book, but now I realize it fits perfectly with what you’re talking about. I downloaded the New York Times Games app.
Now, when I feel like I need a little break, I’ll do Wordle or the Mini Crossword or Connections. What’s nice is that it’s limited. You get one crossword, one mini crossword, one Wordle, and one Connections each day.
I’m almost never on Facebook or Instagram anymore because of it. It actually feels like a real reward. I finish the crossword and think, “Oh, I did the Mini in one minute and 38 seconds.”
There’s an ending to it. It really does feel like I accomplished something, which is very different.
Michaeleen: Exactly. And you’ve actually stumbled onto one of the biggest tricks: bottomlessness.
This is huge.
TV didn’t used to be bottomless.
Michaeleen: TV didn’t used to be bottomless. You had a handful of channels, and eventually the content ended or it got bad enough that you simply stopped watching.
Now everything is endless. There’s always another news story, another level in a game, another post, another video. That endlessness is what keeps us trapped in the cycle.
You actually did so many things right with the New York Times Games app. You found something that takes a little more effort, but it also has a clear stopping point. You finish it, and then you’re done. You created a bottom.
That’s exactly what I want to do with my own kids. I want to help them find activities that have a clear purpose and a clear ending. When you’re done, you’re done, and you turn it off.
Compare that with scrolling Instagram for 30 minutes. What’s the purpose? What are you actually doing? What are you looking for? There’s always more content. It never ends, and it’s incredibly fast.
I think it’s Chapter 4 of the book where I talk about figuring out how to use these technologies—if you’re going to use them at all—in ways that don’t manipulate you into these loops but instead feel genuinely satisfying.
People often ask, “How do you know it’s a real reward?” Your brain tells you. You feel better afterward than you did before. You feel done. You feel full. You think, “I’m ready to stop.”
If, instead, you’re thinking, “What’s next? One more. One more,” then you’re still stuck in the loop.
For a lot of people—for a lot of kids, and certainly for me—that loop is frustrating and deeply unsatisfying. It just makes life feel gray and gloomy.
Sarah: I noticed something a while ago. One of my favorite activities in the world is reading, and I realized I can’t read if my phone is in the same room with me.
When I was reading your book, I thought, “This is something I absolutely love doing, but it doesn’t create that same dopamine loop.”
Reading doesn’t do that.
I actually have to keep my phone in another room because reading takes more effort than scrolling Instagram.
Michaeleen: Exactly. It takes more work, and that’s part of why it’s more satisfying.
We’re made to work. Human beings are actually very good at working, and that effort is part of what creates satisfaction. If something is too easy, it’s much easier to get trapped in the wanting loop.
Sarah: You also say in the book that, evolutionarily, our brains are designed to look for the easy way out.
Back when life was hard, that made perfect sense.
But now that everything comes to us so easily, it doesn’t make sense anymore.
Michaeleen: That’s exactly right. These products are exploiting that tendency.
Food is probably where you can see it most clearly.
Our brains evolved to look for the foods with the most calories per bite. Why would you eat something with fewer calories per bite, especially when food was scarce? That’s how we evolved.
We also evolved to look for calories that our bodies could use quickly. A refined white-flour cracker gives you calories much faster than a carrot does. You’d have to eat carrots for much longer to get the same energy.
Our brains are completely designed to choose the cracker.
You’d never touch the carrot. It doesn’t make evolutionary sense.
That’s especially true for kids, who are eating much more instinctively. But honestly, I’d argue that adults have the same problem. If the crackers are sitting there beside the carrots, most adults are going to have a hard time choosing the carrot.
Sarah: Tell the story about the strawberries and the veggie straws.
Michaeleen: This was when I really understood what was happening.
Rosie was about eight years old, and we went to the pool with one of her friends. I packed raw edamame and strawberries. The girls were tired and hungry, and they were happily eating them. They were enjoying them.
Then I pulled out a bag of veggie straws—which, by the way, aren’t really veggies and aren’t really straws. They’re basically highly processed potato starch.
Sarah: I think it’s extruded potato starch.
Michaeleen: You’re right. Extruded potato starch.
The starch is chemically extracted from the potato, so there’s really nothing potato-like left except the starch. It’s heated at a very high temperature, pushed through machinery, then sprayed with fat or basically fried and covered with salt.
