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Jacquie Golden of Salinas, Calif., finds that e-mail has an unexpected advantage over the telephone when communicating with her teenage grandson Timothy Haines, a student at the University of Nebraska. "On the phone, he'll say everything is fine, his life is fine, his mother's fine, his friends are fine. With e-mail he opens up. He tells me how he's really doing, how rotten his last football game was and how school sucks. He gets down."
Many far-flung families have discovered a wonderful Web freebie: create-your-own family sites, where relatives equipped with passwords can post messages, share family anecdotes, keep track of birthdays, scan in snapshots--and see what the rest of their extended family has been up to. Valerie Juleson lives in Wilton, Conn. Her 12 adult children--11 foster kids and one biological child--are spread out all over the U.S. and Europe, and her two grandchildren live in Florida. She keeps up with everyone through a site created on myfamily.com One of the latest sitemakers to come online: superfamily.com
Meera Ananthaswamy has a double challenge in uniting her children and parents: distance and culture. After emigrating with her parents from India to Canada in 1962, she moved with her husband and two daughters to Dallas three years ago. To maintain the closeness they felt when they all lived near one another in Hamilton, Ont., the three generations try to get together at least twice a year. In addition, the two girls spend summers with their grandparents. Between visits, they stay in touch through weekly phone calls. Perumal Rajaram tells his granddaughters stories from Hindu mythology, instructs them in Indian philosophy and takes them to the Hindu temple in Hamilton for traditional prayers. "It gives them history and a sense of where they've come from," says Meera.
But sometimes Suma, 16, and Usha, 13, find their grandparents' sense of tradition onerous. The girls like to wear jeans and shorts, which Rajaram abhors. Then Meera steps in as interpreter. "I tell them, 'Your grandparents' definition of pretty is someone in a sari and not someone in short shorts. You've got to remember where your grandparents come from.'" So far, the disputes have been trivial. But trouble could erupt if the girls decide, say, to marry outside their ethnic group. Rajaram is already steeling himself for the battle--and his likely defeat. "I'll try to talk them out of it first. And if they still go ahead, then I'll say, 'It's O.K. I don't approve, but have a good life.'"
Good communication and that spirit of compromise have helped keep Meera's family close. That's not always the case in modern multicultural America, says sociology professor Schlesinger. The tragic irony is that many immigrants come to the U.S. in search of a better life for their children and grandchildren. But in order to achieve the goal set by their elders, the younger generation must assimilate, and when they do, they become strangers who speak a different language and live by an alien code. "The grandparent has achieved his American Dream," says Schlesinger, "but at a terrible cost." Exacerbating the alienation is the fact that because the Americanized grandchild is more adept at navigating the new world, says Teri Wunderman, a psychologist who works with Hispanic families in Miami, "there's less the idea that Grandma and Grandpa are these older, wiser people."