How digital communication tools helped me parent my two-home kids
Illustration by Karagh Byrne
by Susan Sanders
In all fairness to the teachers, our blended family was a lot. We rolled into orientation night eight deep. We tried to give the wide-eyed teacher clarity about how this mob was related to the only person that mattered to them — the student.
When school got underway, the chaos amplified. Someone was always either duplicated or completely left off of email threads. Although we only lived three miles apart, we wasted time going back and forth when show and tell, soccer practice, or other activities were not synced between the calendars. While there is value in helping the kids “fail safely” by not rushing to retrieve items they forgot, this two-home existence was not something they chose. We felt strongly about helping the kids feel secure and learn resilience. We needed to figure out a productive way forward.
Communication challenges were not limited to school. Resentments festered when dates and events were planned for the grownups, but then torpedoed by forgotten schedule changes. Fun family activities were discovered, then had to be jettisoned because the kids were with the other family. These disappointments piled up and were not a sustainable way to manage our family. We needed systems and tools to manage the communication.
“A common issue around communication in families is not sharing clear expectations or lacking clear structure,” says Candace Folden, LCMHC, a counselor practicing in Greensboro, NC. “Kids do XYZ this time and it's fine; next time they do XYZ, they are punished.”
Ours was not a unique situation. Just under half of the American population (42%) is part of a blended or step-family unit. I know from working with single-household families that these communication issues are not unique to blended families. Establishing a solid foundation of communication is important for the overall well-being of family members, especially children, whether they have just one home or more.
Folden explains what happens when kids don’t have that solid foundation of communication. “It is confusing and they internalize it feeling like they cannot trust their own reality, they think they are bad or wrong.”
The long-term impacts of family communication tend to extend into the workplace. According to Elisabeth Berger, a researcher at the University of Hohenheim in Germany, digital modernization is the most important catalyst for entrepreneurship and innovation these days. New and better digital tools are released every day, often causing organizations to either adapt or fall by the wayside. Ironically, it’s this attitude of adopting digital innovations to make the workplace more efficient that can, at times, negatively influence an employee’s mental health.
For example, a healthcare organization located in Southern California experienced a near 50% turnover rate in clinical staff and decline in registry temps willing to work in the facility in 2021. Leadership directly attributed this to the Electronic Health Record (EHR) used in the organization — it was unknown to the clinical staff and too hard to learn. Overwhelmed with the COVID pandemic and extraordinarily long hours with thin support, the force-feeding of a complex clinical digitization tool caused burned-out nursing staff to leave in large numbers.
This kind of mass exodus is not productive nor sustainable for organizations. Technology is supposed to make workflows easier, not introduce barriers and speed up burnout.
Enter the concept of digital sustainability. Gerry George, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and expert in management, defines digital sustainability as “the organizational activities that seek to advance the sustainable development goals through creative deployment of technologies that create, use, transmit, or source electronic data.”
Each organization will define “sustainable development goals” in their own ways — based on staff capacity, industry standards, and corporate strategy. In a family unit, it might translate into the family values, specific problems to be addressed, and age-appropriateness of the digital tools being proposed. This is also the strategy we used in our blended family.
As we brainstormed to improve and organize communication, we focused on simple, free digital tools so they would be available across both families. They needed to be easy to use to avoid the frustration and overload that would be counterproductive to the improvements in communication that we were trying to make.
Karagh Byrne
Digital communication tools that worked for us
Managing calendars, finding order
Anything at all related to kids went into Google Calendar. Custody and school schedules, games, performances, practices, special events, and vacations all went into its own calendar — one that was shared with all four parents. When the kids were old enough, the calendar was also shared with them. If they asked who they were going to be with on a certain day, we had them check the calendar. When they wanted to make plans, we encouraged them to add it to the calendar. (Google Calendars can be integrated into Outlook at most workplaces and can automatically update the calendar on your phone.) This allowed me the flexibility of accepting a late meeting if I knew we did not have the kids that night or generally planning for that elusive work-life balance.
The calendar was important because we were raising adults, not just growing children. They did not ask for this restructuring of their family, but having transparency around expectations helped ease that burden. It also helped us talk to them about what they did while they were away from us without it sounding like we were prying inappropriately for information.
Karagh Byrne
Organizing chaos through document sharing
We used Google Drive to share documents between families. Long-term reference documents, like school evaluations and medical summaries, were at everyone’s fingertips. Documents needing input from both houses also lived here. When high school graduation rolled around, we created a shared spreadsheet on Google Drive to make sure friends and relatives from all four parents were included.
Mitigating mountains of emails
To say there is a lot of email attached to school and extracurricular activities, even for families in one home, is an understatement. In order to increase the likelihood that all four parents had visibility to all communication, we set up email to be forwarded automatically. This is a simple, standard feature with most email service providers. Anytime a teacher’s message came to my inbox, it automatically forwarded to the other three parents to help balance the labor.
These simple digital tools were easy to implement, but of course they did not work perfectly. Communication can certainly be challenging, and we are families made up of people with differing thoughts and opinions. But these digital solutions gave us a foundation that allowed us to build and grow. As we found cracks in the systems, we were able to improve them over time instead of just throwing our hands up and playing the blame game.