5 Family Problems Simirity Was Built to Solve

Andrew Ronald

Simirity Founder | Father of two

16th June, 2025

Modern families face a unique set of communication problems brought about by spending less time physically together. Technology has provided us with powerful tools—WhatsApp, FaceTime, Facebook, Google Photos—yet many families still feel emotionally distant and struggle to pass down what matters most. 

For instance, many families are less familiar with their extended family than previous generations were. Irreplaceable heritage stories disappear when elderly relatives pass away. And life lessons that once flowed naturally between generations now get lost in our busy, scattered lives.

My family felt these problems and others too, and we wanted to do something about it. We built Simirity to fill these gaps—not as a replacement for existing family communication apps, but to complement them with something designed specifically for families. 

In this article, we explore five distinct family problems that Simirity addresses—problems that even the best communication apps weren’t designed to solve.

Which of These Family Problems Sounds Familiar?

Before we explore each family problem in detail, take a moment to consider which of these scenarios sounds most relevant to your family. Perhaps multiple problems will resonate with you—my family can relate to all five.

1. Families separated by distance can struggle to go deeper than surface-level conversations. You’re well-connected technically, but miss that feeling of genuine closeness.
2. Families with elderly relatives who recognise that time is limited to capture precious stories before they’re lost forever. In my family, I’m very keen to preserve the stories that only my retired parents know.
3. Heritage enthusiasts seeking to add personal stories to their family tree research. You understand that while ancestors’ stories are precious, the family stories being created today are just as important—and far more accessible to preserve.
4. Parents trying to preserve present-day moments that families will treasure in future years. When I capture stories about special times with my kids, it feels like I’m making a priceless investment—and if it’s not captured now, there’s no way to get it back.
5. Families sharing life lessons across generations. You’ve accumulated wisdom through real-world experiences that could guide younger family members, but busy lives mean these conversations rarely happen naturally.

You might not feel all these problems today, but Simirity can grow with your family’s needs. Start with your most pressing challenge and expand from there.

Let’s look at the family problems in more detail, identify the underlying issues, and see how Simirity can help.

Your family’s past, present & future—woven together in Simirity

learn more

1. Long-Distance Families

Do you enjoy your family calls but find that they follow the same predictable pattern? ‘How’s work?’ ‘How are the kids?’ ‘What’s the weather like?’ You hang up feeling like you’ve checked a box rather than genuinely connected.

The challenges of living apart

• Time zone differences make spontaneous conversations nearly impossible.
• Scheduled calls focus on “catch-up” topics with little time for deeper conversations.
• Children lose interest in routine calls and only truly connect during rare face-to-face visits.
• You miss daily family details that grandparents especially treasure—the small moments between big milestones.

How Simirity solves these problems

Every platform shapes what we share. 

Facebook encourages uplifting updates with cheerful photos. LinkedIn is for professional achievements. WhatsApp is for quick messages. But where do you share your child’s thoughts on what he wants to be when he grows up? Or your own story about growing up in the 80’s?

Simirity gives families permission to explore conversations they’d never have elsewhere—not because they couldn’t, but because we naturally adapt to each platform’s unspoken rules.

• Connect on your schedule — share stories and send story requests when convenient; family responds when it suits them.
• Stories inspire better conversations — when Mum shares a story about her first job or the Annapurna trek from her youth, your next call becomes far more interesting.
• Share beyond the highlight reel — capture everyday moments, children’s artwork, and casual videos you’d never post publicly.
• Give children family context — they discover what grandparents, parents and extended family members experienced, creating real topics for meaningful conversations while making them feel more connected to family beyond their home.

2. Families With Elderly Relatives

As a tech geek, I wouldn’t dream of not backing up my important files. Yet for years, I didn’t realise that the most precious content of all—my family’s stories—existed only in my ageing parents’ memories. When this finally dawned on me, it felt overwhelming. All those stories they’d gathered from their own parents and extended family could be lost forever, simply because I hadn’t asked the right questions or made the effort to preserve them.

