Long Distance Love: Building Bridges that Last
As a kid, there were few things my brothers and I enjoyed more than mucking about in the rivers and streams of Maine on family camping trips. Whether we were building rafts, racing sticks through the rapids as we bombarded them with rocks, or maneuvering felled trees to provide safe passage to the far side, we couldn’t get enough. One lesson we learned quickly, however, was not to expect anything we erected, no matter how clever and/or overbuilt, to survive Mother Nature’s whims. Each time we would return to the sites of our infrastructural masterpieces, there would be no signs of our efforts, with flood waters long since having brushed aside our handy work.
As it turns out, in my old age, I still love playing around in rivers and streams, except now I have power tools and some light machinery to ratchet the stakes up a bit. Recently I’ve been scheming about building a bridge across the river that cuts through our small property in VT. If that sounds like an ambitious, and potentially insane, undertaking, that jives with the feedback I received from my buddy, who’s an experienced contractor. In my head, I would perfectly fell a tall tree from along one bank, careful to have it land just where I wanted like in some cartoon. Maybe I’d even nail some planks on to the top if I was feeling fancy, and then, Viola! Safe passage across forever. My friend was skeptical
As is often the case when you bring in the (supposed) experts, he quickly rained on my parade. With a smug smirk, he informed me that in order to graduate from the driftwood bridges of my childhood, I would need to begin with these things he called “abutments.” If, like me, that’s not a word that you are intimately familiar with, in short, it refers to the foundations built into either bank to ground the bridge and give it the lateral strength to resist the inevitable flood waters. As my friend droned on and on about their critical role, my mind started wandering to what we’re building at Kinsome, as it is wont to do these days, and something suddenly clicked.
Kinsome builds up the abutments of long distance grandparent-grandchild relationships.
We’ll need to workshop that with our marketing gurus, and we could use a less obscure, technical-sounding word than “abutment,” but nonetheless, bear with me as I spitball here a bit.
One of the aspects that draws the most suspicion when we describe Kinsome is the fact that it is an asynchronous communication platform. Grandma and little Johnny are not conversing live on Kinsome, it’s true. Someday we might layer in that functionality, but from talking to hundreds and hundreds of families, we don’t think the synchronous communication tools available are where the real problem lies. If you have a strong relationship with someone, hopping on a Facetime or Zoom call is a great way to connect. It isn’t as good as being together IRL, but it’s pretty damn good.
But what if it’s a stranger on the other end? And you have no agenda or context for the call? It’s typically not a great setup for a fruitful, enjoyable experience, and unfortunately that’s often what we’re doing when we bribe our kids to sit still for 30 seconds to talk to Grandma on Facetime. We’re taking the Eben Pingree approach to bridge building: plunk a log across the river, and congratulate yourself on a job well done. Sturdy, reliable passage for the foreseeable future is sure to follow!
Having shared blood isn’t nothing (I thought about trying to extend the analogy further to describe it as the rebar reinforcing the concrete abutments, but that felt like a bridge too far 😉), but it’s not enough on its own. Grandma most likely loves her grandchildren inherently and very deeply, and they probably understand they are supposed to feel the same way back (though without much idea of what that means). But the reality is that the generations often don’t actually know each other and have only limited, second-hand context of what is going on in each others’ lives, to say nothing of the many-decade age difference and the challenges it introduces.
At Kinsome, we are providing a daily window into each other’s day-to-day lives, filling in the seemingly mundane details that give relationships depth. We make it fun for kids to share regular updates and to initiate activities that reveal their ever-evolving personalities. Grandparents not only get regular fuel for their bottomless adoration, but through their responses and participation in activities, have a regular outlet to funnel that love back to their grandchildren. While very few young kids are inherently interested in every detail of their grandparents’ lives, Kinsome uses the kids’ recent experiences to spark grandparents’ recollections of memories and stories that feel more contextually relevant to them because they relate to the kids’ lives right now. Add in a dose of AI to bring those stories to life, and kids actually get excited about learning their family history, which studies have shown can catalyze a greater sense of self and grounding in young people1.
So there it is: Kinsome fortifies the intergenerational bridges within families, giving them the weight to endure shifting shores on either side and the inevitable flood waters between. We aren’t aiming to replace Facetime as a family communication tool; in fact, Kinsome makes Facetime and other video tools far more effective given the foundation that gets built up between calls. Similarly, Kinsome only accelerates the bonding process when extended families are able to get together in-person. Once you’ve done the work to establish your abutments, spanning the divide is the easy part.
In all honesty, I’ll probably still ignore my buddy as I bridge the river in VT. Pouring proper concrete abutments sounds way too hard and expensive. But when it comes to properly connecting my kids with my parents and in-laws, the work would absolutely be worth it…if Kinsome didn’t do it all for me.
Excited about what we’re creating at Kinsome? Sign up here to join the waitlist for our official launch this Spring.
1 Sample studies on the subject include this one from BYU and this one from Emory University.
