Virtual Visitations

Ponytail flying, 10-year-old Ashton Kaleita of Winter Springs, Fla., bounces across her bed, punches buttons on her computer and picks up the phone to dial her mom in Lancaster, Ohio. "Hurry it up, Mama! I have the IP number," she says. In seconds, Ashton's smiling mom appears in real time on the computer screen. "Good morning, Princess," Tawny Kaleita-Sniderman says. Ashton chatters about Saturday's plans--bowling with Dad and the YMCA Indian Princesses, then a sleepover at a friend's house. "Mom, put Sputnik up, please," she squeals. Kaleita-Sniderman gently holds a bewildered-looking dog with pointy brown ears to the camera. Ashton reads a list of jelly-bean flavors--almond, chocolate pudding, sardine. "Wait a minute!" her mom laughs. "Sardine?"

This virtual visit is one way for Ashton and her mom--who have been separated by thousands of miles since Kaleita-Sniderman divorced, remarried and moved to Ohio--to communicate. The transmission isn't perfect. Lips move. Words lag behind, like a badly dubbed-in translation in a foreign movie. An eerie whistling sound seeps in and out of the audio, and the camera doesn't catch details in Ashton's many works of art. Her brilliant yellow clay dragon with jewel-like eyes and feather wings is a gray blob on the computer screen. But to Ashton, the videoconference is "cool." To her mom, it's "a godsend."

While videoconferencing is nothing new, Ashton and her mom are pioneers. Ashton's child-custody case is among the nation's first in which virtual visitation was ordered by a judge, and experts predict similar court-ordered arrangements will follow as technology advances and 4 out of 10 marriages fail. The son of an electrical engineer, John Sloop, a Seminole County, Fla., judge, has long delighted in the hands-on problem solving of building and repairing machinery, like the two-story grocery lift he helped build for his mother. So it was natural for Sloop, when making the "heart-wrenching decision" about where Ashton's primary residence would be, to embrace her mom's suggestion to use video equipment to ease the pain of separation.

Tawny, a stay-at-home mom and primary residential parent living in Florida, assumed the equipment would be used mostly by Ashton's dad Gary Kaleita when she moved to Ohio, where her new husband took a job. Instead, Sloop made Kaleita, who also remarried, the primary residential parent. Kaleita-Sniderman called it "my worst nightmare come true ... One day I had her, and the next day I didn't."

To bridge the distance, Judge Sloop ordered "unrestricted" communication between Ashton and her mom. He stipulated that separate phone lines be installed in Ashton's bedrooms in both homes to ensure her privacy when talking with each parent, and he ordered that each parent purchase state-of-the-art computer systems with videoconferencing equipment.

But "no technology in the world is going to replace a hug," Sloop says. Mom and daughter visit as often as possible. Ashton goes to Ohio for three-day weekends, parts of longer vacations and most of the summer. Mom comes to Florida. They videoconference twice weekly and talk by phone almost every night. Gary Kaleita says he wants some "accommodations" made in the timing of Tawny's phone calls to schedule homework and other activities better. And he would have preferred that Ashton use the computer he already owned. Now he uses the new equipment to see and talk with Ashton when she visits her mom, however, and he plans to continue using it.

Virtual visitation cannot replace real visits, Ashton's parents both say, and experts agree. Yale University Child Study Center faculty member and attorney David Rosen calls videoconferencing "a great idea" as a supplement to real visits, but he also sees a danger. With such technology, parents might become "more casual" about moving away from their children, he says. Cynthia Kaplan, a child psychologist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., says parenting "is much more about being there," but for parents who can't be there, she suggests that courts appoint therapists to identify visitation methods most helpful to each child. A virtual visit that reassures one child might frustrate another who sees Daddy's face and longs for his good-night hug.

Ashton says she's feeling "dandy." She and her mom look into each other's eyes as their banter veers from pets to overalls to mud walks. "O.K., Princess. I'll call you tonight," Kaleita-Sniderman says. But just as Ashton turns away, her mom calls, "Wait, wait! Kiss!" and presses her lips close to the camera. "Bye, Princess," she says, blowing the kiss across the airwaves to her daughter.