The challenge of preserving their stories

• Knowing where to store everything safely — you end up with written notes, photos, videos, and voice recordings scattered across different places. How do you keep them organised and accessible to relevant family members?
• Getting reluctant parents to open up — many elderly relatives won’t share personal stories without being asked direct questions, but they often don’t know where to start.
• Asking the right questions — with so many life experiences to explore, it’s overwhelming. Questions like “How was your childhood?” are too broad. You need guided prompts that uncover specific, meaningful stories.
• Making it feel natural, not intimidating — putting elderly relatives “in the spotlight” for formal interviews can feel uncomfortable and make them withdraw.
• Capturing personality, not just facts — you want their humour, emotions, and hard-earned wisdom preserved authentically, not sanitised accounts that don’t sound like them.
• Including difficult stories too — the miscarriages, failed relationships, and work disappointments are hard to discuss, but they’re often where the most valuable life lessons and genuine connections happen.

Simirity’s gentle approach

Simirity recognises that preserving elderly relatives’ stories isn’t just about capturing information—it’s about enjoying the journey and deepening relationships as you explore their past. Our approach makes story-sharing feel like quality time together rather than a ‘must-do’ documentation task.

• Everything is stored in one secure place — photos, videos, written stories, and voice recordings are all saved together as private stories that can be shared with the family.
• Natural conversation flow — story prompts that feel like interesting questions rather than interviews.
• Specific, manageable topics — guided prompts like “Tell us about your first job” instead of overwhelming broad questions.
• Family-wide participation — stories come from everyone, so no one feels singled out as the sole focus. Grandparents get to enjoy stories from their family, as well as exploring and sharing their past.
• Personality-rich stories — capture the way they actually speak, including their humour and emotional insights by including video or voice recordings in stories. These formats capture so much more than words alone.
• Honest family history — Simirity prompts families to share both celebratory and difficult stories. Stories about struggles are among the best for connecting people, and offer helpful insights that stories about fun times never can.

3. Heritage Enthusiasts

My mother has done incredible work building our family tree over the years. It’s nice hearing about her latest discoveries—new names, dates, and the odd photo stretching back generations.

But despite all her research, we still don’t feel significantly closer to these ancestors. The problem is that their stories weren’t preserved, so we know very little about them. This led to our realisation that if we don’t preserve today’s experiences, our descendants will know as little about us as we know about them.

Family heritage is not just about the past; it’s also about preserving our living history.

Problems for heritage enthusiasts

• Missing the human stories — genealogy provides dates and places but doesn’t help you understand ancestors as real people with hopes, fears, and daily struggles.
• Incomplete family picture — official records like those available on Ancestry, capture major events but miss the small moments, family traditions, and personal stories that represent our true life experience.
• Desire to bring family history to life for children — your family have had such diverse and rich life experiences, yet children mostly learn about the past from history books. Wouldn’t history be so much more engaging and meaningful if they were hearing about it from their family’s perspective?

How Simirity helps heritage enthusiasts

While genealogy websites excel at organising facts and building family trees, Simirity creates the space for what’s missing—the human stories that bring those names and dates to life.

• Real people behind the names — preserve stories that reveal ancestors’ personalities, struggles, and joys alongside their birth and death dates.
• Documents the details that records miss — preserve family traditions, daily life details, and personal experiences that never appear in official documents.
• Engaging family history education — with parents and grandparents sharing their take on world events they’ve experienced, children gain a personal and meaningful view of history through their own family’s eyes.

4. Preserving Present-Day Moments

Modern families are great at documenting life through photos, but we’ve confused capturing moments with preserving experiences.

You may have thousands of images, but how many actually capture the complete story you can revisit? The things your children say and do, your thoughts and feelings about today’s experiences—none of these fit in a photograph. Yet these are often the moments that you’ll find most meaningful in later years.

The challenge isn’t taking more photos; it’s recognising the stories worth preserving and capturing them with their full context and emotion intact.

Why photos alone aren’t enough

• Photos without stories lose their meaning — without someone to explain the context, family photos become just visual records rather than meaningful memories that capture how moments felt and why they mattered.
• Many important moments can’t be captured in pictures — children’s funny questions, unexpected insights, and daily family interactions can’t be photographed but are often the most treasured memories.
• Photo overload dilutes meaning — thousands of images make it impossible to find the truly special moments when you want to revisit them.

How Simirity preserves what photos miss

There’s currently no shared space designed specifically for families to preserve their meaningful moments privately.

