Real Relationships - How to build back the skills technology took from us

Date: March 8, 2027

Time:  10 a.m. to 1p.m. ET

Facilitator: Jake Ernst, MSW, RSW

CE hours: 3

This training is suitable for:

• Mental Health Professionals: psychotherapists, counsellors, psychologists, social workers
• Medical Professionals: nurses, psychiatrists, pediatricians, family doctors
• Direct Service Workers: drop-in workers, shelter and hostel workers, child and youth workers, youth justice workers
• Educators: teachers, ECE, school administration, support staff

Level of training: Introductory

Client age category: For professionals who work with clients from 6 years to adulthood.

Description: Today’s kids and teenagers are growing up in a social world unlike any generation before them. Smartphones, social media, gaming, algorithms, and now AI are changing not only how young people connect, but how they learn to manage discomfort, navigate conflict, tolerate uncertainty, ask for help, read social cues, solve interpersonal problems, and build relationships.

This workshop focuses on social health—our capacity to form, maintain, and repair meaningful relationships—and what happens when technology begins to replace the everyday experiences through which these skills are developed. Rather than focusing simply on screen time or digital safety, we’ll examine a more important developmental question: What are young people no longer getting enough practice doing?

At the centre of the workshop is co-regulation: the relational process through which children and teenagers learn to manage emotions, tolerate frustration, take healthy risks, recover from setbacks, and eventually develop greater capacity on their own. Participants will learn how relationships can become a powerful counterbalance to technologies designed to soothe, stimulate, distract, answer, recommend, and increasingly act on our behalf.

Together, we’ll explore how helping professionals can build back the “social muscles” young people need to thrive—not by rejecting technology, but by deliberately creating more opportunities for friction, connection, agency, reciprocity, repair, and real-world practice.

In an age of increasingly intelligent technology, the workshop makes the case that one of the most important technologies we have is still the relationship between us.

Learning objectives:

• Assess social health and identify the core relational capacities children and adolescents need to form, maintain, and repair meaningful relationships.
• Identify how contemporary technologies—including smartphones, social media, gaming, algorithms, and AI—can reduce opportunities to practice key developmental and interpersonal skills.
• Apply principles of co-regulation to help children and adolescents tolerate discomfort, navigate uncertainty, manage emotions, and build greater independence and capability.
• Develop practical strategies for rebuilding “social muscles” by creating opportunities for real-world connection, agency, reciprocity, conflict resolution, repair, and problem-solving.