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DECEMBER 24,2015 2020 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, | The Jewish Home
Parenting Pearls
Proactive vs. Reactive Parenting By Sara Rayvych, MSEd
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his is a topic that has been percolating in my brain for a while but I had been hesitant to take it on. As I don’t drink coffee, I need to percolate something. I don’t know where I first heard of the concept of proactive parenting so I can’t give credit where credit is due. In my humble opinion, the importance of proactive parenting can’t be overestimated, and I think it would reign as one of my major personal parenting principles.
What is reactive parenting? Most parenting would probably be classified as reactive. Simply, this means we see our child do something and we react to their behavior, action, or words. Our reaction may or may not match the severity of the situation and may involve yelling, punishing, or saying something hurtful. The subsequent consequence may not provide any educational lessons. We can easily see how ineffective this method is. Worse yet, it could be damaging to the child. Reactive parenting can easily give parents a feeling that they are losing
control of the situation or their feelings. Feeling out of control can be a scary situation, even for an adult, and it puts you in a very vulnerable place. You’re liable to overreact to try to regain stability. I’m sure we’ve all had times we overreacted and then felt guilty afterwards. Often, our reaction matches the level of our frustration or anger and not the severity of what the child actually did. This can be counterproductive educationally because a lesser behavior may earn a greater reaction than the worse behavior. Our children could get a skewed impression of where our values and priorities truly are. Another problem with reactive parenting is that we’re basically waiting for a problem to happen before we take any steps. We’re not preventing the issues; we’re simply waiting for them to occur.
What is proactive parenting? Proactive parenting could be thought of as anticipating the issues in advance and having a solution pre-
pared. It doesn’t involve prophecy, so don’t get that nervous. It does take practice and you can’t have a proactive approach for everything being that we’re only human (but don’t tell that to our kids!). The goal is to slowly become more proactive and less reactive in our response. We can see there are many advantages to proactive parenting. By having an idea in advance of how you want to parent any given situation, you are more likely to respond in an appropriate manner, without exaggerating your kid’s misbehavior or your response. You’re less likely to scream, yell, or act in a way you’ll regret, and you’ll feel more in control throughout the encounter. It’s easy to see how being proactive will help you react appropriately but the benefits are even greater than that. When you are proactive, you can often prevent the misbehavior from occurring in the first place. While you can’t anticipate and prevent every situation, you can often recognize the signs of trouble brewing and step in before the full storm hits. With some forethought, you’ll have the oppor-
tunity, in advance, to set up an environment for your child to succeed, not fail. As parents, we often underestimate how much we can alter a situation by carefully setting it up and positively manipulating it to meet our child’s needs.
How do you predict the future? Wouldn’t it be fun if I actually had an answer to this question? The truth, as you know, is that we’re not prophets even if we have other wonderful traits. What you can predict is that certain behaviors will occur again. You know your child’s tendencies and what situations will trigger them. By anticipating those scenarios and preparing for them in advance, you’ll be more able to manage, or prevent, them from happening. Often, children keep making the same mistakes or repeating the same negative behaviors, and parents keep reacting, often in the same ineffective manner. You want to stop the inevitable cycle of futility and frustration. Even if the behavior isn’t identical, it’s often similar enough. For exam-
