by Maggie Downs posted in Life

I just spent a little over a week away from home for a professional development conference, which meant I was forced to communicate with my 3-year-old son by FaceTime.
The expectation is always that FaceTime (or your video chat service of choice) will go very, very well. It will be a tender moment of connection between mother and child. It will be a meaningful exchange in which distance is transcended in mere seconds. It will be the best part of the day.
The reality, however, is that FaceTime with a toddler is a digital hellscape.

 
There is no good way to FaceTime with a toddler because:
1. He expects Paw Patrol when he looks at a screen.
2. I am not Paw Patrol.
Whenever this realization hits my child, he looks at me with the same expression I reserve for the DMV when I've made an appointment and still end up #87 in line. The only difference is that I've learned to stifle my screams. Beyond that, there's a performative aspect to FaceTime that makes these conversations feel phony. I was ready to call it quits after a night of him running circles around the iPad, ignoring me in favor of his toys, then a meltdown when I said I was going to hang up. Yet I missed my child. I still wanted to connect with that stinky little muffin of mine, so I tried and tried again until we made it work.
During that time away, I picked up a couple of tricks for making FaceTime chats as painless as possible for kids of any age. Maybe some of them will work f...