The routines and needs of grandparents and parents for grandparent-grandchild conversations over distance

Abstract

A variety of systems have been designed to support communication between distance-separated grandparents and grandchildren. Yet there are few studies of the actual conversational routines of these groups as well as the social challenges that might arise as a result of technology usage. To address this gap, we conducted an interview and diary study that explores the conversational practices of distance-separated grandparents and young grandchildren (aged 3-10) from the perspective of the grandparents and parents of the children. Our results describe the focus of grandparent-grandchild conversations and show that grandparent-grandchild communication is not without its challenges: grandparents sometimes feel self-conscious, perceive that parents or children will be annoyed if they ask too many questions, and do not want to interfere too much in their grandchildren's lives. The implication is that designs should attempt to support the conversation routines and needs of grandparents and grandchildren while attempting to mitigate the social challenges.

Full text

The Routines and Needs of Grandparents and Parents for
Grandparent-Grandchild Conversations Over Distance
Azadeh Forghani and Carman Neustaedter
School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University
250 – 13450 102nd Avenue, Surrey, BC, Canada
azadehf@sfu.ca, carman_neustaedter@sfu.ca
ABSTRACT
A variety of systems have been designed to support
communication between distance-separated grandparents
and grandchildren. Yet there are few studies of the actual
conversational routines of these groups as well as the social
challenges that might arise as a result of technology usage.
To address this gap, we conducted an interview and diary
study that explores the conversational practices of distance-
separated grandparents and young grandchildren (aged 3-
10) from the perspective of the grandparents and parents of
the children. Our results describe the focus of grandparent-
grandchild conversations. and show that grandparent-
grandchild communication is not without its challenges:
grandparents sometimes feel self-conscious, perceive that
parents or children will be annoyed if they ask too many
questions, and do not want to interfere too much in their
grandchildren’s lives. The implication is that designs should
attempt to support the conversation routines and needs of
grandparents and grandchildren while attempting to
mitigate the social challenges.
Author Keywords
Grandparent and grandchild communication; family
communication; design;
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.3. Group and Organization Interfaces: Computer-
supported cooperative work.
INTRODUCTION
The grandparent-grandchild bond is an important emotional
relationship in a human’s life, often considered to be very
similar to the parent-child bond [31]. Both grandparents and
grandchildren benefit from a strong relationship [31]. Yet,
in reality, many grandparents and grandchildren face
challenges in building and maintaining their relationship.
This is often because of social challenges such as divorce,
or poor relationships between parents and grandparents, yet
it can also be caused by geographical separation
[2,21].Technology such as the phone or video chat can help
mitigate issues of distance-separation, yet they bring with
them their own challenges, such as parental scaffolding and
child engagement [2,26]. Time zones and busy schedules
also add to the challenges [21] as does cultural differences
and language barriers.
There are several systems designed to support this
demographic already where the focus is doing and sharing
fun activities (e.g., [3,17,26]). While beneficial, these
systems tend to not focus on direct conversation where
grandparents and grandchildren might share their personal
stories, achievements and experiences. We also see a gap in
understanding how parents react to communication between
grandparents and grandchildren and how they see such
communication ideally working. Past research on
grandparent-grandchild communication also does not focus
on understanding social or cultural issues beyond
scaffolding challenges for parents. Without this
understanding, one may easily think that grandparent/child
communication occurs with little social conflict.
Given this background, the goal of our research was to
understand grandparent and grandchild communication
over distance from the perspective of the grandparents and
parents of the children. In particular, we were interested in
families with children aged 3 to 10 years old and not yet at
the pre-teen stage of life (where they want to talk less with
grandparents [21]). We also wanted to understand the
parent’s role in facilitating this communication. For these
reasons, we conducted a diary and interview study with
grandparents or parents of children between the ages of 3
and 10. Both provided an understanding of how
grandparents communicated with their grandchildren and
how they engaged them for conversation. We also
investigated what grandparents were already sharing or
would like to share with their grandchildren as well as the
challenges they faced in doing so.
Our results show that grandparents like to know nearly
‘everything’ about their grandchildren. Conversations focus
on learning activities, unexpected happenings, storytelling
(real life and fiction), sharing experiences, and cultural
exchanges. Yet communication is not always an ideal
situation. Grandparents face social challenges such as
feeling self-conscious and overly inquisitive and often work
hard to socially manage communication exchanges. Many
parents desired additional social support from grandparents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or
distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and
the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned
by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To
copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to r edistribute to lists, requires
prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from
permissions@acm.org.
CHI 2014, April 26–May 1, 2014, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Copyright © 2014 ACM 9 78-1-4503-2473-1/14/04...$15.00.
Add the DOI string/url from ACM e-form confirmation here.

over distance. These findings show the value of
conversational systems that focus on engaging children to
share more details about their daily activities. They also
suggest trying to mitigate the social pressures and
challenges faced by grandparents and parents.
RELATED WORK
Studies of Family Communication
Family communication and the role of technology has been
a widely studied topic in the fields of CSCW and HCI. In
particular, there has been a large emphasis on how family
members desire to connect with each other over distance to
share stories about life, learn about the well-being of others,
and coordinate times for visiting [22,23,27,28]. People
prefer in-person communication, but when they cannot
achieve this, they value synchronous systems like the phone
or video chat to feel especially close to one another
[5,14,15,16,23,28], and asynchronous systems to balance
the time demands of communication [23,28].
More specifically focused on child-adult communication,
Ballagas et al. [2] studied phone conversations between
children and their remote family members. They found that
children are easily distracted, not motivated to talk, and,
depending on the age, have difficulties using the phone.
They also show that phone conversations are not enough to
build a close relationship with children. Other research has
shown the value in adult-child conversations for healthy
language development [33]; this motivated our own study.
