Ending screen time: the handover matters more than the limit
Families set limits and then fight anyway, which suggests the limit is not the sore point. Watch the moment the device goes away and the pattern is clearer.
Video designed for children is built to remove stopping points. Autoplay, no credits, next episode already running. A child asked to stop is not being asked to finish something — they are being asked to interrupt something engineered never to finish.
Restore the stopping point
Ending at a boundary the child can perceive — the end of an episode, the end of a level, the save point — removes most of the conflict without changing the total minutes. Where the content has no boundary, imposing one before starting works better than imposing one during.
"Two more episodes" is a stopping point. "Twenty more minutes" is not, unless the child can see a clock and read it.
The five minutes after
The worst part of the transition is often not the ending but the vacuum after it. Children coming off a screen are frequently flat, irritable and at a loose end, and adults read that as proof the screen was the problem. Having the next thing already in motion — the table set, the walk starting — carries more weight than any negotiation about duration.