Do you miss your family? Have you spent the entire pandemic struggling to figure out how to bring everyone together and feel like a solid family unit? Do one or more members of your family live far away or on their own, and you want to do everything you can to keep them close? If you are like most families, better communication would solve most - if not all - of your conflict and stress. Separation from loved ones, as we’ve all recently learned, can be grueling and can change our perspectives about what good communication even really is. This book aims to help navigate that new world of post-pandemic separations with the lessons we’ve learned along the way as a society full of families.

If the world was ever sane, it has certainly gone crazy lately. From digital enhancements, to the divides they’ve created, to the fast-paced lives we’re all racing through, the steady anchor of solid family communication has never been more valuable or more necessary. While the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the world and deepened chasms between family members already separated by distance, divorce, and lifestyle differences, people brought their technology and their willingness to learn to the table. Now, we as a world are finally able to begin using the words after the pandemic in more than a vaguely hopeful way. Even as our heads spin from the collective roller coaster we’ve all been white-knuckling for more than a year, we are left to evaluate the state of the world and our relationships, as they are now on the other side of the trauma we’ve shared. Communication may be difficult. Getting back into routines of going places to spend time with loved ones, though travel was wildly accessible before, may take some getting used to again. Fault lines that existed in family communication long before there was nothing left to do but communicate are likely to expose themselves once busy people return to busy life.

Driven by the needs of corporations and consumers during lockdowns across the world, technology and psychology alike have been working on closing the gap between needs and solutions. Individuals faced with the necessity of understanding certain means of communication in order to keep their livelihoods are now able to grasp technological concepts that would have made them shrink back in uncertainty a year ago. The means of communication are changing every day, and families of every shape and size, though they may have previously been unaffected by these changes in technology, have found that they only stand to benefit from embracing those changes.

From separation due to pandemic lockdowns, long distance, or conflict, into the hopeful new world as we get back on our feet again, this book aims to help families learn how to communicate. Answering every question from how to cultivate intimacy without losing your personal identity, to how to properly use Instagram for communicating, The Long Distance Family: Keeping Communications and Family Relationships Strong When Living Far Apart serves as your guide book to keeping your family close in spirit under a variety of circumstances. Covering technological advancements, the very best of family therapy research, and a few stories of real-life people, there is a little something here for everyone who would like their family to communicate better, feel closer, and build a foundation for stronger relationships.