There are also a number of studies of grandparent-
grandchild relationships and communication. Geurts et al.
[10] found that more frequent contact with a grandchild
during childhood helped strengthen their relationship
throughout life. Kenner et al. [18] showed that learning was
enhanced for both grandparents and grandchildren when
they jointly participated in activities. We also see that
grandparent-grandchild relationships often depend on
parents to help establish the relationship and subsequent
communication [4]. Studies have shown conversations
between grandparents and adult grandchildren (college
students) tend to focus on education, family, friends, leisure
and current events [20]. Evjemo et al. [8] found that
grandparent-grandchild conversations were typically about
the concurrent activities that kids were doing while on the
phone. Yet phones did not suffice for sharing the activity.
Systems for Communication Over Distance
There have also been a variety of systems designed to
support family communication over distance. First, several
systems are targeted at the family as a whole in an effort to
support a variety of relationships. Judge et al. [15,16]
explored the effect of always-on video connections on
creating stronger feelings of connection and togetherness
between distance-separated family members. They found
children liked such systems because they could easily show
their grandparents objects and even participate in shared
activities. Experience2Go [13] was designed for family
members to share activities (e.g., school events, sports
events, birthday parties) with remote loved ones such as
grandparents regardless of where the activity happened.
Other systems focus on child-child connections for school-
aged children to support synchronous play dates over
distance [17,32]. Here children can play together, show
their toys and talk to each other [17,32]. We also see
examples of asynchronous video communication systems
for supporting intercultural communication between
children [6] or connections amongst school friends [12].
Study results show the importance of allowing children to
share objects, tell stories, and perform for friends [6,12].
Systems for Grandparents and Grandchildren
Several systems have also been proposed in order to engage
children to stay in touch with their remote grandparents.
First, some focus on supporting story telling. Family Story
Play [24] is a tangible collaborative storytelling interface
that uses a physical book coupled with video conferencing.
A web-based version called Story Visit was also created
[26] where grandparents and grandchildren can read an e-
book together. People in Books [9] is a shared visual space
for story reading, which immerses remote readers into
online storybook illustrations, giving them an illusion that
they are part of the magical world. Vutborg et. al. [30]
proposed an asynchronous system that combines different
components including collage and storytelling features
where these components mediate play and oral storytelling.
Second, some systems focus on games and tangible objects
to stimulate communication. Take Me With You [21] is a
shared adventure game that promotes social interactions
between remote grandparents and grandchildren along with
physical movements in the real world reflecting an illusion
of exploring a virtual world and doing shared activities
together. Magic Box [29] is a physical box, which carries
gifts, toys, photos, and any other special things between
grandparents and grandchildren. Raffles et al. [25]
developed a messaging system for preschoolers using a
jack-in-the box toy with an embedded mobile phone.
Third, there also exist systems focused on grandparents
who may face challenges in communicating because of
their age, technical literacy, or illness [21].
Taken together, we see a variety of research on family
communication and support for connecting grandparents
and grandchildren. Yet we see little on how grandparents
might converse with their grandchildren to learn about their
life and how designs can support this aspect of relationship
building. Several of the systems described above can illicit
and support conversation during other activities (e.g., play),
however, we have yet to see studies focused on what that
conversation might specifically be about, or how
conversation happens (or could) without such activities.
We also did not find any literature that describes the social
or cultural challenges that exist as a result of grandparent-
child communication over distance.

STUDY METHODOLOGY
We conducted a diary and interview study to explore
grandparent-grandchild conversations over distance from
the perspective of the grandparents and parents. Our goal
was to reveal how grandparents and grandchildren
conversed and what social challenges they faced from the
adult perspective.
Participants
We recruited 20 participants through snowball sampling,
emails to teachers and parents of a local elementary school,
and ads on Facebook, Twitter, and CraigsList. Half of the
participants were grandparents of children between 3 and
10 years old, while the other half were the parents of
children in this age range. We recruited participants with
diverse demographics and cultural backgrounds. Our study
was largely focused in Vancouver, Canada but due to
snowball sampling we had participants from several
countries: 15 from Canada (although some migrated from
countries, e.g., Italy, Albany, Iran, India, Ukraine, Brazil), 1
from the United States, 3 from Iran and 1 from Australia.
All participants except two were female as women
primarily contacted us about the study. However, this
reflects past research that shows women are typically the
most involved in family communication [11,23].
Some of our participants were living in different cities than
their grandchildren and some were in different countries
with different languages, cultures and time differences. We
included participants with different family situations, such
as single parents and step-grandparents. We also purposely
recruited people with cultural differences in the family due
to reasons such as marriage out of faith, or immigration to a
new country. We wanted to investigate if this impacted the
exchange of cultural knowledge between the grandparents
and grandchildren. We did not include children as
participants in our study because our focus was on an
adult’s perspective and topics related to such a perspective
(e.g., family conflict, language, methods for engaging
children). We suggest that future research explores
children’s needs as part of such communication.
Interview Method
We conducted semi-structured interviews with each
participant individually. Interviews lasted between 45 and
60 minutes and occurred in person (at the participant’s
home or location of their choice), via Skype, or on the
phone. Interviews contained questions in several categories:
1. Background: We asked about their cultural background
and family situations, and reasons for distance-separation.
2. Communication Patterns: We asked participants to
describe communication with their remote grandchildren or
their children’s communication with the remote
grandparents. We focused on the methods, frequency,
duration, and the existing and desired content of
communication. We also asked several gender and age-
specific questions for families who had both boys and girls.
3. Communication Needs: We also asked about
communication needs that went beyond existing routines.
This included questions about children’s activities, daily
routines, developmental stages, stories, and achievements.
We asked those participants living in different countries
with different cultures about concerns and issues that they
might have faced due to cultural differences. On the parents
side, we asked similar questions but from the parental
perspective.