Social media platforms are built for public engagement, not intimate family memories involving children. Simirity fills this gap by creating a secure family environment where you can combine different media types—photos, videos, audio, and stories—to capture experiences as they really felt, not just how they looked.

• Safe space for family memories — share intimate moments privately without worrying about public exposure or data privacy.
• Complete story capture — preserve not just what happened, but how it felt and why it mattered to your family.
• Emotional context preserved — capture children’s words, parental thoughts, and family conversations alongside visual memories.
• Meaningful moments highlighted — special experiences don’t get lost among endless camera roll photos.

5. Supportive Families

The old saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ reflects how families once functioned as support networks. The extended family shared experiences regularly, creating natural mentoring for children and mutual support for adults.

Today’s families are geographically scattered and busier than ever, with children often unaware of what happens outside their own household. Families possess collective wisdom but lack the regular connection needed to share this precious resource that can truly help those in need.

When family support fails

• Values drift without family reinforcement — healthy family principles and values get weakened when children primarily learn from peers and media rather than extended family members who share those same values.
• Textbook advice lacks personal connection — children receive generic guidance from books and internet sources instead of real-world family experiences they can relate to, with no ability to ask follow-up questions from someone who truly knows them.
• Elder wisdom remains inaccessible — grandparents and older relatives possess decades of life experience and hard-earned insights, but younger generations rarely access this wisdom because visits are infrequent and conversations stay surface-level.
• Unaware of the help that family can provide — family members struggle with challenges alone, unaware that relatives have faced similar situations and could provide guidance, support, or simply the comfort of shared experience.
• Limited role models and mentors — children grow up with fewer adult influences and examples of different life paths, missing opportunities to learn from diverse family experiences and perspectives.

How Simirity rebuilds family support

Simirity transforms scattered family wisdom into accessible guidance by turning life experiences into stories.

When family members share their challenges, successes, and lessons learned, they create a library of real-world advice that children and adults can access anytime. Unlike generic internet advice, these stories come with context, personality, and the option to ask follow-up questions from people who genuinely care.

• Values reinforcement through storytelling — family principles get strengthened when children hear how multiple relatives successfully applied these values.
• Real-world guidance over generic advice — family stories provide context and nuance that textbooks can’t match, with the ability to ask clarifying questions.
• Elder wisdom made accessible — grandparents and older relatives can share life lessons through engaging stories that younger generations can revisit anytime.
• Awareness of family resources — ongoing story sharing reveals which family members have relevant experience to help with current challenges.
• Multiple role models available — children see diverse life paths and approaches through extended family stories, expanding their understanding of possibilities.

Why Traditional Communication Tools Fall Short

We have more ways to communicate with family than ever before. So why do many families still feel disconnected? The truth is, these tools are brilliant at what they were designed for—quick messages, video chats, and social networking. But these are not family bonding apps; they connect us briefly rather than bringing us closer.

Here are a few reasons why the traditional family communication apps may not be the complete solution:

The messaging app trap

WhatsApp and Messenger excel at quick updates—’Kids are fine,’ ‘Weather’s lovely here,’ ‘Happy birthday!’ But try sharing a meaningful story about your grandmother’s wartime experiences or your child’s recent revelation. These platforms feel too casual for sharing more personal moments.

Video calls: great for faces, not for stories

FaceTime and Zoom are brilliant for seeing each other, but busy schedules and time zones limit when you can talk. More importantly, once the call ends, those precious conversations disappear into memory—if anyone remembers them at all.

Social media: public performance not private connection

Facebook and Instagram are designed for public sharing and entertainment, not intimate family bonding. These platforms prioritise likes and engagement over meaningful family connections.

Photo apps: pictures without context

Google Photos and iCloud store thousands of images beautifully, but they can’t capture why a moment matters. Twenty years from now, will your children remember the story behind that random Tuesday photo? Without context, even your most treasured photos become just an interesting collection to scroll through.

See Simirity in Action

If any of the family problems we explored are familiar —feeling distant despite regular contact, worrying about lost stories, or struggling to preserve meaningful moments—Simirity can help.

Rather than replacing your existing family communication apps, Simirity complements them by providing what’s been missing: a private space designed specifically for deeper family connection and story preservation.

Watch the video below to see Simirity in action, then explore our demo account to browse family stories and experience the platform for yourself.

Join for free and start building your family’s digital legacy today.