Grandparents stay in touch via webcams

DEER PARK, N.Y. — Her grandfather wanted to play tea party, but Alexandra Geosits, 2 ½, insisted she had only apple juice. She held out a plastic cup, giggling as she waited to see if he would accept the substitute.

That they were a thousand miles apart, their weekly visit unfolding over computer screens in their respective homes, did not faze either one. Like many other grandchildren and grandparents who live far apart, Alex and Joe Geosits (JAY-sits), 69, have become fluent in the ways of the webcam.

"Delicious," Joe Geosits pronounced from Florida, pretending to take a sip from the cup, which remained clasped here in Alexandra's hand.

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

In a way that e-mailed photos and postcards never could, the webcam promises to transcend distance and the inability of toddlers to hold up their end of a phone conversation.

Some grandparent enthusiasts said this virtual form of communication makes the separation even harder. Others are so sustained by webcam visits with services such as 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 pixel-ated versions of their grandparents as regular fixtures on their screens.

But at a time millions of people around the world are beginning to beam themselves across the ether, the webcam adventures of the nursery-school set and their grandparents offer a glimpse at what can be gained — and what may be lost — by almost-being there.

"We would be strangers to them if we didn't have the webcam," said Susan Pierce, 61, of Shreveport, La., who was a virtual attendee at Thanksgiving dinner with her grandchildren in Jersey City, N.J., this year.

In the past year, Pierce and her husband, Joe, watched Dylan, 17 months, learn to walk and talk over the webcam, and witnessed his 4-year-old sister Kelsie's drawings of people evolve from indeterminate blobs to figures with arms and fingers and toes.

But the powerful illusion of proximity also sharpens their ache for the real thing. "You just wish you could reach out and cuddle them," said Pierce, a nursing professor. "Seeing them makes you miss them more."

Nearly half of American grandparents live more than 200 miles from at least one of their grandchildren, according to AARP. Professor Merril Silverstein, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, has found that about two-thirds of grandchildren see one set of grandparents only a few times a year, if that.

Staying in touch

Many grandparents find the webcam eases the transition during in-person visits, when grandchildren may refuse to sit on their laps or reject their hugs because they don't recognize them.

As one webcam evangelist wrote on her blog: "You'll be able to pick up where you left off without those warming-up-to-you, awkward moments."

On Pierce's most recent visit to New Jersey last month, for instance, Dylan called out the nickname he uses for her over the webcam, "Buffy!" and jumped into her arms. "It melted my heart," Pierce said.

Urged on by strong word-of-mouth, grandparents are often the ones to buy webcams for their grandchildren, or, technically, their own children. But the youngsters, who spend much of their time playing games of pretend, may shuttle more easily between the virtual and the real.

The adult children in a family have their own reasons for encouraging the webcam 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 webcam quickly became a vehicle for remote baby-sitting.

"It was a lifesaver," said Rodenborn, who graduated from Columbia Law School last spring. Because the webcam connection is free, parents often keep it on as long as a grandparent is willing to make funny faces and animal sounds.

For adult children pressed into service as real-time documentarians, the experience can also be taxing.

After Alexendra Geosits' virtual apple-juice party with her grandparents on a recent Sunday, her father found himself chasing her upstairs, laptop in hand, as she went to get a favorite doll, and following her around the living room as she played hide-and-seek and showed her bellybutton. Finally, it was her snack time, and he could relax.

Growth this year

The recent inclusion of webcams in most laptops helps account for the 20 percent growth in video calling in the past year, said Rebecca Swensen, an analyst at the technology-research firm IDC.

Internet companies are also promoting "video chat" as an enhancement to standard instant-messaging and Internet phone services. Google, for instance, which makes money from the advertisements in its popular Gmail Web-based e-mail software, introduced video capability for Gmail this month.

About 20 million people worldwide have made a video call for personal communication in the past month, Swensen said. U.S. soldiers in Iraq beam themselves home over webcams; parents on business trips (including President-elect Obama) bid goodnight to their children, face-to-onscreen face.

Hugs by proxy

Grandparents and grandchildren are working on ways to nudge the medium a little closer to teleportation.

When Deborah Lafferty, 55, and her granddaughter Natalie, 2, want to hug, for instance, Natalie comes to the screen in Seattle and squeezes her own face, just as her grandmother does to her when she visits from England. Lafferty, in turn, squeezes her face, a proxy. "Grammy loves you so much," she says, echoing the phrase she uses in person.

Grandparents use their own children as surrogates to close the tactile gap. Barbara Turner once sang her fussing newborn grandson to sleep from Ottawa, watching as her son rocked him in Indiana. She could almost feel the baby snuggling against her shoulder.

But this week Turner and her husband rushed to Indiana to be on hand for the birth of her second grandchild. "Some things you just can't do over the webcam," she said. "You make the trip."

Still, some veterans of the technology fear the video cam has started to substitute, rather than supplement, time together.

Jennifer Ray, 24, of San Antonio, and her brother persuaded their parents to get a new computer so they could all video chat with their respective toddlers on split screens from different states. Now the siblings commiserate about their mother's unwillingness to travel.

"She still comes," Ray said of her mother, Diane Heyman, who lives in Arizona. "But not nearly as often."

"It's probably true," Heyman, 49, admitted. "You feel like you're actually seeing them and interacting with them, so it eases that longing."