4. Barriers and Conflicts: We asked participants about
communication challenges or issues. We specifically took a
look at issues around speaking in different languages and
living in different time zones. We wanted to explore how
these issues influenced communication, if at all. Lastly, we
asked about family conflicts that might occur as a result of
communication either between parents and grandparents,
parents and children or between siblings of the same family.
Online Diary
After our first two interviews with grandparents, we
recognized that it was difficult for them to remember the
specifics of how they communicated with their
grandchildren, especially if the frequency of
communication was low. For this reason, we asked our
remaining 18 participants to keep an online diary of
grandparent-grandchild communication over a period of
three weeks before the interviews. An online form asked
them about their recent communication, the content of the
communication, and any issues or challenges they faced.
Participants filled these in after communication episodes
with their grandchildren or when they thought of things to
note. We read all submitted diaries prior to the interview
session and focused portions of the interview on getting
more detailed information about communication episodes
reported in the diaries. We found these participants were
able to provide much more detailed responses during their
interviews. However, we still used the data from our first
two interviews in our analysis.
Data Collection and Analysis
We kept handwritten notes along with audio or video
recordings for all interviews. Recordings were transcribed
and then we performed an analysis using open, axial, and
selective coding on our transcriptions and diary entries. The
goal of our analysis was to document and understand the
main themes in order to provide design implications for
supporting this relationship. We did not find any gender
differences aside from boys tending to talk about items
normally associated with ‘masculinity’ (e.g., armies) and
girls talking about more ‘feminine’ objects (e.g., Barbie).
We report on the most prominent findings focused on
aspects of the communication routine and the use of
technology and non-technology; conversational content
during communication; and, social situations and
challenges. Some of our results refer to a child’s
perspective, yet this is the interpretation through the
grandparent or parent’s eyes and not the actual child.

COMMUNICATION ROUTINES
Participants described a variety of communication routines
with different technology preferences, methods for
engaging children, and varied timing and frequency.
Technology and Non-Technology Preferences
Both the grandparents and parents in our study actively
tried to build the relationship between the grandparents and
grandchildren in a variety of ways. This included having
phone calls, using video chat, exchanging email, and even
sending post cards or other letters to the grandchildren. The
most frequent mode of communication that we learned
about was the use of phone calls between the grandparents
and grandchildren. These calls were either deliberately
targeted for the grandchildren, or were portions of calls
between the parents and grandparents that then shifted
focus to having the children converse.
Despite the prevalence of phone calls, 17 out of 20
participants actually preferred to use video chat instead
because grandparents could actually see their
grandchildren, their growth and looks, etc. and share the
viewing of objects such as books and toys. Yet many
grandparents in our study explained that they were not as
familiar with video chat so it was often difficult to use it.
Parents similarly described this as being an issue with the
grandparents. As a result, video chat was most often used
in situations when other family members were around to
help set up a video chat session.
Communication Frequency and Timing
Our findings showed that grandparents typically tried to
communicate with their grandchildren on a weekly basis, if
possible, though many participants desired to talk with their
grandchildren several times a week. Some grandparents
only talked to their grandchildren once or twice a month.
Weekends were the most popular time for communication
because of busy work schedules during the week.
Frequency was also dictated by the closeness between the
parents and grandparents, as well as the occurrence of
holidays, birthdays, and other special events or days. Those
families that had relationship issues between the parents
and grandparents caused grandparents and grandchildren to
rarely communicate (once or twice a year). We found that
children’s communication with their remote grandparents
usually depended on their parents’ communication with the
grandparents. Mother-daughter communication was
typically more frequent, thus, children generally
communicated more with their mother’s parents. However,
this was not the case in some divorced families when
children stayed with their fathers. As one might expect,
time zone differences made the communication between
remote grandparents and grandchildren less frequent and
often limited it to only weekends.
Regardless of the technology being used for grandparents
and grandchildren to communicate, grandchildren did not
want to be distracted while already playing or engaged in an
activity. Communication that was a part of a routine (e.g.,
the same time each week) was more likely to be received
well by grandchildren than a random phone call or video
chat session that interrupted existing playtime. Children
would routinely get bored after short durations of
conversation with grandparents (e.g., 5 to 15 minutes) with
video chat calls typically holding the child’s attention
longer. Some children would come and go from the room as
parents conversed with grandparents where they would
move into and out of the conversation.
We also found that the call duration of parents and
grandparents often dictated how much time the
grandparents talked with the grandchildren. Grandparents
who talked more with the parents (their children) tended to
talk longer with the grandchildren. This was because they
had ‘more to talk about.’ Thus, parent-grandparent
conversations can act as a catalyst for grandparent-
grandchild conversations.
Engagement and Awareness
In order to engage grandchildren to talk, remote
grandparents actively tried to learn about their interests and
then focus on these during conversations. This may come
from visits to see the child in person, or discussions with
the child’s parent or siblings. For example, P12’s mother
(the grandma) always learned a lot of information about her
remote grandson from her. When the grandmother talked
with her grandson, she already knew who his friends were,
what activities they did together and, consequently, what to
talk about. This allowed her to engage her grandson on the
phone for a long time. Related to this, we also found that an
awareness of a grandchild’s life also helped grandparents to
simply feel close to their grandchildren.
“Sometimes it is nice to know if the child is sick. Some kids
like a phone call from Grandma when they do not feel well.
Grandma would just like to say I love you! When their
grandson or grand daughter are sick, it is important for the
child to know Grandma and Grandpa care also.” - P1,
Grandmother, Diary
Grandparents also creatively did activities with their
grandchildren over both the phone and video chat. For
example, P2 whose grandson was interested in armies,
camouflage, and going out hunting, made a blanket with
camouflage to build a closer relationship with him. They
spent large amounts of time talking about the blanket and
making a story around it whenever they talked.
