For about six months, every playground visit ended the same way: me carrying my daughter out under my arm like a rolled-up carpet while she screamed “NO! TWO MORE!” at a volume that made a pigeon fall off the fence. Real pigeon. It startled, flapped, came back.

I tried everything the internet told me. The five-minute warning. The two-minute warning. The one-minute warning. She heard none of them. She was four feet up a climbing frame, fully committed to being a pirate, and my voice was just weather.

The timer on my phone flopped too. I set a cheerful little chime for “five more minutes” and she treated it like the starting gun for climbing higher. I have a photo of her on top of the slide, timer going off in my pocket, grinning at me like a tiny dictator.

What actually worked was embarrassingly simple, and I only figured it out because I was too tired to argue one Tuesday.

First: the warning has to be physical, not verbal. I go to the bottom of the slide, I crouch down, I touch her shoulder, and I say, “Three more slides, then we say goodbye to the park.” I hold up three fingers. She counts them. Something about being touched and seeing the fingers makes it land in a way shouting across the playground never did.

Second: the goodbye ritual. We wave at the swings. We say “bye-bye slide.” It sounds ridiculous. She is four. She does it solemnly, like she’s closing a shop for the night. Some days she adds new items — last week we said goodbye to a specific wood chip. But the ritual gives the leaving a shape instead of it just being me ending the fun.

Third, and I’m not ashamed of this one: the exit snack. There is a banana in my bag every single time. Not for hunger — for the walk. The second her feet hit the pavement, banana appears. It works because leaving the playground is genuinely hard for her, and having something to hold and chew while we walk home gives her hands and mouth a job that isn’t screaming.

Does it work every time? No. Last Thursday it rained, she was overtired, and I carried the carpet again. A dog walker gave me the look. But we’ve gone from a meltdown every visit to maybe one in five, and the one in five is usually because I skipped a step — no shoulder touch, no banana, my fault.

The thing I stopped doing was treating the leaving like a negotiation. There is nothing to negotiate. We are leaving. The warnings and the ritual and the banana aren’t persuasion tactics. They’re just me acknowledging that stopping something fun is hard, and giving her a way through it instead of dragging her.

She still says “two more” sometimes. Now I say “okay, two more,” and she does two, and then she waves at the wood chip, and we go home.