If you really look at the research, your body treats it almost like sugar. It practically dissolves in your mouth. There’s almost no digestion required. It moves into your gut and into your bloodstream incredibly quickly.
So even though the package says “veggie” and even though it says “potato,” what you’re really getting are extremely fast calories, much like sugar.
The moment I put those veggie straws on the table, those two girls ate the entire bag.
One after another.
You want to talk about dopamine?
“Do it again. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again.”
They didn’t stop until every single veggie straw was gone.
And then they completely forgot about the strawberries and the edamame.
That was the moment I realized that if any ultra-processed food is available, kids simply won’t choose the whole foods.
Sarah: You asked Rosie afterward which she actually liked better, and she said, “Oh, the strawberries.”
Michaeleen: Exactly. Even though she genuinely likes strawberries better—they taste better—her brain, and all of our brains, are designed to choose the veggie straws because they’re such a dense source of fast calories.
That realization led me to start doing little experiments. I’d make homemade meals with whole foods, then put one ultra-processed starch on the table—a dinner roll or some corn chips. I’d sit there and watch my husband and Rosie eat all of the ultra-processed food first. Then my husband might eat some of the whole foods, but Rosie wouldn’t touch them.
It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t my fault. This is simply how our brains are designed. It makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective, and the food industry is explicitly taking advantage of that. If you look at the calorie density of ultra-processed foods, it’s gone up and up over time. What really surprised me, though, is that it isn’t just about sugar. Sugar clearly triggers dopamine—”Do it again. Do it again.” But highly refined potato starch, corn starch, and white flour are just as powerful, and in some studies they’re actually more addictive than foods with added sugar.
I recently read a study describing almost the exact recipe you mentioned: extruded starch that’s fried or sprayed with a little fat and loaded with salt. That combination is incredibly addictive. The moment you see it, you want it, and then you eat it. The dopamine hit actually happens before you eat it. It’s, “Oh, I see the bag. I want the bag.” That’s the dopamine.
Then there’s almost no satisfaction or pleasure because satisfaction comes from protein and fiber—and, to a lesser extent, fat. Those are the things that make you feel, “Ah, I’ve had enough. I’m done.” Ultra-processed foods have stripped away almost everything that creates that feeling of satisfaction. That’s what pleasure actually is.
I really believe we can learn to tell the difference between wanting and genuine pleasure. Just like you did with the New York Times games, you replaced endless scrolling—which kept you wanting more—with something that actually makes you feel good every day.
Sarah: Can you talk a little bit about what you call “magnets” and “cues”?
I finished your book last week—it really was a page-turner—and I’m already putting some of your ideas into practice. One of the simplest suggestions was to stop carrying your phone around everywhere. I wore a watch to a baseball game the other night because I didn’t want to keep taking out my phone just to check the time.
Then this morning I went for a walk with my daughter and left my phone at home. When I got back, I made something to eat and did a couple of other things before I suddenly realized, “Oh—I left my phone upstairs for two hours.”
Just the act of not taking it with me on the walk and leaving it in another room made it disappear from my mind. It was amazing.
Michaeleen: I love that. That’s beautiful.
I call phones, video games, iPads, and ultra-processed foods magnets because neuroscientists actually use the term motivational magnets, and that’s where I borrowed it from. They work through space, and they create what we call cues.
Let’s use screens instead of veggie straws. Imagine Rosie comes home every day after school and plays Toca Boca World on the iPad.
Sarah: My daughter used to play those hairdressing games—and even vacuuming games. I never understood the appeal until I read your book and realized she was basically getting dopamine-mined.
Michaeleen: Exactly. If you look at what keeps young children on those apps, it’s the repetition. They’re doing essentially the same thing over and over again, which is actually very unsatisfying.
At first, what keeps Rosie playing are those little dopamine hits—”Do it again. Do it again.” But over time, something fascinating happens: the dopamine hit moves backward in time. Eventually, just seeing the iPad triggers dopamine. Simply seeing it creates desire and makes her really want it. Dopamine doesn’t just make us want things—it motivates us to work to get them.
So she sees the iPad, and suddenly she wants it. If it’s sitting there, good luck getting her interested in anything else because her brain has already triggered that powerful feeling of, “I need this to survive.” She’ll be pulled toward it like a magnet. That’s where the term comes from. You don’t just want it—you physically move toward it. You want to pick it up. You want to hold it. You want to touch it.