In addition to the above, grandparents also had particular
topics or themes that they tried to focus conversations
around in order to engage their grandchildren. We describe
these in the next section.
CONVERSATIONAL CONTENT
All conversational content tended to favor recent activities
as this was what the grandchildren would most often bring
up. Children younger than five years tended to focus on
describing the immediate or recent past (e.g., the past hour),
even if the activities were short in duration and of everyday

mundane things that might have little significance to the
grandparents; prior research has also showed conversational
focus on current activities [8]. Children older than five
years discussed recent events but would go further back in
time to talk about the current day or past week. Their
descriptions were also of longer-term activities.
“My grandson told me that while they were at their farm,
he was towed behind the tractor on ski and then he tried to
drive the tractor.” – P2, Grandparent, Grandchild Aged 6
Our analysis revealed that conversations between the
grandparents and grandchildren focused around several
main themes: learning, unexpected ‘stuff,’ storytelling,
sharing experiences, and cultural exchanges. Some of the
examples that we learned about fell into multiple
categories; thus, they are not mutually exclusive groupings.
Learning Activities
We found that grandchildren often talked with their
grandparents about what they learned, given the frequency
of this activity at school, pre-school, through home
activities with parents, or at extracurricular activities like
sports. They liked to talk about or show their abilities, in
particular, new ones, such as singing a song, reading a
book, or showing their artwork and drawings.
“My daughter reads books for [her grandparents] in
English although she knows that they cannot understand
English at all but the way that the remote grandparents
enjoy her reading encourages her to read for them.” – P10,
Parent, Children Aged 3 and 7
“We talk a lot about synchronized swimming when I talk
with her because that’s the focus of her life right now” –
P7, Grandparent, Grandchildren Aged 4 & 6
“She had told me that she wanted to tell her grandmother
that she had swam in the shallow end of the pool from one
side to the other without help.” - P18, Father, Diary
In many cases, video chat worked better for sharing
learning activities because grandparents could actually see
the child showing them the new skill or book they were
reading. However, sports activities were routinely difficult
to share over video chat because they occurred away from
the home.
Unexpected ‘Stuff'
Grandchildren also liked to follow and talk about
unexpected happenings in their grandparents’ lives. Thus,
while children were keen to share everyday mundane things
about their own life, their interest in their grandparents lives
was more ‘high level’ where they talked about unexpected
things. For example, one grandchild was surprised to learn
that his grandparents lived in a different time zone (12
hours difference) and had different notions of day/night:
“My 6 year old grandson asks me whether it is day or night
at my side and sometimes reminds me that he knows that
although its night for him it is my daytime.” – P4,
Grandparent
P7 had a similar situation that revolved around different
weather patterns. She lived in the same country as her
grandchildren but with a different climate:
“They think it’s very cool that we have snow and I think it’s
very cool that they don’t.” – P7, Grandparent
Grandchildren Aged 4 & 6
Storytelling
As expected, children loved when grandparents told them
stories. This included bedtime stories, fairy tales, and also
real family stories. Grandchildren were also particularly
interested in stories about their parents when they were
kids, what it was like for the parent to be a child, or what
the grandchildren were like when they were born.
Some grandparents were also very creative when telling
stories to their grandchildren and would turn it in to an
interactive game. For example:
“I’ll start the story and then they continue it, and I’ll
continue it, that sort of thing, alternating. So, we make it
up.” – P7, Grandparent, Grandchildren Aged 4 & 6
Another grandparent leveraged artifacts from her travels to
create special stories:
“One thing we do – my husband and I, often go on trips.
one way we have communicated, and that has been quite
fun, is to collect a number of postcards from everywhere we
went, and then create a story and write one line of one
sentence of the story on each of the postcards and mail it
from a different city so that when we got home, they might
have got 30 different postcards and a complete story. You
know, that has been fun.” – P2, Grandparent, Grandchild
Aged 6, Step-grandchildren Aged 4,5, & 6
Sharing Experiences
Grandparents and grandchildren also shared their
experiences with each other. This related to either
grandparents or grandchildren talking about their travels to
new places or talking about shared interests and passions, or
the grandparent’s occupation.
“Whenever I’m in exotic places, I send them post cards, …,
and they know that grandma travels, so when I go to visit,
or sometimes they’d tell me… we talk about different places
I’ve been, and they say, “grandma, have you been to blah,
blah, blah?” – P5, Grandparent, Grandchildren 5 & 7
P13 described how her daughter (aged 8) had read a book
about endangered animals and wanted to have a website
created so she could write about it. Her ‘granny’ had a blog
and so they had a long and interesting conversation where
granny talked about blogs, webpages, and the difference
between the two. They also talked about what kind of
animals the granddaughter wanted to write about and how
she was going to research and read about them for her blog.

Participants also described talking and reminding
grandchildren about physical and shared experiences that
they used to have with each other. For example, P2 used to
make cookies and biscuits with her step-granddaughter
(aged 5) whenever they visited each other and they usually
talked about this when they were on the phone.
Cultural Exchange
Some grandparents and grandchildren also talked about big
cultural events like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter,
Halloween, and New Year celebrations. Both parents and
grandparents liked the grandparents to talk about cultural
events and heritage with remote grandchildren. This
included simple conversations such as asking what gifts
children received for a holiday, and also more detailed
descriptions such as the meanings behind holidays. The
extent to which this happened depended on the children’s
age, their interest, and family background. For example,
grandparents that had different cultural backgrounds than
their grandchildren sometimes talked about their own
cultural celebrations.
“I think ritual and tradition also help to give people a sense
of their place in the world and their history and their roots,
a sense of belonging, and it’s really important.” – P6,
Grandparent, Grandchild Aged 7 & 9
While beneficial for some, we elaborate on the challenges
with cultural exchanges in subsequent sections.
