Marking the child as out (daycare, grandma, the other parent)

The watch chip shows who's actively watching the child inside the app (see on-duty-handoff). Sometimes that's the wrong frame: the child is genuinely outside the app's care set — at daycare, with grandma, at the other parent's. Marking the child as out is the chrome's way of saying "no-one needs to be on the watch right now — they're elsewhere, and that's intentional."

---

## How to mark out

1. Tap the watch chip next to your child's name button.
2. In the small sheet that opens, tap Mark out.
3. Pick a reason (optional — you can mark Out without one):
4. - Daycare — at the nursery / preschool.
5. - With other parent — with your co-parent for the day or the night.
6. - With grandma — with a grandparent (covers any grandparent).
7. - With sitter — with a babysitter or nanny.
8. - Other — anything else, or skip the reason picker entirely.
9. The chip across every caregiver's screen flips to Out · {reason} (or just Out if you skipped the reason).

The chip stays that way until someone clears it.

---

## What happens to the watch when you mark out

Marking Out is mutually exclusive with anyone being on the watch — the chip can't say "On the watch" and "Out · Daycare" at the same time.

• If you were on the watch when you tapped Mark out, your watch is dropped automatically. Same with anyone else who held the watch on the channel — their session sees the Out signal and self-clears their on-duty bit within a second or two. Nobody has to step off manually.
• If no-one was on the watch, the chrome just flips to Out without any other change.

This is the "truth-in-chrome" promise: when the chip says Out, it means Out — no stale "On the watch" lingering on a different screen.

---

## From chat

These phrasings work too — Happyly fires the same action and flips the chip on every caregiver's screen:

• "I just dropped Michael at daycare."
• "She's with grandma tonight."
• "He's at his dad's."
• "The sitter's here."
• "We're home." / "Picked Michael up." / "Back from daycare." — clears Out.

Happyly confirms warmly ("Got it — Michael's at daycare.") and stays quiet about it otherwise.

---

## Coming home — the Welcome-back follow-up

When you tap the Out · {reason} chip and pick We're back:

1. The Out chip clears immediately on every caregiver's screen.
2. Happyly surfaces a soft inline prompt next to the watch chip: "Welcome back. [Take the watch] [Skip]".
3. Tap Take the watch to claim it — your chip flips to On the watch, your co-parents' chip flips to "{Your name} has the watch".
4. Tap Skip if no-one needs to be on the watch yet (e.g., the baby's asleep and both adults are working).
5. Either way, the prompt auto-dismisses after about 10 seconds so it doesn't linger.

The prompt is local to whoever tapped We're back — your co-parents see the Out chip clear but aren't prompted to take the watch themselves. The person on the ground claiming the watch is the right default.

---

## What it does (and doesn't) do

• ✅ Shows every caregiver — host and edit-tracker guests — that the child is intentionally outside the app's care set.
• ✅ Optional reason chip so co-parents know roughly where, without anything more granular being tracked.
• ✅ Auto-clears any active watch on the channel when Out is set ("truth in chrome").
• ✅ Offers a one-tap Take the watch when you mark back — no extra navigation needed.
• ❌ Doesn't track how long the child has been out. Happyly never times these things — that's the surveillance line we don't cross.
• ❌ Doesn't notify anyone (no push, no email, no sound). The chip is purely ambient — visible only when a caregiver is in the app.
• ❌ Doesn't auto-clear on a timer or schedule. If you forget to mark back, the chip stays until someone taps We're back.
• ❌ Doesn't lock anyone out of the app. Both caregivers can still log feeds, check insights, message the coach — the chip is informational, not gated.

---

## Who can use it

The host and any guest with the Co-parent presence permission (the Co-parent and Caregiver presets). Grandparent / view-only guests see the chip in the chrome but the Mark out action is hidden — they're silent observers who don't change channel-wide state.

---

## Why no time tracking?

Marking the child as "at daycare for 6 hours" would be useful information if the only goal were operational. But the research behind co-parent sync was clear: caregivers resent any mechanic that times them, scores them, or compares them. "Michael's been at daycare for 6h" is one short hop from "Mom did 73% of the daycare drops this month," and that's exactly the surveillance creep we don't want. The chip says Out · Daycare and stays quiet. If you need to track time at daycare, that's a calendar tool's job, not a coaching app's.

---

## Quick reference