Episode #23
Screens, Friction & the Village We Lost: Raising Connected Kids with Jillian Harris, LCSW
"Kids never have to be uncomfortable. And grown-ups don't either. That's a huge problem." Jillian Harris has spent fifteen years working with children and families — first in a residential center, now as a clinical social worker at a school in New York City where every student has a language-based learning disability, and in her own private practice. Her days are spent doing something most of us never think about as a job: helping kids repair connection after it breaks. This week Rita asks her the question at the center of Season 2. What happens to connection when the friction disappears? Because that's what technology has been quietly doing for a hundred years: removing friction. And friction, it turns out, is where resilience gets built. Where kids learn they can fall, get hurt, and try again. Where they discover that a misunderstanding can be repaired. Jillian is candid about how hard this is in practice — including in her own home. She has a screen-free household and a toddler who doesn't know the Disney princesses. She also names, honestly, the support that makes that possible, and what she'd do without it. In this episode: Why getting a teenager to talk is one of the hardest things there is, and what actually works What happens when tone and social cues get lost even between kids speaking the same language Phones at school: what a real ban looks like, burner phones included Why quitting the scroll works like going back to the gym — the hardest part is starting The Meta fine, Australia's ban, and whether regulation can do what parents haven't Social media used to mean using media to be social. When did that stop? Why screens make learning worse, for every kind of brain Unsupervised play, and the sentence every kid needs to be able to say: I fell, I got hurt, I'm not dying The village we lost, and Jillian's fantasy of an apartment building full of parents What app she'd build if she had a magic wand Rita on the new Gooshi feature that lets a grandparent record a story from across the country Mentioned: The Anxious Generation and The Amazing Generation by Jonathan Haidt; Project Reboot. Gooshi stories and app → gooshi.world Everything in one place → linktr.ee/gooshi_world If you want to connect with Jillian https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/jillian-kuhn-harris-new-york-ny/1243362 If this episode gave you something, a five-star review helps other families find us. Send us Fan Mail You can explore Gooshi's ecosystem here: https://linktr.ee/gooshi_world
