Once Upon a Feeling

Gooshi
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Once Upon A Feeling is a storytelling and parenting podcast that honors children’s emotions and the complexity of caregiving. Through thoughtful conversations and developmentally informed insights, it helps parents create emotional space—so guidance comes from presence, not pressure.

  1. Episode 21

    Season 2 is Here!

    Season 2 of Once Upon a Feeling is here. After three months away — with family, with friends, with strangers who didn't stay strangers — Rita comes back with the question that shaped her summer and now shapes the season: what does it actually mean to connect? With ourselves. With each other. With our parents. With our children. It's a question that feels especially loud right now, in the middle of every conversation about technology and what it's taking from us. But connection isn't new and it isn't a trend. It's how humans have always worked: through community, through each other, with each other. This short intro sets up the season ahead. New conversations start now. Have a topic you want explored? Leave a comment, or write to rita@gooshi.world. 🎧 Subscribe so you don't miss an episode  💛 Gooshi stories & app → gooshi.world #onceuponafeeling #season2 #connection #consciousparenting #community Send us Fan Mail You can explore Gooshi's ecosystem here: https://linktr.ee/gooshi_world

  2. Episode 22

    Grief Is Love After Loss: Talking to Kids About Death, Change & Legacy with Mindy Brodsky, LCSW

    Season 2 of Once Upon a Feeling is about connection — and it opens with the place where connection shows its truest shape: loss. Rita sits down with Mindy Brodsky, a licensed clinical social worker who works in grief, death and non-death loss, and legacy writing. The conversation starts at a memorial for a friend's husband, gone at 52, and the realization that we spend our lives planning a future we forget to inhabit. From there it opens into the questions most of us were raised to avoid: How do you tell a child the truth about death without sending them into overdrive? Why do kids grieve, play, and grieve again — and why is that healthier than the way adults do it? What does it mean for grief to be witnessed, and why can strangers sometimes hold it better than family? Mindy introduces ring theory, the practice of the compassionate witness, and the tradition of ethical wills — letters that pass down what matters most, written while you're well. Rita brings the Milan cathedral, six hundred years in the making, and the idea that a legacy is something you build knowing you won't see it finished. Somewhere in the middle, Mindy mentions a line from a Gooshi story she read with her six-year-old — "What do you think would help your heart?" — and reveals she now uses it with grieving adults. In this episode: Why "tell the truth" is the first rule for talking to kids about deathThe small losses we never name: a friend moves, summer ends, your baby turns 12Kids as puddle jumpers, and the "should" that keeps adults from doing the sameRing theory and how to show up without making it about youLegacy letters, ethical wills, and living fully now — not when the finish line appearsMindy's six-week grief book club begins October 19; details at mindybrodsky.com. Gooshi stories and the app at gooshi.world. Everything else at linktr.ee/gooshi_world. Send us Fan Mail You can explore Gooshi's ecosystem here: https://linktr.ee/gooshi_world

  3. 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 worksWhat happens when tone and social cues get lost even between kids speaking the same languagePhones at school: what a real ban looks like, burner phones includedWhy quitting the scroll works like going back to the gym — the hardest part is startingThe Meta fine, Australia's ban, and whether regulation can do what parents haven'tSocial media used to mean using media to be social. When did that stop?Why screens make learning worse, for every kind of brainUnsupervised play, and the sentence every kid needs to be able to say: I fell, I got hurt, I'm not dyingThe village we lost, and Jillian's fantasy of an apartment building full of parentsWhat app she'd build if she had a magic wandRita on the new Gooshi feature that lets a grandparent record a story from across the countryMentioned: 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

  4. Episode 24

    Leadership at Home: Trust, Competence & Raising Kids Who Can Handle Hard Things — with Cristina Barvo

    Cristina Barvo spent a decade in Hispanic marketing before she asked herself a question most of us postpone until midlife: is this how I want to spend my days? What followed was early childhood education at UCLA, six years teaching preschool, and eventually two things she built herself — Empower Kids for Life and Leadership at Home, a program that brings early childhood expertise to working parents who can never make the 10am meeting at school. Her insight is simple and it reframes everything: the foundations of early education and the foundations of leadership are the same foundations. In this conversation she and Rita get into why we confuse what we do with who we are, why every transition is an integration rather than a choice, and the three principles Cristina uses as a compass — trust, competence, and motivation. Trust means your words, thoughts and actions line up, which sometimes looks like telling your child “I don’t know, but we’ve figured out hard things before.” Competence means reminding a child of what they’ve already overcome instead of telling them they can do anything. Motivation means looking for what moves them from the inside. They also talk about the work they do together: Big Orange Sky, the story written for children after the Palisades and Eaton fires, and the new book born from the earthquake — a story about a girl who paints a stone the color of her lost bedroom wall, and learns that home is the people, not the walls. In this episode: Why your job isn’t your identity, and what happens at parties when you change careersThe YMCA method: you, me, wait, alternatives — and why seven seconds of silence changes everythingTrust, competence, motivation: the three principles underneath the how-tosWhy you can be strong and flexible at the same time, like a wireWhat children actually need after a disaster: presence, play, and a story that looks like theirsComparison, competition, and the scarcity that creeps into loving parentsReparenting yourself while parenting someone elseResources: Empower Kids for Life → empowerkidsforlife.com (Strong Ground / Tierra Firme). Spanish: Liderazgo en Casa. The story is also in the Gooshi app. 🎧 gooshi.world Send us Fan Mail You can explore Gooshi's ecosystem here: https://linktr.ee/gooshi_world

See All Season 2 (4)

About

Once Upon A Feeling is a storytelling and parenting podcast that honors children’s emotions and the complexity of caregiving. Through thoughtful conversations and developmentally informed insights, it helps parents create emotional space—so guidance comes from presence, not pressure.

Information

  • Creator
    Gooshi
  • Episodes
    24
  • Seasons
    2
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Once Upon a Feeling
  • Show Website
    Once Upon a Feeling