Even if it’s hidden away in a drawer or a closet, if she knows it’s there, those magnets work through walls. She’ll go looking for it.
Sarah: Have you seen that study where students either had their phone on their desk, in their backpack, or in another room? Just having it in the backpack was almost as distracting as having it sitting on the desk.
Michaeleen: That’s exactly right, because they know it’s accessible. Over time, these cues become so deeply wired into our brains that we don’t even have to see the object anymore. We just have to know it’s there.
What’s often triggering the habit isn’t even the phone itself—it’s an emotion. For example, when I’m writing and I get a little frustrated, that feeling becomes the cue: “Go check the news.” That used to be mine. Then it became, “Go check your email.” Now I’ve stopped checking the news, so mine has become, “Go check the weather.”
Sarah: At least that can only last so long unless you’re checking the weather around the world.
Michaeleen: Exactly. It’s much less sticky.
But that’s the point. If the phone is in the backpack, the brain knows it’s available. These magnets work through walls. They work through bags. To really make those cues disappear, you have to do exactly what you did. You leave it at home. Your brain knows, “I can’t get it. I’m not walking all the way back home for it,” so it lets go.
As parents, we have to make these things completely disappear within a particular context. That’s another really important piece of this: magnets and cues work in contexts.
Every day after school is a context for Rosie’s brain. Every day after school, in our house, she plays Toca Boca World. So when she walks into the living room at four o’clock, her brain already knows what time it is, even without a watch. Human brains are incredibly good at tracking those patterns.
That context triggers dopamine. It triggers the desire for Toca Boca World.
What we want to do instead is use that same context to trigger a desire for something that actually fills her up. Maybe after school in the living room becomes the cue for making art, riding her bike, or going outside.
That’s really what Dopamine Kids is about: using dopamine to get your kids excited about the real world and training their brains accordingly.
Sarah: Can I back you up a little bit there? Because one thing you say in your book is that it doesn’t work to simply take the screens away and say, “Let them be bored. They’ll figure it out.”
That’s really the only other advice I’ve seen out there: just take the screens away and let kids be bored.
But you did a lot of work to create opportunities for dopamine from other things. You didn’t just tell Rosie, “No more Toca Boca World.”
Can you talk about that? I think a lot of parents try the approach of saying, “Okay, we’re just not doing screens anymore.” Then they end up with weeks—or maybe months—of crying and begging: “Can I just play a little?”
Michaeleen: I think that approach can sometimes work with very little kids, but even then I don’t think it lasts. These things are like weeds. The screens will come back unless you replace them with something else.
Behavioral psychology is actually very clear on this. It’s much easier to create a new habit than it is to break an old one. It’s much easier to replace a behavior than simply remove it.
For example, while I was writing Dopamine Kids, I decided I wanted to stop drinking as much. I had gotten into the habit of having a glass of wine every night, and I realized it just wasn’t working for me anymore.
I didn’t simply take it away. I bought non-alcoholic beer. I replaced it with something.
Kids are the same way.
If you just take away the iPad—especially if they’ve been using it for a long time—their brain has come to believe it’s something they need to survive. That’s what these products have tricked the brain into believing. So when you take it away, it genuinely feels awful.
But if you give them another activity that’s exciting, interesting, and something they genuinely want to do, taking the screen away doesn’t feel nearly as difficult. Over time, you can actually help them discover activities that make them feel even better than the iPad does.
That’s what creates a permanent habit instead of a temporary one.
Behavioral psychology is pretty clear that kids are using these things because they’re trying to meet a need.
Rosie wasn’t obsessed with Toca Boca World or cartoons because she wanted screens. She wanted adventure.
Adventure is a fundamental human need for kids. You could also call it autonomy, but I like the word adventure because I think it’s easier to understand. Kids need to explore, learn, and take little risks. They need that in order to feel good.
I think a lot of kids are using screens to try to fill that need.
So instead of simply taking screens away and leaving that need unmet, you have to backfill it.
I said to Rosie, “Tonight we’re not going to watch Netflix. We’re going to take a break. Instead, we’re going to do something you’ve been dying to do that I just haven’t made time for yet. You’re going to ride your bike to the market by yourself.”
I would even say to her, “Instead of watching cartoon characters have adventures, you’re going to have a real adventure yourself.”
That’s the difference.
You’re taking something that was trying—but ultimately failing—to meet a real human need and replacing it with something that actually does.
