5 ways to keep your international family in sync

Photo: joeshlabotnik

The benefits of raising kids in a multicultural household are immeasurable. Having an international lifestyle means your kids are exposed to many cultural stimuli and are able to form a well rounded view of the world.

But what about keeping in touch with family members who live far away? Well the internet has a solution to that. I'm American and I live with my wife and 2 boys in Prague, so there is quite some distance, and 7 time zones between me and my parents in Texas. We call at 7pm Prague time and my parents are having lunch at noon in Dallas.

Here are some tips which have worked well for us.

1. Skype
The old man of video chat. Skype is a free piece of software that lets you make voice and video calls to other users for free. Millions of people use it everyday for keeping in touch with loved ones. A lesser known capability of Skype is to call regular phone lines. You can buy credits which allow you to dial any phone. My family has used this with great effect. I normally just ring my mom's cell phone, and if she's at home she moves to the computer to start a video call. We don't use many of the paid minutes, and we can reach her as if on a normal telephone. Cool! I find the video chat to be super important when you have small kids. It allows your little ones to actually see, and remember who those people are that the only meet 2 or 3 times a year.

2. A kid blog
I'm not the kind of parent who wants to blast my kids entire life into the public sphere of Facebook. I have no idea where things like Facebook will be in 10, 15, 20 years. Once you put something there it's there forever. I'll let my kids decide for themselves how public their lives will be. To this end when our first boy was born at the end of 2011 I decided to create a password protected blog where we could dump photos for family members to follow. It worked great. We used Wordpress with a plugin called Private Wordpress to add a password to the entire blog. We could upload images as we pleased and didn't have to worry about losing control of all the images.

3. Whatsapp
Whatsapp messager is a messaging app for smartphones. It lets you send free text, video, photo and audio messages. It's free for the first year and then $1 a year after that. I'm pretty sure our family would collapse with out it. We typically send between 5 and 10 photos and text messages to my parents in a week. It's so easy to snap a picture of the boys doing funny boy things and send it. Effortless. My mom gets a steady stream of grandbaby images and we don't have to go through the ritual of getting image off a camera, uploading them somewhere, sending a link in an email. The ad-hoc benefit for me is tremendous. The only bad thing to come from Whatsapp was that it completely killed our kid blogs. :) Since we could send images on the fly we had no reason any more to upload them to a blog.

4. Facebook
Facebook is the gorilla that lives in the flat down the hall. Sometimes it seems the entire internet revolves around this single service. For better or worse that's the world today. If you are fine with all your data belonging to and being used by the service, then share away. There is really no easier way to stay connected. If you are a bit more privacy focused though there are some things you can do. For instance, create a private group for you and your family. Facebook will still have all your data, but at least your kids images and updates won't be public to the entire planet.

There are a few very big "gotchas" however with using Facebook as a photo sharing service. Once you upload images they are highly compressed and lose a lot of quality. You also cannot export all your photos in bulk at a decent resolution. You can export them, but the quality is abysmal. Don't use it as the only place to store your families images. A service like Flickr is much more suited to this as you can always retrieve your full resolution images. 

5. Kidpost
If you love using Facebook, but have family members who are not using the service there is a neat little website called Kid Post that will fill the gap. You add a #kidpost hash tag to images you want to share beyond FB and Kid post will email them to people in a list you specify. Neat!

So you ask, how does Little Lexicon fit into this field? My goal is to create an independent platform that lets you create a record of your kids words and to give you the power to share it as you please. More public than Whatsapp, but way less public than Facebook. I want families to connect on a deep level no matter if you live 2 floors down from them, or 7 timezones away. I don't even want a language barrier to be a real issue. More and deeper communication can only make the world a better place.

So what do you think? What tools have you found to be invaluable to keeping your family connected?