If we could give parents one technique, it would be this: warn before you change anything.
Why abrupt endings fail
A four-year-old deep in play is fully absorbed. From the inside, an adult announcing "time to go" is not an instruction — it is an unexplained, unnegotiated end to something important, arriving with no notice.
The resulting resistance is entirely reasonable. Adults would object to the same treatment.
What to do instead
"Two more slides, then we go." Countable, not temporal. Young children have almost no sense of what two minutes means, but they understand two slides, two more turns, one more page.
Then hold it exactly. If you said two slides, it is two slides. A warning that turns out to be soft teaches a child that warnings can be negotiated, and then it stops working.
Same signal every time. A phrase, a song, a bell. After a few weeks the signal itself does the work and you stop having to repeat yourself.
Say what comes next. "We're going home to have dinner" gives them something to move toward instead of only something to leave.
Give the job of ending it to them. "You tell me when you've finished the last one." Astonishingly effective, because it converts a loss of control into a small exercise of it.
Where it matters most
Leaving a playground. Turning off a screen — this is the hardest transition of the modern day and warnings are essential. Coming to the table. Leaving the house in the morning. Bedtime. And drop-off, where a short, definite, always-the-same goodbye is itself a transition ritual.
Why we use it constantly
Every transition in our day has a warning built into it — before tidying, before circle, before coming in from outside, before lunch. It is not politeness. It is the single most effective behaviour tool in an early years room, and it costs two minutes.
More on the daily rhythm in our approach.
