What you can usefully do from a long way away

Small practical things travel well and reassurance does not. Send something ordinary. Cover a specific cost rather than asking whether they need money. Help them work out how to register with a doctor, find the launderette, open the right bank account — the administrative fog is a real and badly underrated part of a first term.

And be the steady one. You are not there and cannot fix the day, but you can be the person whose reaction is predictable — which is exactly what makes you the person they ring when something has genuinely gone wrong. Over three years that is worth more than any amount of intervention.