SOCIAL SITUATIONS AND CHALLENGES
We also found additional social situations and challenges
emerge as a result of communication between grandparents
and grandchildren. These related to being recently separated
by distance; parental support; self-consciousness and
perceived annoyance; or, being of a different culture.
Becoming Separated by Distance
We found that communication between grandparents and
grandchildren was often especially challenging right after
separation. For example, several participants described how
their grandchildren refused to talk on the phone or use
video chat with the grandparents for the first few months
after one of the parties moved away. This happened for all
four families in our study where grandparents and
grandchildren lived close by and then one party immigrated
to a country far away. The grandchildren wondered why
they had to move apart and felt resentment towards the
situation. Once communication resumed, the grandchildren
would remind the grandparents about emotional moments
that they had with them to make sure that the remote
grandparents still loved them despite the distance
separation. For example, P3 said her grandson frequently
asked her: “Granny, did you remember that you used to tell
me a story and I used to sleep in your arms when you were
here? Would you do it again when you visit?”
Parental Support
Our results also showed that some parents liked to have
remote grandparents support them and become more
involved in their children’s activities from a parenting
perspective. This most often occurred in households with
single parents or parents with busy schedules, or when the
grandparent’s profession related to the support needed (e.g.,
a school teacher). For example, P10, who is a single mom
and working full time said:
“I like my parents to read books for my children over Skype
while they want to sleep or help my daughter in her math
problems and homework.” – P10, Parent, Children Aged 3
& 7
Grandparents also offered parental support for situations
where they may know more about a topic than one of the
parents. For example, one parent talked about how
‘grandpa,’ a dentist, was especially valuable to have talk to
her son because of his occupational experience:
“Few months ago my son had some tooth problem and went
to dentist. As my father is a dentist too, my son told the
story for him and I asked my dad to remind hygienic routine
to my son. My son enjoyed this practice and showed his
teeth and the way he was brushing in a video chat to my
dad. My father keeps looking at his teeth and pretends that
he is checking up his teeth. My son encouraged taking care
of his hygienic routine more.” – P5, Parent, Child Aged 5
In addition, we also found that remote grandparents can
become more involved in activities or topics where there is
a lack of support or interest from the parents. For example,
P2 described how she talked with her grandchildren about
things that were not of interest to the children’s parents:
“Animals. That’s a huge, huge thing for one of [my step-
grandchildren]. It might be more important to another if
mom and dad were into animals, but they were not.” – P2,
Grandparent, Grandchildren Aged 6, Step-Grandchildren
Aged 4, 5, & 6
While parental support by grandparents was certainly
valuable, some grandparents described how they did not
want to overstep their bounds and infringe on the parenting
styles of their children.
“I deliberately behave like a grandparent, not like a parent.
We would resist interfering with their discipline because it
feels then like you’re criticizing the parent.” – P7,
Grandparent, Grandchildren Aged 4 & 6
Similarly, some parents talked about how they did not want
the grandparents to influence certain child behaviors.
“Some of the language from my father-in-law could be
toned down. You can’t just tell kids that ‘if I were you, I’d
just go and tell them I’m gonna kill you.’ You can’t say that
in front of kids.” – P13, Parent, Children Aged 5 & 8
Self-Consciousness and Perceived Annoyances
All grandparents in our study felt that being separated by
distance from their grandchildren weakened their emotional
bond with their grandchildren. This made some
grandparents apprehensive or self-conscious when

communicating with their grandchildren because they did
not want to provide unneeded advice or annoy them by
asking them about their unpleasant experiences.
For example, P2 described how she wanted to talk about
her grandchildren’s passions but this could easily change
and she did not want to be embarrassed by asking about the
wrong thing. She also did not know if her grandchildren
were having bad experiences with their activities and did
not want their short amount of conversational time to focus
on negative thoughts:
“I would like to talk about whatever their passions are. One
of them is hugely interested in animals; one is interested in
language, stars, geography and history. One of them is
going to a French and Russian school and not really
enjoying it, so he doesn’t want to talk about or talk in
French at this stage. I’m just trying to build relationship
with them wherever they are.” – P2, Grandparent,
Grandchild Aged 6, Step-Grandchildren Aged 4, 5 & 6
Similarly, P5 described wanting to know about a potentially
unpleasant topic:
“You want to find out a little bit about the kind of people
they are and also to watch their development… My
grandson just last week was writing a test to get into a
school in his area. So, I was very interested in how he did
in the test. Was he anxious? Did he feel comfortable? And it
will be interesting to see if the does get chosen.” – P5,
Grandparent, Grandchild Aged 7
Interestingly, we found out that while grandparents were
interested to know about almost every detail of their
grandchildren’s lives, they did not want to bother them by
asking ‘too many’ questions. Grandparents expressed a
similar sentiment about asking parents too much
information about their grandchildren. Thus, they perceived
that the other parties might be annoyed with their questions.
Because of this, nearly all of the grandparents we talked to
did not push their grandchildren to talk about things.
Instead, they preferred that their remote grandchildren
directed the conversation and talked about what they
wanted. This is surprising given the age and (lack of)
conversational abilities of young children.
In cases where grandparents were part of divorced families
or were step-grandparents, grandparents were additionally
concerned about the focus of conversations with their
grandchildren and ‘saying the wrong thing’. This was
despite having ‘good’ relationships with the parents and
grandchildren. As one might imagine, situations like these
were even worse when there were relationship issues
between grandparents and either or both parents.
Cultural Differences
As mentioned, some grandparents really liked to share
cultural knowledge with their grandchildren (e.g.,
traditional cultural holidays). This was especially the case
for grandchildren who had moved away from one’s native
country (e.g., grandchildren living in Canada after moving
from India). However, this also raised challenges. First,
language was often an obvious barrier. Some grandchildren
simply did not speak the same language as their
grandparents, or their grandparents did not know how to say
words associated with cultural events in the language that
grandchildren understood. Second, in some cases,
grandparents told us they would prefer not to overwhelm
children with knowledge about their original roots because
they felt that remote grandchildren had a lot of other things
to deal with already. Instead, grandparents wanted to talk
about the new culture of the grandchildren, despite a
longing to share their native roots and traditions.
