Good morning {{first_name|Reader}},

I have been reading a book called Dopamine Kids by Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD. It named something I had been watching happen in my own house without having the right words for it.

This week I want to talk about boredom; what happens when we engineer it out of our lives, what it does to our kids, and what it might be quietly costing all of us.

My youngest daughter is a sweet kid. Patient, funny, genuinely kind in the way that some children just are before the world starts working on them.

She is also a completely different person after a long day on her tablet.

The tablet version is irritable, short-tempered, resistant to everything — especially bedtime. When we take it away, she needs time to come back to herself. She sits in the discomfort of having nothing to scroll through, nothing flashing, nothing asking for her attention, and she has to find her way back to being the kid she was before she picked it up. That window is uncomfortable for everyone in the house.

I had been watching this happen for a while before I started reading Dopamine Kids by Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD. Doucleff is a science reporter for NPR with a doctorate in chemistry, and the central argument of her book put language to something I had been watching but could not fully explain. Dopamine is the molecule of motivation, not happiness. It pulls us toward things rather than rewarding us for having them. When screens flood a child's brain with dopamine surges many times a day, everything that is not a screen loses its pull. Real life becomes understimulating by comparison. Boredom, which used to send a kid outside or into their imagination, becomes something they cannot tolerate.

That is what I was watching with my youngest. The tablet was not making her happy. It was making everything else feel smaller.

The average American checks their phone 205 times a day. That works out to once every five minutes excluding sleep time. Nearly 81% of adults check their phones within the first ten minutes of waking up. Forty-six percent of Americans say they are addicted to their phones and forty-four percent say they feel anxious when they do not have them.

The kids are not doing any better. Despite access to more stimulation than any generation in history, 91% of youth in North America report experiencing boredom often. That number should stop you. Constant stimulation was supposed to solve boredom. Instead it has made it worse.

A 2026 study published in Motivation and Emotion found that people who strongly dislike boredom do not actually experience less of it. They experience more, and use their phones more as a result. The avoidance strategy produces the thing it is trying to avoid. The more aggressively someone reaches for a screen when they feel bored, the more frequently and intensely they feel bored overall.

Research also shows that even the presence of a phone on a table, not in hand, not being used, just sitting there, causes people to feel more distracted and have lower enjoyment during social interactions compared to those who put their phones away entirely. The device does not have to be active to interrupt the moment.

What this tells us is that boredom tolerance is a skill, and we are systematically losing it. Adults and kids alike. The phone is the symptom. The atrophying capacity to sit with nothing is the problem.

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We are not perfect at this. I want to say that first because the version of this essay that turns into a lecture about screens is the version nobody needs.

But reading Dopamine Kids moved some things around for us. The core insight that Doucleff builds on is this: the brain's dopamine system can be recalibrated, but only through exposure to lower-stimulation environments long enough for the brain to rediscover what genuine satisfaction feels like. You cannot get there by moderating screen time. You have to create real stretches of understimulation and let the discomfort run its course.

For our youngest, that has meant the tablet is not available in the mornings and not available in the hour before bed. Those are the two windows where the research consistently shows screens do the most damage to mood regulation and sleep quality. The transition has not been smooth. The stretch of time between taking the tablet away and her remembering how to exist without it has gotten shorter, but it has not disappeared.

What has changed is that she finds things to do now that she did not find before. She draws. She plays with her toys. She talks to us about things she noticed during the day. None of those things are dramatic. All of them are things she was not doing when the tablet was available.

The Artful Parent describes boredom tolerance as a quiet skill that can be rebuilt the same way other forms of tolerance are rebuilt: through exposure. Sit with the discomfort in small doses. Extend the window gradually. Leave the phone in another room during dinner. Sit in the car for a minute after parking before reaching for anything. Let the queue at the grocery store be a queue.

That advice applies to adults as much as it applies to kids. The same dopamine dynamic that is reshaping my youngest's mood is operating in every adult who checks their phone 205 times a day. The mechanism is identical. The only difference is that adults have had longer to build the habit and have more justification ready for why they need their phone right now.

We are trying to build a house where boredom is not a problem to be solved. Where the discomfort of nothing to do is allowed to exist long enough to become something. Where the kids (and the adults) learn to trust that the stillness will eventually produce something better than whatever the screen was offering.

We are not there yet. We are working on it.

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The book that started this is called Dopamine Kids. If you have children and you have noticed what I noticed with my youngest, it is worth reading. Doucleff writes as a scientist and a parent, the book is practical, grounded in current research, and specific enough to actually do something with.

If you do not have kids, the data in the middle section of this essay is still about you. The average adult checks their phone 205 times a day. That is a human problem, and the same dopamine dynamic driving my youngest toward her tablet is driving the rest of us toward ours.