When you do that, it’s not nearly as hard.
It goes back to what you mentioned earlier about kids saying they’d rather be with their friends than on screens. That same research also found that kids would rather be outside playing than watching screens. So you’re giving them the opportunity to do the thing they actually want to do.
That’s really the process: figure out a replacement activity—or a replacement food—and then gradually begin taking the old thing away.
The result is that your child isn’t angry at you all the time. Your relationship is better because they have something wonderful replacing what they lost.
More importantly, it creates a lasting habit because they’re not simply complying with a rule. They’re building a hobby, a skill, or a way of living that genuinely brings them pleasure and meets their needs.
One of my biggest concerns with a lot of the screen advice that’s out there is that it isn’t permanent.
Real change comes from making small but permanent changes.
It’s not, “We’re doing a 30-day screen detox.”
It’s, “We don’t use screens after dinner anymore,” or, “We don’t use screens on Saturdays.”
And that’s just how our family does things now.
That’s how you train the brain.
If you keep bringing the old habit back, you undo the learning and go right back to where you started.
So I always encourage people to think small—but think permanent.
Sarah: One suggestion you make is starting with something simple, like, “We don’t do screens in the car.”
Michaeleen: Yes.
Sarah: I think that’s such a great place to start. Your book is full of practical little ideas like that, so the whole thing doesn’t feel overwhelming.
We’ve been talking about some of the bigger concepts, but the book is incredibly practical.
I’m working on a book myself right now, so I know how much work goes into something like this. I just want to say you did a really beautiful job balancing the theory with concrete things families can actually do.
I really, really recommend it.
Michaeleen: Thank you.
The car is a great place to start because it’s such a clear context for a child’s brain.
They get into the car and their brain thinks, “Screen time.”
Instead, you can make the car mean, “Reading time,” or “Journaling time,” or even “Bored time.”
It’s a really useful place to begin because they’re already somewhat contained, so it’s easier to establish a new routine.
Sarah: I love that.
The one thing I want to ask about—and I hope you don’t take this as criticism—is that some of what you’ve done takes a lot of time and energy privilege.
Michaeleen: Yes. I think it’s very similar to what I found with Hunt, Gather, Parent. There is some work up front, but I also think we dramatically underestimate how much work we’re already doing when we rely on screens as babysitters or pacifiers.
We tend to think that’s the easy route, but even in the short term, I don’t think it actually is.
Sarah: That’s a really good point because the fighting itself takes a lot of energy.
Michaeleen: Exactly. That’s ultimately what made me change and what made me want to write this book. I was just tired of arguing with Rosie about screens. I hated policing her.
It’s very similar to what I found with Hunt, Gather, Parent. Recently, one parent gave me some feedback that I actually thought was really insightful. She said, “I think you could have been clearer that having daily screen time—or unlimited screen time—is actually a lot of work.”
And she’s right.
The parent is managing it every single day, moment by moment. There’s constant fighting, negotiating, and policing.
I’ll tell you something else. Once we got ultra-processed foods out of our house, the amount of work I do around food dropped to about one-tenth of what it had been before. We actually spend less money because we’re eating less.
People don’t realize that ultra-processed food makes you eat more. That’s very well documented. Kids snack constantly when those foods are around. Rosie now eats two or three real meals a day when she’s eating whole foods.
So I’m actually doing much less work because those foods aren’t in the house.
I do agree there’s some work at the beginning. Teaching Rosie to ride her bike to the market took time. But now she’s 10, and she rides her bike everywhere. She bikes to piano lessons. She bikes all over town.
That investment keeps paying dividends.
Sarah: That’s a really fair point.
I had just been telling you before we started recording that, over the years, I’ve noticed more and more parents coming to coaching specifically because of challenges around screen time.
The fights about screens, getting kids off screens—it has become such a common struggle.
They just need to read your book and get some strategies.
Michaeleen: I’m really just trying to encourage people that if they have that gut feeling—that sense of, “This just isn’t working for our family”—it’s okay to say no.
There is a way to do it that doesn’t require an enormous amount of ongoing work.
Really, what you’re doing is setting up the environment so the default becomes these other activities. You’re designing things so you’re not constantly policing or managing every moment.
That’s my biggest pushback against the idea that this approach is more work.
It took a lot of work for me to figure all of this out and understand how it works—
Sarah: And you did that for us.
Michaeleen: Exactly.
