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Tawny, a stay-at-home mom and primary residential parent living in Florida, assumed the equipment would be used mostly by Ashton's dad Gary Kaleita when she moved to Ohio, where her new husband took a job. Instead, Sloop made Kaleita, who also remarried, the primary residential parent. Kaleita-Sniderman called it "my worst nightmare come true ... One day I had her, and the next day I didn...
Ponytail flying, 10-year-old Ashton Kaleita of Winter Springs, Fla., bounces across her bed, punches buttons on her computer and picks up the phone to dial her mom in Lancaster, Ohio. "Hurry it up, Mama! I have the IP number," she says. In seconds, Ashton's smiling mom appears in real time on the computer screen. "Good morning, Princess," Tawny Kaleita-Sniderman says. Ashton chatters about Saturday's plans--bowling with Dad and the YMCA Indian Princesses, then a sleepover at a friend's house. "Mom, put Sputnik up, please," she squeals. Kaleita-Sniderman gently holds a bewildered-looking...
This virtual visit is one way for Ashton and her mom--who have been separated by thousands of miles since Kaleita-Sniderman divorced, remarried and moved to Ohio--to communicate. The transmission isn't perfect. Lips move. Words lag behind, like a badly dubbed-in translation in a foreign movie. An eerie whistling sound seeps in and out of the audio, and the camera doesn't catch details in Ashton's many works of art. Her brilliant yellow clay dragon with jewel-like eyes and feather wings is a gray blob on the computer screen. But to Ashton, the videoconference...
While videoconferencing is nothing new, Ashton and her mom are pioneers. Ashton's child-custody case is among the nation's first in which virtual visitation was ordered by a judge, and experts predict similar court-ordered arrangements will follow as technology advances and 4 out of 10 marriages fail. The son of an electrical engineer, John Sloop, a Seminole County, Fla., judge, has long delighted in the hands-on problem solving of building and repairing machinery, like the two-story grocery lift he helped build for his mother. So it was natural for Sloop, when making the "heart-wrenching...
...bridge the distance, Judge Sloop ordered "unrestricted" communication between Ashton and her mom. He stipulated that separate phone lines be installed in Ashton's bedrooms in both homes to ensure her privacy when talking with each parent, and he ordered that each parent purchase state-of-the-art computer systems with videoconferencing equipment...