Parent to parent: How do you stay in touch?

By Jeff Hudson

So your son or daughter is studying at UC Davis, and you haven’t talked in a while. Of course, you know your kid is busy — the quarter system makes the pace of student life brisk and intense. You don’t want to distract your student. Yet being a parent, naturally you are curious to hear how things are going for the kid you nurtured all those years.

But what’s the best method to stay in touch? It depends.

I’m not much on texting. However, when it comes to “cutting through the clutter” and getting my sons’ attention, I have found that a text message will often do the trick. There’s something about texting that appeals to college students — maybe because they can quietly reply via text on the bus, in the library, at the restaurant, even in class (sshh!!).

I’d much rather contact my kids via e-mail — I’m more of a “long-form” communicator. But e-mail is clearly less appealing to my sons. They check e-mail periodically, but sometimes not for a day or two, and they are spotty in terms of responding.

There is, of course, the cell phone — my sons always carry theirs. A phone call sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I try not to call when Stephen and Andrew are in class. The problem is that my sons’ schedules change constantly as they add music rehearsals that I don’t even know about. So there are big chunks of the day when I’m not even sure whether it is OK to ring them.

I asked my sons what method they prefer, and they both told me I should try them on the cell phone first. “Calling on the phone is better," Andrew told me. "Texting is kind of awkward, and I don’t check e-mail very often during the day.” When I replied, “But half the time, you never call me back,” both my sons just shrugged. Ah, the independence of being 21.

And there’s Skype, the online video calling service that some people treasure. Most of the successful parent-child Skype pairs I’ve known establish a pre-arranged time for their regular call. Stephen also used Skype, sometimes for hours at a stretch, to chat with his girlfriend when she was studying in France last year.

When you want to convey a message of the heart, I still find that nothing tops an old-fashioned hand-written letter. Stephen and his girlfriend exchanged dozens of handwritten letters when she was in France.

A hand-written note from mom or dad probably isn’t going to be quite as thrilling as a personal letter from a boyfriend or girlfriend. But it seems to convey a greater degree of importance than a phone call or an e-mail. Many people keep a treasured stash of family letters they re-read years later. Call me old-fashioned, but sometimes, the old ways are best.