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Comment by csmeder | Hacker News Reader

Hi Royce and Oliver, I have a suggestion: look into dimming the screen slowly for the last 30-60 seconds before you pull a person out of the app. This will greatly decrease the annoyance of being pulled out. It gives you time to anticipate being done with your session. I do this with my toddler.

We let him use our phone to look at family videos while we are changing him. If I turn the phone off abruptly, it can be frustrating for him at times. However, if I manually dim the screen more and more (and lower the volume more and more), it feels natural that the phone is getting "tired". He is then okay with leaving the phone.

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This is brilliant, will absolutely hack around with it this weekend. I think it's possible to temporarily modify brightness on iOS as a third party app, thanks very much for the suggestion

Instead of brightness, you could make the screen go black and white. I already do this to reduce my screen time. You can set screen colors in accessibility, and scrolling instagram is much more boring when it's in B&W.

I have my triple tap set to B&W, definitely makes things a lot less interesting.

I had that and found it to be less effective since it was so easy to disable it.

I'm now using the iOS shortcut automation turning on the BW mode at 10pm and then disabling it at 5pm.

same. wish there was a shortcut i could place on my home screen as a toggle though.

Absolutely gold suggestion. This might just be the future for most internet-connected device use, and particularly for children/supervised use like you're describing.

Do you have physical brightness buttons? Do you have any more gradual transition hacks?

Our 2-yr old doesn't have access to phones at all -- except perhaps when he grabs one that's lying around; but then he expects it taken from him. But he's so taken with TV that we plan screen time in reverse: start at dinner time and subtract how much time we want him to be there. Our whole approach to tantrums is having something else lined up rather than just shutting things off and leaving a void. I'm fascinated by your methods.

he's probably just surreptitiously using control center to dial things down. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202769

One thing I discovered recently was that iPhone volume buttons decrement the volume 1/16 at a time.

Correct, as he gets older this won’t work because he will understand what I’m doing.

I’ve thought about writing an app that shows a pre set collection of videos from my photo library and then slowly turns down the brightness after a few minutes. If anyone want to build this let me know. I’d love to use it.

We don’t have a tv in the house. And we don’t use our phones/iPad in front of our son. So the only time he sees a screen is when we are changing his diaper. The only exception has been when we are all sick we watch a family movie on the iPad with him. And if I’m being honest a few Saturday mornings I’ll watch a show with him while we are waking up.

I use control center to lower the brightness.

> So the only time he sees a screen is when we are changing his diaper.

"Mum! Why do I always need the loo when I'm doing homework on the computer?"

"Ah."

It's this and a thousand other "hacks to handle human failings" that will allow us to have the promise of technology while minimising the downsides - just as we did for weavers looms, coal power and so on

Really love this idea!

Wow! Brilliant idea!

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