I also think the court system—and society more broadly—is slowly starting to catch up. The regulations around screen content are so far behind the technology.
If you think about it, 20 years ago Rosie wouldn’t have been able to walk into a movie like Jaws without a parent. There were very clear rules about what children could and couldn’t see.
Now I can hand her a device that gives her access to some of the most extreme content imaginable.
One scientist told me that a child today can see, in about ten minutes, more pornography than our grandparents’ generation would have encountered in an entire lifetime.
Something is clearly out of balance.
Either society has changed dramatically, or our regulations simply haven’t kept pace.
When you look at child exploitation, trafficking, and abuse online, it’s obvious that regulation is behind.
Sarah: Big Tech has so much money and so much influence that I think that’s part of why the laws have fallen so far behind.
Michaeleen: It absolutely is. But I also think there’s this persistent myth that kids need these technologies and that they’re doing so much good.
One of my hopes for this book—and for the work many other researchers are doing—is that people will begin to understand that kids genuinely need help regulating this stuff.
They cannot regulate it on their own.
Right now, that entire burden falls on parents, and that’s a tremendous amount of work.
Sarah: We can’t regulate it on our own, and we’re grown-ups.
Michaeleen: Exactly.
When I first started researching this book, I interviewed a famous economist at Stanford—someone in his forties who will probably win a Nobel Prize someday. He spent our entire conversation telling me all the systems he had to build so he wouldn’t look at the news while he was working.
He had blocked it at the router. He’d blocked it on his computer. He’d blocked it in multiple other ways.
I remember sitting there thinking, “If he has to do all of that, how is a thirteen-year-old supposed to do her homework?”
That’s one of the central messages of the book.
This isn’t about willpower.
It’s not about teaching kids to resist temptation through self-control.
It’s about teaching them to build environments where they aren’t constantly tempted in the first place.
That’s exactly what you described earlier when you left your phone at home.
You create spaces in your life where the temptation simply isn’t there.
That’s the key to living a happier, healthier life—not relying on willpower, but learning to avoid unnecessary temptation and building habits that don’t require you to fight yourself every day.
Ironically, that’s what ends up making life much easier.
Sarah: That was another really interesting thing you talked about in your book—willpower.
Michaeleen: One of the really interesting findings about willpower is that people with fewer bad habits don’t actually have more willpower. They’ve simply arranged their lives so they’re exposed to fewer temptations.
Sarah: That’s right. A great place to start might be something like what you did with food. You talked about not eating food on the go.
Michaeleen: Exactly. No food on the go.
Sarah: Baby steps.
Michaeleen: Right. Or parents will tell me things like, “We don’t have ultra-processed foods at breakfast.” Breakfast is actually an easy place to start. You have oatmeal. You have eggs. There are lots of simple whole-food options. So you make that one meal your starting point.
That’s really the idea. Start with something small.
I think the same principle applies to parenting. Parenting actually becomes easier when the temptations simply aren’t there. You’re not constantly managing them.
Sarah: When my kids were growing up—and thankfully they mostly missed all of this because my youngest is 19, so there wasn’t Netflix and everything else that’s available now—we had a simple family rule: no screens Monday through Thursday.
Back then it was television, but they just knew that was how our family worked. If they asked, I’d simply say, “Remember, it’s Wednesday. We’ll watch TV on the weekend.”
It was actually very easy.
Michaeleen: Exactly. And that’s the dopamine system at work.
Their brains know what day of the week it is. We’re remarkably good at keeping track of time and routines. They knew they were in your house, after school, and that there wasn’t going to be TV.
It’s like a smoker on an airplane. Eventually the smoker’s brain learns, “I’m on a plane. I can’t smoke.” The craving relaxes because the brain understands the context.
The same thing happens with family routines.
In Israel, for example, many families observe a digital Sabbath where they unplug for a full 24 hours every week. Parents tell me their kids love it because they know that’s the time they play board games, spend time outside, and do other things together.
Their brains learn that weekly rhythm.
Our brains naturally work this way, so we can use that tendency to make family life calmer and more peaceful.
Honestly, one of my favorite outcomes is that when nine o’clock comes around, my daughter is calm and actually wants to go to bed. Whatever effort it took to establish those habits at the beginning has been completely worth it. It’s peaceful now, and hopefully those routines will stay with her for years.
Ironically, it was much harder for me to stop scrolling before bed than it was for her.