Exchanging cultural knowledge was also challenging when
cultures clashed, such as when people were married ‘out of
faith’ or with a person of another nationality or religion. For
example, P5 described religious issues around holidays:
“I would like to talk more of our religious holidays but it’s
difficult because they celebrate more of the Christian,
because of their father’s family.” – P5, Grandparent,
Grandchildren Aged 5 & 7
Because of situations like these, many grandparents in our
studied simply tried to avoid such conflicting topics:
“I think you have to be very careful as a grandparent to
recognize the boundaries, recognize the limits.” – P7,
Grandparent, Grandchildren Aged 4 & 6
On the other hand, parents’ opinion about grandparents
talking with the grandchildren about culture, religion, and
heritage varied depending on personal attitudes, family
backgrounds, or personal preferences. Several parents said
that they did not like grandparents to talk about ‘religious
stuff’ with their children, while others were okay with it.
DISCUSSION AND DESIGN IMPLICATIONS
We now summarize our results, compare them to the related
work, and describe the implications for technology design.
Communication Routines
Our results described the communication routines of
grandparents and grandchildren, which mostly focused on
phone and video chat conversations. Previous work
primarily focuses on understanding how children can be
engaged through shared activities such as reading books or
playing board games [3,26]. However, we have found that
grandparents are also able to engage children with direct
conversation. Thus, feelings of closeness and togetherness
are also coming from shared awareness through
conversation. For grandchildren, this comes from a high
level understanding of major events in the grandparents’
lives. For grandparents, this comes from low-level detailed
knowledge about the grandchildren.
Overall, this suggests that, in addition to the systems we see
in the related work that already focus on storytelling and
activities, grandparents and grandchildren would also find
value in systems focused on shared conversation. These

systems should certainly be easy to use such that even
grandparents and young grandchildren who have minimal
knowledge of computers can use them without extra help.
We also recognize that children have limited attention spans
and may value conversing intermittently in more of an
asynchronous manner; in general, grandparents like to ‘talk
more’ and children like to ‘talk less.’ This suggests
grandparent-grandchild conversations may best be
supported through a mixture of asynchronous and
synchronous technologies. If children are interested in
talking for longer periods of time, they can use tools such as
video chat. Yet those with more limited attention span in
the current moment may benefit from the ability to record
and send messages back and forth with grandparents. One
may also consider video chat with multiple cameras or
displays that allow children to migrate between rooms.
Conversational Content
Our results also showed that the content of conversations
between grandparents and grandchildren is focused around
new ideas and skills that children have learned, unexpected
‘stuff’ and interesting situations in both parties’ lives,
storytelling of both a fictional and real life nature, sharing
experiences, and cultural exchanges. Each of these
presents design opportunities for new communication
technologies for grandparents and grandchildren where the
majority are not described in the prior research. The related
work has shown the large interest that children have in
reading and listening to stories over distance [3,26]. We
build on this understanding to show children would also
love to hear stories about their parents when they were
children or themselves when they were born. Thus, our
work highlights the importance of personal stories, in
addition to fictional stories from books.
This suggests that designers of communication technologies
for grandparents and grandchildren could focus on enabling
them with storytelling tools or features in an interactive and
engaging way that can allow them to talk about their
experiences such as traveling to new places with their
remote grandchildren or telling them real stories where
grandchildren or their parents are the main characters. This
can even go beyond the idea of seeing ‘talking heads’ tell
stories to incorporate real world visuals, pictures, and media
that (e.g., [21]). This avenue may also allow grandparents
to share cultural knowledge, if desired by the parents,
where cultural stories could be embedded within
communication technologies.
Beyond storytelling, we also see design opportunities for
communication technologies to allow grandparents to
support grandchildren in showing them the things they have
learned to do, as well as the experiences they have in-the-
moment (e.g., sports events [13]). This is a rich new area
which has a high potential for technological improvement.
Social Situations and Challenges
Our results also described the social situations and
challenges that can emerge for grandparent-grandchild
communication over distance. These are not reported in the
prior literature and present many interesting design
challenges. Most importantly, they show that grandchild-
grandparent communication is not always the ideal situation
that much of the related work paints a picture of; conflict
and difficult situations can easily emerge.
Becoming Separated by Distance
First, it can be especially challenging for grandparents and
grandchildren to communicate when distance separation
first arises. Thus, even the best-created design solutions
(e.g., systems proposed in the related work [3,15,16,21,26])
may not be used by grandparents and grandchildren in real
situations where separation has only recently occurred.
Technology designs for cases of recent separation may best
be focused on reminiscing about the mutual memories that
grandparents and grandchildren hold. There may also be
great value in using technology to show that grandparents
still love their grandchildren (e.g., a huggable teddy or doll
that ‘transmits’ such emotion). Then, when grandchildren
are ‘ready,’ designs that allow them to share aspects of their
new life with their grandparents may be beneficial.
Parental Support and Scaffolding
Second, we also found that some parents valued
grandparents providing parental support during
communication with their children. This was more desirable
in divorced families where only one parent was taking care
of the children, new immigrant families where parents were
struggling with day-to-day responsibilities, or situations
where parents did not have the necessary knowledge.
As a result, communication systems that allow grandparents
to remotely help grandchildren with certain activities would
be valuable for some people. Activities may include
homework, extra-curricular planning, teaching a native
language, or learning hygiene practices (e.g., brushing
one’s teeth). In such situations, careful and creative design
is needed in order to provide a shared space for both parties
to interact in where objects can be seen and gestured at.
