Video Calls With Grandparents Who Struggle With Technology
The call is meant to start at 7pm your time. At 7:04, your phone rings — your mother, not on video, because she pressed the wrong green button again. You talk her through it for three minutes while your own kids lose interest and wander off. By the time the video actually connects, the moment you’d been looking forward to all day has mostly evaporated into troubleshooting. That’s what video calls with grandparents who struggle with technology look like from the Canadian end.
Why this is harder than it looks from the outside
Setting up a video call feels trivial if you’ve grown up doing it. It isn’t trivial for someone who’s spent seventy years without a smartphone as a daily tool, sitting alone in a room in South Africa without anyone physically beside them to point at the right icon. Every “just tap the green button” instruction you give over the phone requires them to first find the button on a screen that, to them, looks like a wall of unfamiliar symbols. Patience here isn’t optional; it’s the only thing that actually works.
What tends to help, in practice
Pick one app and stick with it, rather than switching between WhatsApp, FaceTime and whatever else seems easiest that week — every switch resets the small amount of muscle memory they’ve built up. Set the call up once, together, ideally when someone who can help is physically in the room with them — a sibling, a friend, a neighbour’s grandchild — rather than trying to talk someone through installation entirely over a phone call. And favour a recurring scheduled time over spontaneous calls: a fixed slot means they can have the app already open and waiting, rather than fumbling to answer an unexpected incoming call under pressure.
The unglamorous fixes that actually move the needle
A large sticky note near their usual chair with the two or three steps written out in order, in their own language, does more than any tech support call. So does writing your own name next to their device’s contact list in big letters, since a small contact photo they can’t quite see is a common, invisible cause of missed calls. If typing is difficult, voice notes solve more of the actual problem than video ever will — they don’t require any timing coordination at all, and a shaky, low-tech voice message beats a video call that never manages to connect.
When video isn’t the answer
Sometimes the kindest thing is admitting video calling isn’t going to become comfortable for this particular person, and building the relationship around what does work instead — a weekly phone call, recording video messages for grandparents abroad that they can watch when someone’s there to help them open them, even letters, if that’s genuinely what lands best. There’s no rule that says staying close has to look like a screen.
None of this fixes the distance itself. It just means the twenty minutes you do get aren’t spent hunting for a green button instead of actually talking.
Cape2Canada’s blog covers the parts of this move that have nothing to do with visas at all — the everyday, human side of staying close from far away.