A few weeks ago Julia wrote about how we approach kids climbing:

The basics:

1. Spot the child if they're doing something where a fall is likely.
2. Don't encourage or help the child to climb something that's beyond their ability to do on their own.
3. If they don't know how to get down, give advice rather than physically lifting them down.
4. Don't allow climbing on some places that are too dangerous.

I was thinking about this some when I was at the park with Nora (3y) a few days ago. She has gotten pretty interested in climbing lately, and this time she climbed up the fence higher than I'd seen her go before. If I'd known she'd climb this high I would have spotted her. She called me over, very proud, and wanted me to take a picture so that Julia could see too:

She asked me to carry her down, and I told her I was willing to give her advice and spot her. She was willing to give this a try, but as she started to go down some combination of being scared and the thin wire of the fence being painful was too much, and she returned to the thicker horizontal bars.

We tried this several times, with her getting increasingly upset. After a bit Lily came over and tried to help, but was unsuccessful. Eventually I put my hands on Nora's feet and with a mix of guiding and (not ideal) supporting them helped her climb down to the lower bar. She did the rest herself from there, something she's done many times.

This took about fifteen minutes and wasn't fun for any of us: Nora, me, other people at the playground. But over the course of the rest of the day I brought it up several times, trying to get her to think it through before she climbs higher than she would enjoy climbing down from.

(I think this is an approach that depends very heavily on the child's judgment maturing sufficiently quickly relative to their physical capabilities, and so is not going to be applicable to every family. Lily and Anna were slower to climb and this was not an issue, while Nora has pushed the edges of where this works much more.)