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Suppose "you" personally can handle the disconnect and hop from a skype session with the wife and toddler to an immediate direct-action engagement, are you certain the guy next to you can? I can see no reason why a quick phonecall to say "hi" to the family is a problem, in a vacuum. But communicating home, whereas the actual phone call is a creature comfort, can have totally different motivations afterwards.
Soldier A: just found out their new daughter was born without complications and will be going home from the hospital the next morning.
Soldier B: just found out his wife is sleeping with the next-door neighbor, his son was just arrested for trafficking narcotics, and the bank which force-placed insurance on his home is about to foreclose (in actual law a foreclosure must be stayed while a solider is serving active-duty overseas, but attorney fees and interest rates plus back payments keep rising).
Assume both soldiers are equal professionals in every comparable manner. No way in hell will Soldier B not be more distracted. Will it necessarily mean they can't do their job? Of course not. But as mentioned above, the Holmes Rahe stress scale is real. Everyone has a breaking point and why risk it on a foreign battlefield?
Extending this out from overseas deployment to regular work, anyone with more access to communicate with their family or friends WHILE working, said communications will necessarily affect the person communicating from work. It might not be catastrophic failure, but the reward is no way commensurate with the risk.
I remember receiving letters from my family serving and eagerly writing back that evening so it could go in the next-day mail. I also remember speaking with family as gunshots and explosions ring out in the distant background. I'm not sure if the family communications disrupted any strategy or operations but every action has an equal and opposite reaction. How the reaction manifests itself varies to the individual.
As a whole, our society is too technologically ingrained with social media. Everyone feels a need to know what everyone else is doing right away. And ironically, that takes away from the intimacy of what's going on in real life right in front of your face.
TL;DR - If it's not safe enough to take your family with you, you should probably not communicate with them even weekly until you're out of theatre.
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