I reflect on how I communicated with my own three children at different stages of their growth and development. From the start, for instance, they all called Helena, my wife, 'Mimi'. This was started by Phoebe, the eldest. Living in Happy Valley, I had the misfortune of giving her, when she was one, her very first speech lesson, while holding her in my arms watching horses marching downhill into the race course.

So the first word I taught her was 'ma', Cantonese for 'horse'. The upshot was that, at the second lesson, she wouldn't say 'Mammy'. She absolutely refused to call her mother a horse! We reached a compromise, and she would only repeat the second syllable of 'Mammy'. She has addressed Helena as Mimi ever since, and so have her brothers. The lesson I learned was that language teaching is fraught with pitfalls.

I sent my children to a wide range of hobby classes when they were small, enabling them to express themselves in different formats and media. They're all good musicians. Phoebe loved drawing pictures, too, and after art class training and reading comic books, she started producing her own full- length comic strips.

That was in the early 1990s, when she was boarding in a dungeon-like castle-turned-dormitory, and writing us long letters on one-sheet aerogrammes. My heart warmed to see her writing the little line,'Thank you, Mr Postman!' beside the home address. Alas, this form of communication, which allows fuller expression of sentiments, soon became obsolete.

Phoebe moved to St Paul's Girls in London for Form Six studies and would make long-distance calls home from telephone boxes on weekends. We had a common hobby of watching films, and mostly we chatted about the Hong Kong productions she watched in London to alleviate her homesickness.

Perhaps only a girl would sit and write long letters and have lengthy chats with parents.

Her younger brother, Phoebus, was always a quiet child. But he ended up a valedictorian when he graduated from high school.

By then, my three kids were communicating with their friends in new ways. They later went on to e-mail, blogs and Facebook.

Fabian, the youngest, was typical of a teenager left at home alone, after Phoebe and Phoebus had gone overseas. He would sit at the dinner table in silence. When we finally protested, he retorted, in a most condescending tone, that he was already doing enough by dining at the same table with us: 'Why, all my classmates shut themselves up in their own rooms all evening!'

The solution was for me to become his friend in need. Studying at Sevenoaks, Kent, for the International Baccalaureate, he called home with an SOS. He was a science student, so he found it hard to prepare for a test on Shakespeare's Othello.

I came to his rescue by giving him a quick lecture on the phone, then sending him a comic book version of the tragedy. I was gratified to see him growing fond of the Bard. At home on summer vacation, he watched the film Shakespeare in Love, was fascinated by the play within the play, and hunted for a copy of Romeo and Juliet to read.

All our children talked to us more when they were abroad than when they were at home.

Phoebe and Fabian are both working and living abroad, and I must pay my respects to the late Steve Jobs for enabling us to continue with free and intimate communications. We chat on the iPhone or iPad virtually face-to-face through Skype.

We frequently engage in sustained dialogue on our iPhones using WhatsApp. A scattered family in the global village today has no difficulty at all in communicating.

Rupert Chan is a recently retired university administrator and chairman of the Chung Ying Theatre Company