From the podcast Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle, Social Wealth Strategist, a practitioner who designs connection at work.
Opening
In my family the miles are wide. Grandparents watch birthdays through photographs and children grow up with people they adore but barely know. Love is not the missing piece. Knowing each other is, and that is what today's guest set out to build.
The idea
Eben Pingree is the CEO and co-founder of Kinsome, an app designed to connect children and their grandparents no matter the distance. The idea was born from urgency.
His mother and his father in law received Alzheimer's diagnoses in the same week, and that spike of clarity asked a hard question, how do young children actually build something with the grandparents who love them from afar? His answer to me has stayed with me ever since.
Grandparents and grandchildren are the same blood, of course they love each other, and yet
“They might inherently love each other, but they haven't built a bond”.
He believes that tossing them onto a video call once a week or once a month is not enough to lay that foundation, so Kinsome works asynchronously.
A child records a short voice update about their day, and Kinsey, a friendly robot character in the app, learns from each conversation and remembers what the child has shared.
When his daughter mentioned her first day of kindergarten, Kinsey asked about it days later, and when she invented a story with a cat in it, the character followed up on the cat's name.
The app now also suggests questions the child can ask their grandparent, drawn from whatever the child just talked about. If a boy was in a school play, Kinsey might ask whether his grandparents were ever in a play, and what that story was.
Family history starts arriving in small doses, and grandparents get to be known, not just loving. For Eben the platform is the missing piece rather than the whole answer, the thing that makes the next live call warm because there is finally something real to talk about.
What I took from it
I moved to Canada from the UK in 2021, so I live inside the problem this app is solving. My children's grandparents know them, but only in the way you know a character in a story you keep missing chapters of.
What moved me in this conversation was the idea that knowing someone is built from small, repeated, low pressure moments rather than one big scheduled call. I also loved that children are taught to ask the questions.
My own kids ask their grandparents about the past far less than I wish they did, and the thought that a gentle prompt could turn that around felt like something I could use this week.
Three things to try this week
- Set up one asynchronous exchange this week. Have your child record a thirty second voice note about their day and send it to a grandparent, then ask the grandparent to reply with one story from their own life.
- Borrow the question bridge. After your child shares something, prompt them with one question for the grandparent, such as whether they ever did the same thing as a child, and send it along with the update.
- Choose connection over the single big call. If a weekly video call keeps falling flat, replace the pressure with two tiny messages across the week and see what it does to the next call.
Watch and go deeper
The player below carries our full conversation, and watching it gives you his story in his own words. You can watch the conversation in the player below. To learn more about the guest, visit Kinsome.
You can also find the guest on Eben Pingree on LinkedIn.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks.
Go deeper with the research
In my work with more than 1,200 leaders I keep meeting people whose family bonds deserve the same deliberate care as their professional ones. If you want to build that skill properly, look at the Social Health in Professional Leadership Certification . Whose small story will you ask for this week?