One must also consider real world privacy issues that might
arise from the natural locations for such activities (e.g., a
bathroom for teaching hygiene practices), as well as the
social issues that could emerge where some parents may not
want grandparents to ‘interfere’ past a certain threshold or
introduce particular behaviors.
The related work has shown the need for parental
scaffolding for grandparent-grandchild conversations over
video chat because of technical challenges [1,19]. Because
of this, one may naively try to design video chat systems
that removed the need for such scaffolding. However, this
could easily create additional social tensions as some
parents may, again, be concerned about grandparent
interference in daily life, especially if they are not present
during grandparent-child interactions. In turn, grandparents
may be concerned about over-stepping their bounds if
parents are not around. While cumbersome, parental
scaffolding allows parents to observe grandparent and

grandchild interactions to ensure they are desirable.
Removing such scaffolding completely may introduce new
problems. This suggests designs should attempt to mitigate
parental scaffolding challenges, while still encouraging
parental supervision during communication sessions.
Self-Consciousness and Perceived Annoyances
Third, despite being the older, experienced person in life,
grandparents were sometimes self-conscious during
conversations with their grandchildren. They did not
always know what to talk about, did not want to make
grandchildren upset, and did not want to feel like they knew
little about their grandchild and exacerbate the feelings of a
lack of connection. Moreover, even though they wanted to
know lots of low level details about their grandchildren,
they did not always want to ask because they perceived that
the grandchildren or their parents may become easily
annoyed. This is a social challenge that technology cannot
solve alone. Yet one could think about focusing new
designs on trying to foster confidence in grandparents by
providing them with more information about their
grandchildren without forcing them to ask or be told.
For example, one might imagine awareness systems, such
as a shared family calendar, as providing an awareness of a
grandchild’s life to the grandparent. These systems can
update grandparents in the background about topics that
children are not interested in talking about. Designing
applications that encourage children to provide information
offline about their daily life, friends, and school activities in
the form of paintings or other media could be also useful.
This information could be used to increase the
grandparent’s true knowledge of the child and act as seeds
for conversation. Grandparents may then feel more
confident that they know information about their
grandchildren, which could in turn reduce feelings of
perceived annoyance since they may have to ask less in
order to learn all of the details they are interested in
knowing about their grandchildren.
Exchanging Cultural Information
Lastly, we learned that exchanging cultural information
between grandparents and grandchildren was valued, yet it
was sometimes difficult because of language barriers and
other clashes of culture. This suggests design opportunities
for cultural exchange between grandparents and
grandchildren. Here it would be important that designers
consider the effects of different languages on shared
information and, possibly, even provide support for
language learning for grandparents, grandchildren, or both.
Designs could leverage existing storytelling systems (e.g.,
[3,24]) and couple them with stories focused on cultural
knowledge exchange or the use of visual content as
opposed to language-specific text. Of course, we also saw
tensions about when and how to share cultural knowledge
with children and this would need to be carefully thought
through such that designs were targeted at appropriate ages.
Study Limitations
While valuable, our research also had several limitations.
Our methods were largely retrospective and we did not
observe any communication in practice because of concerns
about behavior change during such observations. Results
may have also been stronger if we had interviewed dyads of
grandparents/parents. This would have allowed us to hear
both sides of the story to understand social challenges,
issues, conflicts, etc. Unfortunately we faced many real
world challenges in finding study participants that fit our
demographics. There were also sometimes language
barriers which meant it would not have been possible to
interview some dyads. We also suggest that future research
explore children’s perspectives on grandparent-grandchild
communication to complement our study.
CONCLUSION
Our paper contributes a study of the routines and needs of
grandparents and parents for grandparent-grandchild
conversations over distance. Through a diary and interview
study we found that distance-separated grandparents and
grandchildren usually communicate around several main
themes, including recent learning, unexpected ‘stuff’,
storytelling, sharing experiences, and cultural exchange.
Parents also desire parental support to varying degrees.
While grandparent-grandchild communication is highly
valued, it is not without its challenges. Both parents and
grandparents must deal with social issues that arise from
potential interference, a lack of truly knowing one’s
grandchild (leading to self-consciousness and feelings of
perceived annoyance), and cultural differences. This
suggests a new perspective for the design of grandparent-
grandchild communication systems that attempt to balance
the need for information exchange and support with
solutions to the social issues being faced.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank NSERC and the GRAND Network of Centres of
Excellence DIGIKIDZ project for funding this research.
REFERENCES
1. Ames, M., Go, J., Kaye, J., and Spasojevic, M. Making
love in the network closet: the benefits and work of
family videochat. Proc. CSCW 2010 , 145-154
2. Ballagas, R., Kaye, J., Ames, M., Go, J., and Raffle, H.
Family communication: phone conversations with
children. Proc. IDC 2009 , 321-324
3. Ballagas, R., Raffle, H., Go, J., Revelle , J., Kaye, J.,
Ames, M., Horri, H., Mori, K., and Spasojevic, M.,
Story Time for the 21st Century. IEEE Pervasive
Computing, 9(3), (2010), 28-36.
4. Becker, O. A., and Steinbach, A. (2012). Relations
between Grandparents and Grandchildren in the
Context of the Family System. Comparative
Population Studies, 37(3/4), (2012) 543-566
5. Cao, X., Sellen, A., Brush, A. J. B., Kirk, D., Edge, D.,
and Ding, X., Understanding family communication
across time zones. Proc. CSCW 2010, 155-158.

6. Du, H., Inkpen, K., Chorianopoulos, K., Czerwinski,
M., Johns, P., Hoff, A., Roseway, A., Morlidge, S.,
Tang, J., and Gross, T. VideoPal: Exploring
Asynchronous Video-Messaging to Enable Cross-
Cultural Friendships. Proc. ECSCW 2011, 273-292.
