<human>: We were on our way home from vacation and stopped at a McDonalds for lunch.  This particular McD's happened to have a playground.  Given the fact that we were still 9 hours away from home I did not let my 3 year old daughter play on it. (My fault for stopping at a McD's with a playground, now I know...) 

But for the next hour all I heard was "Daddy, I wanted to play on the playground" Incessant, whining, for an hour.  Finally I had enough, I turned and said to her in a stern (but not yelling) voice and said "K, if you don't stop talking about the playground, I'm going to stop the car and drop you off right here!" 

Big Wide Eyes-- "Daddy, NOOO!!!!" But she sat quietly and fell asleep shortly after.  Finally got a couple hours of peace.  Parenting win, I'm thinking.  But...as she was sleeping, I looked at my wife and asked if she really thought I would drop her off on the side of the road.  She looked at me and kind of shrugged her shoulders and gave me a "well, yeah, probably"

During those hours of sleep I started thinking about our vacation.  We had a pool in the backyard and her greatest accomplishment of the week was to jump in from the side all by herself.  This took a lot of coaxing and convincing that I would never let anything bad happen to her and she could trust me to always be there for her.  We were both super proud when she did it all herself.

My question to you Reddit is: is this something we just all do and have to live with?  I mean I want her to trust me and know that I would NEVER do anything to cause her harm.  However, sometimes it seems that you have to exert your will through a perceived threat.  How do I come to terms with this seemingly insurmountable dichotomy?

Give me the gist of the text in a nutshell
<bot>: Threaten to leave my 3 year old on the side of the road coming home from vacation, but ALSO want implicit trust from her that I would not do anything to ever harm her.  How to surmount that contradiction?