Sarah: Do you think there’s any place for moderation?
For example, could Rosie ever pick up Toca Boca again and play it for a little while? Or is it more a case of, once it’s gone, it’s gone?
Michaeleen: That’s a really good question.
I think there are a couple of ways to think about it.
The first is simply asking whether a particular technology is worth it. Does Toca Boca actually give us something valuable enough that it’s worth the possibility of bringing back arguments and struggles? Or is there something else that gives us the same benefit without those downsides?
One of the goals of the book is to help parents start asking that question about technology in general: Is this actually worth it?
The second question is whether your child can handle it.
I use YouTube for work. I’ll watch scientists explaining research, informational videos, or sometimes I’ll listen to music. I also know all the tricks YouTube is playing on me, so I can use it pretty intentionally.
But Rosie at ten years old?
No way.
YouTube is far too sophisticated for her to use purposefully.
Maybe when she’s sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen. Maybe fifteen. I don’t know.
But I’m not going to intentionally introduce it.
If it becomes necessary because of school or something else, then we’ll try it and see how she handles it. If she can use it well, maybe we’ll continue. If she can’t, then we won’t.
I think a lot of this is really about figuring out what your own child can handle.
We don’t give children alcohol or tobacco because they can’t handle them. We don’t give them pornography for the same reason.
These technologies have entered our lives so quickly that we’re all trying to answer entirely new questions.
One of the most important things parents can watch is what happens afterward.
How does your child behave? What’s their mood like? Is it immediately, “One more. One more. One more”?
If that’s what’s happening, then they’re probably not ready for it.
Sarah: Right. It’s not restorative.
This reminds me of a guest I had on the podcast a year or two ago. He was a former video game developer, and the episode was called How to Stop Fighting With Your Kid About Video Games.
Sarah: This reminds me of something another guest said on the podcast, and I think it fits perfectly with what you’re talking about.
He was a former video game developer, and he said something I’ve never forgotten. He said, “If you’re going to let your kids play video games, don’t let them play anything that’s free.”
He said there are lots of amazing games that you actually buy because they’re designed with a real story arc, real challenges, and an ending. As I was reading your book, I kept thinking about that because those paid games are designed to give you an actual reward at the end. You complete levels, you build skills, and then you finish.
He wasn’t talking about buying things inside free games. He meant games that you purchase outright. I remember my husband used to play The Legend of Zelda. It was a game you started and eventually finished.
Michaeleen: I love that. There’s so much I love about it because the business model is completely different.
With free games, the longer you stay on them, the more money the company makes through advertising and in-game purchases. Their entire goal is to keep you there for as long as possible. They’re holding the child inside that loop.
But with purchased games, they actually want you to finish because then they hope you’ll buy another game. It’s almost like movies used to be. They wanted you to enjoy the experience, reach the end, and then come back for the next one.
You’re exactly right—they’re designed to end.
I think that’s really beautiful advice because it highlights how much the business model shapes the experience.
Sarah: That’s what he said. In the free games, the commodity is your child’s attention.
Michaeleen: Exactly.
Whereas with a purchased game, you’re paying for an experience that has a beginning and an end.
We’ve actually done something similar with movies and television. We got rid of all of our subscriptions, and honestly, we’ve saved a lot of money. Now, if we want to watch a movie, we buy it.
We’re much more intentional. We stop and ask ourselves, “Do we really want to watch this? Is it worth it?”
Then, when the movie ends, we’re done.
I think that simple change does so much to keep you out of the wanting cycle we talked about earlier. Paying for something slows the whole process down. It makes you think about your choice, and the design itself is completely different. It’s designed to leave you feeling satisfied—to let you say, “I finished it.”
Sarah: It’s an experience. It’s an adventure. There’s a reward.
Michaeleen: Exactly. I love that idea. I wish I’d put it in the book. It’s really good. Honestly, I didn’t even realize there were that many games designed that way.
Sarah: I’ll send you his contact if you ever want to talk with him.
I could honestly talk to you about this all day.
I’m just trying to think if there’s anything else I really wanted to ask, but I do want to highlight something for anyone who’s still listening.
This isn’t a moral argument about screens or ultra-processed foods being “bad.” You make that very clear throughout the book.
It’s really about bringing more joy and fun back into your life because getting trapped in this cycle of wanting without ever feeling rewarded is making all of us kind of miserable.