7. Druin A. “The Role of Children in the Design of New
Technology” Behaviour and Information Technology,
Vol. 21(1) , 1-25 (2002).
8. Evjemo, B., Svendsen, G. B., Rinde, E., and Johnsen, J.
A. K. (2004, October). Supporting the distributed
family: the need for a conversational context. Proc
Nordi CHI 2004, 309-312
9. Follmer, S., Ballagas, R., Raffle, H., Spasojevic, M.,
and Ishii, H., People in books: using a FlashCam to
become part of an interactive book for connected
reading. Proc. CSCW 2012 , 685–694.
10. Geurts, T., van Tilburg, T. G., and POORTMAN, A. R.
The grandparent–grandchild relationship in childhood
and adulthood: A matter of continuation?. Personal
Relationships, 19(2), (2010) 267-278.
11. Hutchinson, H., Mackay, W., Westerlund, B.,
Bederson, B., Druin, A., Plaisant, C., Beauduin, M.,
Conversy, S., Evans, H., Hansen, H., Roussel, N.,
Eiderback, B., Lindquist, S. and Sundbad, Y.
Technology probes: inspiring design for and with
families, Proc. CHI, ACM Press (2003), 17-24.
12. Inkpen, K., Du, H., Roseway, A., Hoff, A., Johns, P.
Video kids: augmenting close friendships with
asynchronous video conversations in videopal, Proc.
CHI, ACM Press (2012).
13. Inkpen, K., Taylor, B., Junuzovic, S., Tang, J., and
Venolia, G., Experiences2Go: Sharing Kids’ Activities
Outside the Home with Remote Family Members.
CSCW 2013.
14. Judge, T., K., Neustaedter, C. Sharing conversation and
sharing life: video conferencing in the home. Proc.
CHI 2010 , 655-658.
15. Judge, T., K., Neustaedter, C. The family window: the
design and evaluation of a domestic media space. Proc.
CHI 2010 , 2361–2370.
16. Judge, T. Neustaedter, C., Harrison, S., and Blose, A.,
The Family Portals: Connecting Families Through a
Multifamily Media Space. Proc. CHI, ACM Press
(2011).
17. Junuzovic, S., Inkpen, K., Blank, T., and Gupta, A.
IllumiShare: Sharing Any Surface, Proc. CHI, ACM
Press (2012).
18. Kenner, C., Ruby, M., Jessel, J., Gregory, E., and Arju,
T. Intergenerational learning between children and
grandparents in East London. Journal of Early
Childhood Research, 5(3), (2007) 219-243.
19. Kirk, D., Sellen, A., and Xianc, A., Home Video
Communication: Mediating Closeness, Proc. CSCW,
ACM Press (2010), 135-144.
20. Lin, M. C., Harwood, J., and Bonnesen, J. L.
Conversation topics and communication satisfaction in
grandparent-grandchild relationships. Journal of
Language and Social Psychology, 21(3), (2002).
21. Moffatt, K., David, J., and Baecker, R. M., Connecting
Grandparents and Grandchildren. Connecting Families,
C. Neustaedter, S. Harrison, and A. Sellen, Eds.
Springer (2013), 173–193.
22. Mynatt, E. D., Rowan, J., Craighill, S., & Jacobs, A.
Digital family portraits. Proc. CHI, ACM Press (2001).
23. Neustaedter, C., Elliot, K. and Greenberg, S.,
Interpersonal awareness in the domestic realm. Proc.
OzCHI, ACM Press (2006).
24. Raffle, H., Ballagas, R., Revelle, G., Horii, H.,
Follmer, S., Go, J., Reardon, E., Mori, K., Kaye, J., and
Spasojevic, Family story play: reading with young
children (and elmo) . Proc. CHI 2010 , 1583–1592.
25. Raffle, H., Ballagas, R., Revelle, G., Mori, K., Horri,
H., Paretti, C., Spasojevic, M. Pop goes the cell phone:
asynchronous messaging for preschoolers. Proc. IDC
2011, 99-108.
26. Raffle, H., Revelle, G., Mori, K., Ballagas, R., Buza,
K., Horii, H., Kaye, J., Cook, K., Freed, N., Go, J., and
Spasojevic, M. Hello, is grandma there? let’s read!
StoryVisit: family video chat and connected e-books.
Proc. CHI 2011 , 1195-1204
27. Romero, N., Markopoulos, P., Baren, J., Ruyter, B.,
Ijsselsteijn, W. and Farshchian, B. Connecting the
family with awareness systems. Personal Ubiquitous
Computing, 11 (4), (2007), 299-312.
28. Tee, K., Brush, A.J. and Inkpen, K. Exploring
communication and sharing between extended families.
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 67
(2), (2009), 128-138.
29. Vetere, F., Davis, H., Gibbs, M., and Howard, S. The
Magic Box and Collage: Responding to the challenge
of distributed intergenerational play. International
Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 67(2), (2009).
30. Vutborg, R., Kjeldskov, J., Paay, J., Pedell, S., and
Vetere, F. Supporting young children’s communication
with adult relatives across time zones. Proc.OzCHI
2011, 291-300.
31. Vutborg, R., Kjeldskov, J., Pedell, S., and Vetere, F.
Family storytelling for grandparents and grandchildren
living apart. Proc. NordiCHI, ACM Press (2010).
32. Yarosh, S., Inkpen, K. M., and Brush, A. J. B., Video
playdate: toward free play across distance. Proc CHI,
ACM Press (2010), 1251-1260.
33. Zimmerman, F. J., Gilkerson, J., Richards, J. A.,
Christakis, D. A., Xu, D., Gray, S., and Yapanel, U.
Teaching by listening: the importance of adult-child
conversations to language development. Pediatrics,
124(1), (2009), 342-349.