To stay connected with her kids’ pandemic-isolated grandparents, Lisa Mogolov and her husband host weekly video cooking calls. One family chooses the ingredients, and everyone uses them to prepare a meal in their Boston and Kansas City homes. It’s clever, it’s loving, and … it’s not working. “Our kids get very shy and want to hide,” Mogolov says. “Usually it just winds up being me and David talking to his parents.”

Even before COVID-19 sent older adults into hiding, grandparents and great-grandparents could often seem like strangers to kids. Contact might involve gifts of toys meant for someone a tad younger, forced piano performances by parents, really bad jokes, and even worse fashion choices. So figuring out what to say to