Why your kids should hear your voice, not just see your photos
There are probably thousands of photos of your kids on your phone. Now count the recordings of you talking about them. For most parents that number is close to zero, and it may be the one thing they’d most like to have when they’re grown.
What a photo can’t hold
Photos show what happened. You remember why. A picture of the first day of school shows the backpack and the brave face. It doesn’t show that she made you walk her to the door twice, or how quiet the car felt on the way home.
Writing holds more of that. A voice holds more still: the pause before the funny part, the way you laugh at your own story, the name you call them that nobody else uses. Your kids will always know what you looked like. A recording lets them hear what you sounded like when you were talking about them.
What to record
Not a speech, and not a message to the future. Just a story, told the way you’d tell a friend.
- Something that happened today.
- Something they’re into right now, which will be gone by spring.
- The story of the day they arrived.
- Something you want them to know when they’re older.
If nothing comes to mind, start from a question. There are forty here, grouped by kind.
How to record well on your phone
You don’t need a microphone or special equipment. A few habits make most of the difference.
- Find a quiet room. Turn off the TV and the dishwasher. A room with a rug and a sofa sounds warmer than a kitchen.
- Hold the phone close, about a hand’s width from your mouth, with the bottom edge toward you. That’s where the microphone is on most phones.
- Say their name and the date first. It turns a recording into a story with a place in time.
- Tell it, don’t read it. Pauses and restarts are fine. They’re part of what your kids will want to hear.
- Keep it short. A couple of minutes. Short is what you’ll actually do again tomorrow.
- Listen to the first few seconds before you put the phone down, to check it worked.
Keeping recordings so they last
Recording is the easy part. The harder part is finding it again in fifteen years.
- Name each one with your kid’s name and the date, so it stands out from everything else on your phone.
- Keep them together. A recording in a folder of their stories gets listened to. One lost in a long list of voice memos usually doesn’t.
- Keep a copy in more than one place, on your phone and in a backup you control.
- Check once a year that the files still open, and move them along when you change phones.
If something happens
Some parents start recording because they’ve thought about what would happen if they weren’t there. That’s a reason worth having, and it’s worth deciding now who would keep the recordings. But most of these stories are for an ordinary future: your kid at thirty, curious about who they were at six, hearing you tell it.
How Vocette helps
Vocette is a voice journal for parents. Each evening it asks you one good question about one of your kids. You answer out loud for a couple of minutes, and every story is kept as your recording, tagged by kid so you can find it again.
Your recordings stay on your phone unless you choose to back them up. Backups are private: other families can’t see them, and we only open one if you ask us to or the law requires it. You can seal a story until their 18th birthday, or a day you choose. And with an account, you can name someone you trust to receive your stories if something happens to you. We hope it never matters.
Vocette is launching on iPhone first.