Living away from home and having a busy college life can make it hard to feel connected to your family, especially when different schedules and sometimes even time zones come into play. However, you can fit intentional activities into your week to stay in touch with your loved ones, even when you can’t be together face-to-face. 

To prioritize these relationships, try finding fun virtual opportunities that work for everyone, such as video calls, meals, photo albums, game nights, clubs, challenges, and birthday celebrations. 

Video Calls 

Phone calls can be nice when you’re on the go, but video chats help you bridge the distance gap a little bit more by seeing everyone’s faces. 

Whether you are calling your parents, siblings, grandparents, or everyone, try to schedule these calls in advance to accommodate each person’s schedule. If you can, choose one day and time and stick to that every week to make it a regular part of everyone’s routine. 

Planning ahead for this will help you stay on top of your studies and extracurricular activities, too. If you know you have an upcoming call, it might motivate you to finish an assignment early so you can prioritize your family time.

Virtual Meals

One of the things that often makes people feel most at home is a family meal. Even when you’re away at school, you can still keep up with this tradition-it just might take a little extra creativity. 

Try making virtual dinners an ongoing tradition, where each family member cooks the same meal and eats dinner together while on a group call. You can rotate each person’s favorite meal or incorporate things that everyone likes into your dinners. 

If you don’t feel like cooking, that’s okay too. You can have family takeout nights where everyone orders pizza, tacos, pasta, etc. 

Shared Photo Albums

Photos are a wonderful way to feel close to your family and keep everyone in the loop on what’s going on in each other’s lives. Although you can always text them to each other, creating a shared album is often the easiest method for everyone to share and access them.

Make it a habit to upload any new photos to this album as you take them so that you don’t forget. You can share anything you want from your day, such as a beautiful picture of the sunrise, a special day with your friends, or even a picture of a networking event you attended. 

And in the same way, you can see what your family is up to as well. When you are missing them and can’t be with them in person, these snippets of their life can help you feel closer.

You can also buy your family digital frames that everyone can upload pictures to. This is a great gift for grandparents and parents to watch new pictures come in without having to download each one on their phones.

Game Night

If game night is an important tradition for your family, you can keep it up while at school, too. Virtual board games, trivia nights, charades, and video games are all ways you can do this from different locations. 

Alternate between each member of your family so everyone has the chance to pick a game that sounds fun to them, and mix in some prizes for the winners to raise the stakes and spark some friendly competition.

Family Clubs/Challenges

Whether you participate in challenges or start a club, you don’t have to be with each other in person to bond over shared passions.

Here are some examples of family clubs and challenges:

  • Movie club: There’s nothing like a family movie night. If your family loves cinema, you can keep the tradition going at school by selecting new films to watch either on a call or on your own time and discussing them afterward. To make it even more fun, incorporate themes or snacks into your movie club. 
  • Book club: For literary fans, start a book club with your family, with each person bringing their own insights about the characters and plot to your group calls. 
  • Running challenges: If you come from a family of runners, try challenging each other on speed, distance, and frequency of your runs and share your results.
  • Workout competitions: You can also have workout competitions, whether that be push-ups, planks, or even jump rope challenges.

Birthday Celebrations

It’s hard to be away during a loved one’s birthday, but you can still celebrate them even if it’s not in person, making their day special and creating lasting memories. 

Through virtual birthday parties, your family can share cake, exchange stories, sing happy birthday, and watch presents being opened.  

If you’d like to put together a surprise, coordinate a group gift, like a digital card or a present that you mail to them early. You can even create a video montage of each family member sharing what they love about the person and show it to them on their special day. 

Hillcrest’s Affordable BYU-I Housing

At Hillcrest Townhouses, we offer affordable housing close to BYU-I. With a theater room where you can watch movie club films, high-speed internet for family calls, and fully furnished apartments to have shared dinners in, we want you to have a space that feels like a true home away from home. 

If you are interested in seeing your townhouses up close, we can schedule a tour and show you your options. Let’s get connected so we can help you find the right housing for you.