Michaeleen: That’s exactly right.
The first thing I hope parents take away is that this isn’t their fault.
This has happened incredibly quickly, and most of us don’t even understand what we’re up against. These products are intentionally designed by multibillion-dollar companies to capture and hold our children’s attention. That’s what we’re competing with, and for a long time we simply haven’t had the right tools.
The second thing is that this isn’t about taking everything away. That’s a fantasy. It’s not going to work.
It’s about figuring out what actually brings joy to you and your family, keeping those things, and letting go of the things that don’t.
We’ve also moved beyond the old idea that kids will somehow fall behind or be left out if they don’t have all these technologies. There’s so much evidence now showing that giving kids a phone or social media doesn’t suddenly make them feel accepted or like they belong.
In fact, it often does the opposite.
So we can let go of that fear.
Instead, we can ask, “What actually works for our family?” Then we can build the skills to get there and help our kids gradually adopt these technologies in healthy ways because they’re going to be part of their lives.
Almost everyone will eventually have a phone. Most kids will eventually use some form of social media, whether that’s YouTube, Instagram, or whatever comes next.
The question isn’t whether they’ll ever use it.
The question is: When are they ready?
And how do we help them use it in a way that still allows them to be productive?
For me, that’s one of the essential parenting skills of the twenty-first century: helping kids set up their environments—their computers, their workspaces, their routines—so they aren’t constantly fighting temptation.
Sarah: You also talk specifically about having kids work where a parent can see them because I think that’s becoming a huge challenge now that so many students are issued Chromebooks at school.
Sarah: You also mention having kids work where a parent can see them, because I think that’s becoming a huge challenge now that so many students are issued Chromebooks at school.
Everyone I’ve talked to—and maybe there are exceptions out there—says you can’t put parental controls on school-issued devices. Kids need YouTube to watch something for school, and suddenly you’ve opened the door to all kinds of temptation.
Every parent I know whose child has a school-issued Chromebook struggles with it.
Michaeleen: Yes, and I think this is an area that’s really in flux.
From what I’m learning, parents are starting to push back—not only on schools issuing Chromebooks in the first place, but also on not being allowed to set them up in ways that remove things like YouTube. I think parents actually have more power than I realized.
Some schools will work with families if parents speak up. You can go to the teacher or the principal and say, “This is what I want for my child’s Chromebook. I don’t want them to have access to YouTube,” or, “I want these restrictions in place.”
Parents have more rights than I think most of us realize.
I’ve talked with parents who are trying to get Chromebooks out of kindergarten through Grade 2 altogether. Others are asking for more limited internet access or different settings during school hours. There’s really a whole spectrum of possibilities.
I honestly think this is going to be one of the defining parenting issues of the next decade—the school-issued Chromebook, the school-issued iPad.
For me, it just makes those screen-free gaps in the day even more important. If your child has spent the day doing schoolwork on a device, then after dinner becomes even more valuable as a screen-free time.
You need a break. I need a break. We all need a break.
Creating what I call sanctuaries becomes increasingly important as more of school moves onto screens. Kids need opportunities to move their bodies, relax their brains, and experience activities that are genuinely restorative.
I also think there are resources available for parents who want more control over that digital space. It does take work, but as parents we sometimes hand over more authority to schools than we actually have to. We have more rights than we often realize.
In fact, a lot of this is being challenged legally. There are lawsuits against school districts because some software has been given to children in ways that violate privacy protections and collect data improperly.
So I think this whole area is changing, and I’m hopeful we’ll eventually reach a place where, even if students are working on computers, they’ll have better protections against unnecessary distractions.
That’s exactly how I work. I turn on an app blocker so I can’t wander around the internet while I’m working. Otherwise, I’d be distracted constantly.
I have a colleague who says she can’t work for more than a couple of minutes before she finds herself checking something online.
Sarah: I struggle with that too.
It’s getting easier the more I practice, but the pull—that feeling of wanting—is incredibly strong.
Michaeleen: It really is. It’s become a habit, and eventually you’re barely even thinking about it.
I remember when I first installed an app blocker. It felt so uncomfortable. I kept thinking, “But I want to check this. I want to check that.”
Then it faded.
It actually faded pretty quickly.
Sarah: Thank you so much—not just for being here, but for writing this book. It’s really remarkable.
Even though I’m past the most active stage of parenting, I keep noticing the ideas from the book working their way into my own life.
