Staying connected to your child is an extraordinarily important facet of the parenting experience, but many adults are struggling to stay in touch with their kids, especially when long distance relationships are thrown into the mix. While you may not be able to overcome the geography that’s keeping you apart from your child, you can still keep in touch with them thanks to the power of modern technology.

Here’s how you can stay connected to your child, and how you can leverage the power of contemporary tech to establish and maintain meaningful relationships with the people closest to you over long distances.

Making the best use of tech

It’s indisputable that there’s a certain level of charm to older forms of communication; sending a letter or card in the mail is a nice way to remind someone you’re thinking about them, and technology that’s existed for decades now enables us to hear the voices of our loved ones even when we’re far away. Only recently have technological innovations made incredibly intimate connections over long distances truly possible, however – now more than ever before, vast miles can be reduced to nothing thanks to the marvels offered to us by technology.

Take facetime, for instance. A relatively minor innovation – merely adding someone’s face to a traditional phone call with the help of a camera and some smart electronics – has fundamentally transformed how we stay in contact with one another. Now, you can speak directly to your kids, ensuring that they not only hear your voice, but actually make eye contact with you when you’re speaking with them. If you are worried about 4G reception, you can always rely on a signal booster to ensure the phone rings. Where parents once struggled with leaving their kids behind for long periods of time, you can rest with the confidence that you can still connect with them despite the distance between you.

Consider the myriad of ways you can rely upon to tell a long distance bedtime story, for instance, and you’ll be convinced that tech makes modern parenting easier than ever. There are actually entire smartphone apps developed around the idea of long-range parenting. Thus, if you’re worried you’re missing out on the development of your child’s reading skills, consider getting visual with the help of modern tech come the next bedtime story.

The rise of other modern marvels, like the groupchat, also enable parents to have family-wide discussions with groups of children over long distances. Whereas once upon a time no child had a personal cellphone, kids today have access to smartphones at a truly baffling level. Some 95 percent of teens have access to a smartphone, and most of them are creating social media presences for themselves. Now that you can outfit your children with incredibly handy smartphones, you can essentially create groupchats at no cost at all to stay in touch with your whole family at once.

Interactions behind a screen are still real

Many older folks are struggling with the fact that interactions which occur thanks to mediating technology are still real. While many of us consider conversations had over the phone, let alone conversations had via text message or a brief video chat, to be worth less than face-to-face communication, young people see mediated communication through tech as perfectly normal. Bridging the gap between you and your children as it pertains to tech isn’t easy, but you need to understand that there’s no shame in using tech to speak with them if you really want to reach them on their level.

If you want to really stay connected with your kid, get established on the same social media channels they’re on, and become familiar with modern tech, especially smartphones and the apps that power them. You should get comfortable with video chats and text messaging – while they may seem strange to you, children find these modes of communication to be more comfortable and efficient than the now-dated task of a face-to-face conversation. Above all else, while you shouldn’t let your kids spend the entirety of their lives behind a screen, it’s important not to try and force antiquated methods of staying in touch on a generation that lives in the digital world half the time. Check out some tips when it comes to raising a generation of kids who are slaves to a screen if you’re really struggling to have a meaningful conversation with your kid via tech. As long as you make an effort in good faith to connect with your kids with modern means, like smartphones and social media, they’ll see you’re trying. Meaningful connections must be nourished over time, of course – you can’t just shoot the occasional text message to your kids and think that’s enough. Rely on the power of modern tech, however, and you’ll soon find that you’re more connected and in touch with your child than ever before.