Time limits, breaks, and viewing windows

A daily cap controls total volume. It does nothing about the quality of the session, and long uninterrupted viewing is where the behaviour parents dislike actually comes from — the glazed-over state, the difficulty stopping, the disproportionate reaction when the device is taken away.

A short enforced break every half hour interrupts that pattern before it establishes. It is a small intervention with an outsized effect: children who break every thirty minutes tend to transition off a device far more easily than children who watch the same total time in one sitting.

It also makes the end of the session less of an event. When breaks are normal, the final stop is one more break that happens not to resume, rather than a sudden removal after ninety unbroken minutes.

The defaults — five minutes every thirty — suit most primary-age children. Younger children often do better with a shorter interval; older children can usually handle forty-five minutes without much difference.

Rules that cannot bend get abandoned. A long car journey, a sick day, or a film that runs twenty minutes past the cap are all situations where the sensible answer is to make an exception, and having to change the underlying setting to do it is exactly the friction that causes parents to give up on limits.

You can grant extra time for a specific day without touching the daily limit. The extension applies to that day only and the normal cap resumes tomorrow, so a one-off stays a one-off.

There is also a narrower exception for letting a child finish the video they are currently watching when the limit lands mid-way. Stopping a video eight minutes from the end produces a much worse outcome than the eight minutes would have.

All exceptions are recorded, so if you find yourself granting extra time four evenings a week, that is visible — and it usually means the underlying limit is set wrong rather than that your child keeps having exceptional days.

Separately from time, you can control how much of a library is available at once. Setting a cap on active videos, with a release rate — daily, weekly, or monthly — means a large library is revealed gradually rather than all at once.

This solves a specific problem: a child with two hundred videos available spends a meaningful share of their session choosing rather than watching, and tends to graze rather than finish anything. A smaller rotating set produces calmer sessions.

Automatic rotation is on by default when a cap is set, so the available set refreshes on schedule without you doing anything. If you would rather curate what is available week to week yourself, turn rotation off and choose manually.