I have to tell you, the last couple of nights I’ve made brown rice instead of white rice because of something I read in the book. I love white rice, but I know I need more fiber. Honestly, once you start eating brown rice regularly, you hardly notice the difference.
You’ve gotten me wearing a watch, eating brown rice, and leaving my phone at home when I take the dog for a walk.
Michaeleen: I love that.
It lets your brain relax because you’re not constantly multitasking anymore.
I have my watch on too. Rosie and I actually wear the same watch. To me, it’s become a little symbol of this more digitally minimalist way of thinking.
I was doing exactly the same thing—checking my phone every time I wanted to know the time. Eventually I thought, “Why am I using this little computer just to tell the time?”
Sarah: Exactly.
Well, thank you so much.
Michaeleen: Thank you.
Sarah: Before I let you go, I have one question that I ask every guest. It’ll be interesting because I can compare your answer to what you said the last time you were on.
If you could go back in time to your younger parent self, what advice would you give yourself?
Michaeleen: Which age?
Sarah: Any age. Go back to brand-new-mom Michaeleen. What would you tell yourself?
Michaeleen: I’ll give you two answers.
For the baby stage, I would tell myself, “Michaeleen, just carry her all the time. Put her in the carrier and carry her. Don’t worry so much about putting her down.”
She was so happy whenever I carried her, and that’s how so many cultures do it. The baby is simply on someone’s back or on their front while life goes on. I really wish I’d done more of that because I think it would have made both of our lives much easier.
For the older years, I’d tell myself to stop worrying so much that taking away the screens was going to be hard.
I built it up in my mind as this enormous thing. I thought, “It’s going to be so difficult to take away Netflix at night. It’s going to be so difficult to take away Toca Boca.”
But it wasn’t.
It really wasn’t.
Our lives became so much easier afterward, and I wish I’d been able to see that ahead of time.
Sarah: Well, how could you have known?
What you were seeing was the outward expression of all that wanting—the crying, the begging, the desperation. It would be so easy to mistake that for, “I’m denying my child something that brings them enormous pleasure.”
I think that’s an important distinction for parents.
Just because your child is crying and screaming that they want something doesn’t actually mean that it’s bringing them pleasure or that it’s good for them.
Michaeleen: Exactly.
Someone said something to me that I think made it into the book. A child can desperately want to spend another hour playing a video game while actually getting very little pleasure—or no pleasure—from it.
That’s really where the trick is.
That’s the hijacking.
I also think Lenore’s work is right. Kids really do want the offline world.
They just have to experience it first.
I didn’t fully appreciate this before, but you can’t really want something until you’ve experienced the joy of it yourself. Maybe you can see someone else enjoying it, but to actually build that dopamine pathway, you have to get out there and feel it yourself.
You have to think, “Oh, this is wonderful. I love this.”
Then your brain starts wanting more of that.
Sarah: I was thinking about one family I work with. They have five kids, they run their own business, and they’re incredibly busy.
Their five-year-old son was having constant meltdowns and aggression, so I suggested they start tracking what happened right before those moments.
When they came back, they realized that about 90 percent of the incidents were connected to screens. He was trying to get one of his parents’ phones. He was trying to grab the remote from his sisters. He wanted the TV turned on or wanted it to stay on.
This was actually before I read your book, so I probably could have given them even better advice afterward.
But I suggested they experiment with going screen-free for a while and see whether it changed the aggression.
The next time I talked to them, the dad told me that, out of pure frustration, he’d picked up the television and put it out in the garage. He basically announced, “No more TV for the rest of the summer.”
The following week, the mom started texting me pictures.
“Here’s the girls sleeping in a fort they built on the trampoline.”
“Here’s our five-year-old playing with his trucks.”
Picture after picture.
She said, “I think this is going to be the best summer ever without TV.”
Michaeleen: I love that story.
I really do.
And it’s easier.
It’s easier.
All he did was move the TV into the garage.
That’s amazing.
That’s exactly the advice I’d give myself.
Just do it. Trust your instincts. Do it.
Sarah: Do it.
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming back on the podcast.
As always, it’s been such a pleasure talking with you, and you’ve written another wonderful book to add to the parenting canon.
Michaeleen: Thank you so much for having me. It was truly a pleasure to come back.
Sarah: Thanks so much.
We’ll put links to everything we talked about in the show notes, along with your website.


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