Raising confident daughters with SKYPE
Posted on: Tuesday, April 11th, 2006Comments: 0
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When raising daughters, it’s all about time. I’ve said this in other postings. In my view, daughters need high quality and low quality time with their dads. There’s the deep, heart-to-heart conversations, and there’s the dinner time banter, and there’s everything in between. It’s all important. Girls need a father’s day-to-day influence in their lives.
But, sometimes dads need to be away. Travel is becoming a bigger and bigger part of even the most mundane careers. It’s a global economy and that requires travel. So, how do you stay involved as a day-to-day part of your daughters’ lives while you’re on the road? SKYPE!
No, I am not a rep for SKYPE. I get nothing for talking about SKYPE. But it is an awesome tool that could fundamentally change our relationships.
I have a friend who recently decided to take a job out of town. The problem is, he has two kids from another marriage that will be left behind. Without getting into the merits of the decision, he now has to find a way to stay connected with his kids. One of his kids is a daughter who is just entering that awkward…I need my dad whether I admit it or not…age. SKYPE is going to help him to be a daily part of her life, even though he is hundreds of miles away.
SKYPE is a free software that you can download in around two minutes that enables you to make FREE phone calls from your computer to any other computer, anywhere in the world. But that’s not the cool part. The cool part about SKYPE is that if you buy a $30.00 webcam (I recommend Logitech www.logitech.com), you can turn your computer into a real-time video conference phone.
I set up my webcam a few days ago and I have SKYPED with people (including my own daughters) all over the world. It’s awesome! I SKYPED with my girls when they got off the bus today and I felt like I was actually hanging out with them. They showed me their crafts from school. I showed them my office. They talked as freely as if I was in the room. We’ve talked on the phone hundreds of times and it was never like this before. I fully expect to bring children’s books with me on the road, and read with my daughters using SKYPE on my next trip.
I also recommend buying a head set. You don’t need one but it gives you more privacy. I would recommend a particular brand, but I don’t recall the name of my headset at work.
You can visit the SKYPE website at www.skype.com. Set up requires no more than ten minutes…including the webcam! I believe that SKYPE and other tools like it will bring us closer to our daughters when we’re on the road. It could make being away bearable. Most importantly, it could keep business travelers involved in the day-to-day parts of the lives of our daughters.
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