Swap the conversation for something you are both doing
The single change that fixes most toddler video calls is trading conversation for a shared activity. Something you can both see and both act on. A book. A drawing you are each adding to on your own paper. Hide and seek where the child carries the phone around and you guess the room. Attention then runs through the activity instead of straight at each other. Nobody has to produce sentences on demand. A silence while somebody hunts for the right crayon is just a silence. Books are the easiest version, because the book supplies all the words. You read, the child looks, and when they do speak it is about the picture in front of them rather than about their day. Where has the dog gone is a question a three year old can answer. How was your day is not.
Five minutes is a real call
Plan for a short one. Twenty five minutes is not a better call than five, it is the same call with twenty minutes of decline stapled on the end. End early. End while it is still going well, mid good bit if you can. Three calls a week of six minutes each is an easier arrangement to keep than one Sunday marathon. If you are on a roster or driving and the window is fixed, keep the child's part of it short anyway. Say your bit, read a page or two, then let them go and talk to the adult in the room. The call does not have to end when the child walks off.
Prop the phone, do not hold it
A handheld phone swings about, changes distance and puts half a forehead out of frame. It also leaves you no hands. Prop it. A stand, a shoe, a mug, a book leaning against the wall. Get it steady and get it far enough back that your hands and shoulders are in shot, because that is where the interesting things happen. If you are holding up a book, or a toy, or making a shadow puppet, the child needs to see the hands doing it. Same at the child's end. Wedge the phone somewhere solid at about their eye height, on the floor if that is where they are. Then they can move around in front of it instead of being held still in front of it.
Call before the bath, not after
Late calls are a hard ask. By the time a toddler has been bathed and put in pyjamas they are running on the last of the day, and that is the call that gets described afterwards as he was so tired he would not even look at the screen. Earlier windows tend to go better. Before the bath, straight after dinner, or in the morning before daycare and the school pick up line. If your only free window is 9pm because that is when the shift ends or the boom gate lifts, record something instead of calling. A book read into a phone camera at 9pm can be played back at 7am by a child who presses the button themselves, over and over, which is generally what they want to do.
Let the child control something
Toddlers control almost nothing in their day. One real lever changes how a call goes. Small things count. Let them press the button that ends the call. Let them pick the book. Let them decide when to turn the page, and wait for them, even if the wait runs ten seconds. Let them carry the phone into the yard to show you the frangipani, or the magpie that has been swooping the letterbox all spring. Often the choosing matters more than what gets chosen. It is also why turning the page matters so much. It is a small job that belongs to the child, and it is the one part of the reading they can do.
What a shared book on a call actually looks like
Concretely: you both have the same book in front of you. You read a page. You ask the small answerable questions instead of the big ones. Can you find the boot. What is he doing with that bucket. Do you want to turn it. Then you wait, and you let the pause run long. Reading the same thing at the same time, in two places, is a well worn idea. For National Simultaneous Storytime in 2025, the Australian Library and Information Association recorded 2,204,658 registered participants across 16,632 locations, all opening the same picture book at the same minute. Two people and one book is the smallest version of that. You can do it with two copies of the same book, or by holding your copy up to the camera. StoryLink does the version where the page turns on both screens at once and you can still see each other's faces, with 333 illustrated books included free. However you do it, the book is the part doing the work.
Some nights it does not work, and that is not a verdict
There will be calls where the child hides, or says no to every book, or stares at their own face in the corner of the screen for four minutes and then asks for the iPad. Toddlers do this to people who live in the same house as them. They wander off mid sentence from adults standing right next to them. It is not a comment on the person on the screen, and it usually turns around on its own. When it happens, end the call kindly and early. Something plain like okay mate, I will read you the rest tomorrow, and go. No negotiating, no making them say goodbye properly, no explaining distances. Short ending, another go tomorrow.