How to Stop Being a Reactive Parent
You know the feeling. Your kid melts down in the grocery store. Your teenager fails a test they didn’t study for. Your 8-year-old can’t find their shoes — again. And you react. You solve. You lecture. You move on.
Then it happens again next week.
This is reactive parenting, and it’s not a character flaw. It’s the default mode for every parent alive. The day is full of fires, and you spend it putting them out.
The problem isn’t that you react. The problem is that reacting is all you do.
What reactive parenting actually looks like
Reactive parenting isn’t bad parenting. It’s incomplete parenting.
You teach your kid about money when they blow their allowance on junk. You teach them about time management when they’re sobbing at 10 PM over an assignment due tomorrow. You teach them about conflict when they get in a fight with a friend.
The lesson always comes after the crisis. The kid learns, but they learn the hard way every time. And some lessons — the important, quiet ones — never come up at all because there’s no crisis to trigger them.
When’s the last time a crisis taught your kid to cook a real meal? Or handle their own money? Or sit with boredom? Or make a phone call to someone they don’t know?
Those things don’t create emergencies. They create adults who can’t function.
This is what Clayton Christensen — the Harvard professor who spent his final years thinking about family strategy — warned about: the same way companies fail by only reacting to competitors, families fail by only reacting to crises. Without intention, you’re optimizing for today while bankrupting the future.
The cost of staying reactive
Here’s what happens when reactive is your only mode:
Important skills get postponed indefinitely. You always mean to teach them to do laundry, manage a calendar, navigate a disagreement respectfully. But there’s never a fire forcing your hand, so it never happens. The urgent devours the important, week after week, year after year.
You’re always exhausted. Firefighting is draining. You solve the same problems on repeat — the same morning chaos, the same homework meltdowns, the same sibling fights — because the root cause never gets addressed. The root cause is missing skills. And skills don’t appear on their own.
Your kid doesn’t build confidence. Confidence isn’t built by being told “you can do this.” It’s built by doing things and surviving. A child who only learns through crisis develops a belief: “I can’t handle things until they blow up.” That’s not resilience. That’s anxiety wearing resilience’s clothes.
The gap grows silently. At 6, you barely notice. At 10, you start to wonder. By 15, you’re looking at someone who’s three years from legal adulthood and can’t do the things they should be able to do. The gap didn’t appear overnight. It was built one skipped lesson at a time.
It echoes into their future. A kid who only learns through crisis becomes an adult who only learns through crisis. They enter relationships expecting problems to teach them how to communicate. They start jobs expecting failure to teach them how to perform. The reactive pattern you modeled becomes their operating system.
What actionary parenting looks like
The opposite of reactive isn’t permissive. It’s actionary — a word we use because “proactive” has been beaten to death and doesn’t capture what we mean.
Actionary parenting means working backwards from the skills your kid needs and deliberately creating situations to teach them. You don’t wait for life to create the lesson. You create it yourself.
In 1718, Josiah Franklin had seventeen children and no parenting books. So he watched each child — their curiosities, their strengths, their stubborn streaks — and placed each one in an apprenticeship matched to who they were. His son Benjamin was curious about everything, argued constantly, and loved to write. Josiah apprenticed him to a printer. He didn’t have a system. He had intention. And intention, applied consistently, built one of the most consequential people in American history.
That’s actionary parenting. Not perfect. Not complicated. Just deliberate.
It looks like this:
- Sunday morning: Your 8-year-old makes scrambled eggs. Not because you need them to. Because cooking is a skill they need, and you’ve carved out 20 minutes to practice it.
- Allowance day: Your 10-year-old splits their money into spend, save, and give. Not because they asked to. Because you set up the system before they needed it.
- Saturday afternoon: Your 12-year-old does their own laundry. Start to finish. Without you redoing it afterward.
- Tuesday evening: Your 14-year-old calls the dentist to reschedule their own appointment. Nervously. Badly. But they do it.
No crisis required. No meltdown necessary. Just deliberate practice of things that matter.
How to make the shift
You don’t overhaul your parenting overnight. You add one deliberate thing.
Step 1: Pick one skill
Look at what your kid should know by their age and find one thing they can’t do yet. Not five things. One.
Choose something repeatable — a skill they’ll practice weekly, not once. Cooking. Laundry. Making phone calls. Managing their own morning. Something with reps.
Step 2: Create the situation
Don’t wait for the skill to become relevant through a crisis. Engineer it.
If the skill is cooking: pick a meal, pick a day, and make it theirs. If it’s money management: set up an allowance system with clear categories. If it’s time management: hand them their own calendar and let them own their schedule for one week.
The key: you’re creating the opportunity. You’re not waiting for one.
Step 3: Step back
The hardest part. When they burn the eggs, don’t take over the pan. When they forget to move their laundry to the dryer, let the clothes sit there and get musty. When they undercook the pasta, eat the crunchy pasta.
Every rescue teaches them: “You can’t do this without me.” Every time you step back, they learn: “I can figure this out.”
This is where most parents break. The discomfort of watching your kid struggle feels like neglect. It’s the opposite. The struggle is the learning — not a side effect of it, not an obstacle to it. The actual learning.
Step 4: Track it
You need to see the progress. Not for them — for you.
When you’re in the thick of it, it feels like nothing is working. Your kid burned eggs three weeks in a row. But you don’t notice that week four, they didn’t. You don’t notice that they started setting the timer on their own. You don’t notice that they stopped asking for help.
Progress is invisible when you’re inside it. Write it down. Track it. Not to be perfect. To see the movement.
Step 5: Add the next thing
Once one skill is in motion — not mastered, just in motion — add another. Build a rhythm where you’re always teaching something deliberately, alongside all the reactive stuff that’ll never go away.
Susanna Wesley had nineteen children. She could have been purely reactive — just surviving each day. Instead, she had a system. She gave each child individual time. She educated them herself. She was intentional despite chaos. Two of her sons changed the world. Intention doesn’t require perfect circumstances. It requires clarity about what matters.
Reactive doesn’t disappear
You’re always going to react. Kids will always create situations you didn’t plan for. That’s part of the deal.
The shift isn’t from reactive to actionary. It’s from only reactive to mostly actionary with reactive when needed.
Think of it this way: reactive parenting is defense. Actionary parenting is offense. You need both. But if you only play defense, you never score.
The question that changes everything
Here’s the question that started this for us:
“If my kid left home tomorrow, what would they not know how to do?”
Write the answer down. That’s your list. That’s your map.
Now pick one thing from that list and start teaching it this week. Not next month. Not when things calm down. Things never calm down. This week.
That’s what progress looks like.
Ready to move from reactive to actionary? Forging Gumption is the complete framework — or start mapping what matters for free.