A quiet revolution has happened in family life over the last few years, and most of us slid into it without ever deciding to. Grandparenting, for a huge number of families, now happens mostly through a screen. A grandmother reads a bedtime story from another time zone. A grandfather plays peekaboo with a baby he has never once held. What used to require a plane or a long drive now takes a single tap, and a whole generation of older parents is learning, a little awkwardly, how to love a grandchild through glass.
I am living inside this shift, so I do not get to see it from a comfortable distance. My daughter has two sets of grandparents who adore her, and for most of the year she meets them the same way she meets her favorite cartoon, on a bright rectangle held up in front of her face. It is genuinely something to be grateful for. It also leaves a particular ache that I am still learning to name.
What the screen actually carries
The research here is more encouraging than I expected. The developmental psychologist Rachel Barr at Georgetown, who studies how young children engage with technology, has found that video chat is a real relationship tool rather than just a consolation prize. In one large study, grandparents who video chatted often and did things like peekaboo, singing, and reading “reported higher perceived closeness to their grandchildren and enjoyed the calls more, particularly those who were geographically more separated.”
Barr describes how these calls let grandparents “continue to build their relationships, share intergenerational stories and experiences and to have a window into their grandchildren’s lives as they unfold.” That window is real. My daughter knows her grandparents’ voices, their faces, the particular songs they always sing. She lights up when she sees them appear on the screen. None of that is nothing, and I try hard never to treat it as nothing.
What the screen cannot carry
And still, a screen has edges. It carries a face and a voice beautifully. It cannot carry weight, or warmth, or smell. My daughter will know exactly what her grandmother looks like and will not know how her arms feel, or the particular scent of her kitchen, the things that anchor a small child’s love in the body rather than in the eyes. Barr is honest about this in her own work, noting that “while in-person contact is the best, video chat can supplement contact during times of separation.” Video is a supplement. It was never built to be the whole meal.
This is a real departure from how I grew up. In my childhood, grandparents and aunts and a whole web of relatives were a daily physical presence, always dropping in, always feeding you, always close enough to scoop you up without warning. My daughter’s version of extended family is warmer in some ways, since the calls are frequent and chosen on purpose. It is also thinner, mediated by batteries and bandwidth and the patience of a baby who would usually rather chew the phone than talk into it.
Our own version of it
In our family the distances are not equal. My husband’s parents are in Chile, and we manage to be together in person maybe eight times a year, often enough that our daughter has a real, embodied sense of who they are. My own parents are in Central Asia, on the far side of the world, and we see them roughly once a year. For them, the whole relationship with their granddaughter lives almost entirely on a screen, stitched together from short calls across an enormous time difference.
I watch my mother hold her phone up close, trying to memorize a face that keeps changing faster than the calls can keep up with. By the time we manage a visit, the baby she was cooing at has already become a different child. There is real joy in those calls, and there is a quiet grief running underneath them too, the grief of a grandmother who knows her granddaughter’s laugh by heart and has almost never gotten to smell the top of her head.
What I am learning to do with it
I have stopped treating the video calls as a poor imitation of the real thing and started treating them as their own real thing, worth doing well. We keep them short and playful, built around what actually delights a one-year-old instead of around adult small talk. The grandparents sing the same songs every single time, because that repetition is exactly what a small child latches onto. We narrate ordinary moments, lunch, a new word, a tantrum, so they get the texture of her days and not only the highlights.
And then we protect the in-person time fiercely, because that is where the body finally gets to catch up with the screen. The annual trip home, the long stays in Santiago, the week my parents fly in. Those visits are when my daughter gets the smell and the weight and the lap, the parts a phone can never send. We plan our whole year around them, and I have stopped feeling guilty about how much they cost in time and airfare, because they are the foundation the calls quietly rest on. I have made a kind of peace with the fact that this is simply the shape of a modern, scattered family, and that loving across distance is its own skill we are all learning together.
If you are doing this too, holding a phone up to a baby so a grandparent far away can be part of an ordinary afternoon, I think you are doing something quietly heroic and a little heartbreaking at the same time. The face is getting through. The smell will have to wait for the next visit. We are the first big generation to grandparent this way, making it up as we go, and mostly, I have come to believe, getting the important part right.
