Do it. All the anxieties "Should I call?", "Am I a nuissance", "Am I a burden?" matter not.

I am genuinely curious why "memento mori" never seems to stick. Maybe thats part of it's power.

I'm beginning to think that mobile phones and technology for young people is a horrible experience of being answerable without notice to unlimited opportunities for more powerful people to impose themselves on still incredibly experienced just lately still minors.

because simultaneously adults have been inundated with the news of the world and it isn't good, and as a result we're probably genuinely more anxious about our kids than for several generations (my father would be 114 this year, if he could be alive, and his stories of growing up pre Depression in London still make my hair stand on end and thank god for the mercies we do have. Age has made me sentimental and actually interested in what religion is about. But I also recognised both developments as being a deliberate blurring without any definite refocus, of all the accumulated worries into a indefinite emotional haze. If this is necessary for forbearance when my grandchildren err stupidly yet repairably, I'll take it, religion and all. But I don't remember my father in his nineties getting any fuzzier, only sharper. So I hope to overcome the apparent overload.

Still, whatever the reasons, I think we're letting our children's intelligence become too thinly spread across distractions when we are suffering from similar confusion, and I believe it's our job to clear more of the post modern clutter.

When I left for college, we did a weekly Sunday 30 min Skype call.

I'm the oldest of five. This pattern then continued and now my parents and my siblings and their families have that group call with everyone every week.

It's really helped us stay connected. You can't stay close to someone if you never talk to them. And a live interaction is superior to Facebook, etc

It's much better to communicate that you'd like a routine like this than to try to have irregular contact that you'll both have to think about and plan for. I have a weekly video call for my mom and it's very good for us.

Speak for yourself. My family is busy, and we don't like to plan -- we just decide to do something and do it. So a scheduled routine would feel like a horrible anchor to us.

While I'm definitely not going to say that it would benefit everyone, I think it's almost everyone while the relevant kid is in college. It's a lot easier to plan for a slot in your calendar as "Dad time" than to constantly reevaluate whether Dad is more important than XYZ random thing you have on the docket.

Once it’s a routine you don’t have to plan. And being busy is a good reason to have it as part of your routine.

My son went off to college a few years ago and we've established a pattern of having him call us every Sunday. TBH I don't have a ton to talk about (and am not really a talker), I just want to make sure he's ok and everything else is pretty inconsequential.

I would recommend setting expectations early around weekly calls so they become a habit. Even if you have nothing to talk about you can small talk for a few minutes. I suspect you will have a lot to talk about if your child is starting university.