NYT on Skping Grammas

Chris Morgan tipped me off to a story in the Times about the trend of video-chatting with grandparents.

Video calling, long anticipated by science fiction, is filtering into everyday use. And two demographic groups not particularly known for being high-tech are among the earliest adopters.

Some grandparent enthusiasts say this latest form of virtual communication makes the actual separation harder. Others are so sustained by Web cam visits with services like Skype and iChat that they visit less in person. And no one quite knows what it means to a generation of 2-year-olds to have slightly pixelated versions of their grandparents as regular fixtures in their lives.

We've actually given several web-cams as presents to family so that we can see them as well as show them Em. The quality of video chats, particularly iChat (but Skype is good as well) has really improved in the last few years. And the experience, in comparison to a phone call, is exponentially better.

There were a few interesting bits in the article (e.g. 50% of US grandparents live more than 200 miles away from at least one grandchild) as well as this:

The adult children in a family have their own reasons for encouraging the Web cam enthusiasm of the younger and older generations. When Martha Rodenborn discovered that Elena, now 4, would sit happily in front of the computer in their Upper West Side apartment while her grandmother read her piles of picture books from Ohio, the Web cam quickly became a vehicle for remote baby-sitting.

“It was a lifesaver,” said Ms. Rodenborn, who graduated from Columbia Law School last spring.

Em is not old enough to try this yet (and by that I mean, sitting in a chair by herself). But over the next few years this will be interesting to try out, no matter if we are in Germany or Seattle, Minneapolis or Singapore.