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Lead Decisively During Train Track Moments

Direction’s Leadership Principles

Much of good parenting involves learning when not to interfere.

Throughout the Leadership Principles, I have argued that children need room to make decisions, experiment, make mistakes, experience consequences, and gradually assume responsibility for their own lives. Parents should provide maximum support with minimum interference. If we constantly step in to solve problems children can solve themselves, we interfere with the very development we are trying to encourage.

But that raises an obvious question: Are parents simply supposed to stand back and let their children do whatever they want?

Of course not.

There is an important distinction between interfering and intervening. I use interference to describe unnecessarily getting into a child’s business—preventing an experience or taking over a responsibility the child could reasonably handle. Intervention is different. Intervention means stepping in because the situation actually requires leadership.

And occasionally, intervention needs to happen immediately. 

I call these situations train track moments.

Imagine that your child is lying on railroad tracks and a train is bearing down. There is nothing to discuss. You don’t consult your spouse. You don’t ask your child how they feel about being moved. You don’t search the internet for the latest parenting recommendations. You pull your child off the tracks.

It is an intentionally extreme example because it makes the principle obvious. When there is an immediate threat of serious harm, good leadership requires decisive action.

Fortunately, parents don’t encounter literal life-and-death decisions very often. But when they do, this may become the most important of all the Leadership Principles. Becoming a parent means accepting responsibility for another person’s safety and development. Whether we like it or not—and whether our children like it or not—there will occasionally be situations in which we have to take charge. 

The same principle applies to leadership outside parenting. An emergency-room physician doesn’t respond to a crashing patient by convening a committee. In an emergency, someone has to assess the situation, make decisions, and act. People look to the leader precisely because the circumstances don’t allow the usual amount of deliberation.

Parenting contains smaller and larger versions of the same problem.

A toddler runs toward a busy road. You grab the toddler. An intoxicated teenager or friend is about to drive home. You may take the keys. Their objection doesn’t change the immediate safety calculation. In that moment, protecting someone from serious harm matters more than preserving their satisfaction with your decision.

In my work with adolescents, the most consequential train track moments usually involve potential violence or self-harm. A teenager may be destroying the house, punching holes in walls, or becoming physically aggressive toward a family member. Another teenager may be threatening suicide in a way that creates genuine concern for immediate safety.

These are qualitatively different from the ordinary problems of adolescence.

A teenager failing a test isn’t lying on the train tracks. A child making a poor decision with money isn’t lying on the train tracks. A teenager staying up too late, procrastinating on homework, choosing friends you don’t particularly like, or experiencing the consequences of a bad decision usually doesn’t require a parent to seize control.

The possibility of imminent serious physical harm changes the equation. 

With very young children, parents can often intervene directly. Adolescents are different. They become bigger, stronger, faster, and more capable of putting themselves and other people at risk. When parents believe an older child presents an immediate serious safety risk that they cannot safely manage, our advice is generally to transfer that responsibility to people better equipped to handle the emergency, including calling 911 or law enforcement when appropriate. The details of making those decisions deserve a discussion of their own, but the leadership principle is straightforward: a genuine emergency is not the time to avoid action because action is uncomfortable. 

Parents often struggle enormously with this.

Calling for outside help can feel like admitting failure. Having police cruisers arrive at your house can be embarrassing. An emergency-room evaluation can be expensive, exhausting, and disruptive. Parents may worry that their child will be furious with them. They may believe that a good parent should somehow be able to handle the situation without help.

I see it differently.

Recognizing that a situation has exceeded your ability to manage it safely isn’t surrendering leadership. It is leadership. The responsibility of the leader isn’t to prove that he or she can personally solve every problem. The responsibility is to make the best available decision for the safety of the group.

This also illustrates an important distinction running throughout the Leadership Principles: feelings matter, but functioning sometimes has to take precedence.

Your teenager may be extremely angry that you intervened. That doesn’t mean the intervention was wrong. During ordinary life, there is plenty of room to listen, negotiate, tolerate disagreement, and allow children to make their own decisions. During an immediate safety crisis, those considerations become secondary. You deal with the emergency first.

The difficult question, of course, is deciding when something actually qualifies as a train track moment.

There will always be gray areas, but the clearest dividing line is imminent physical danger. If you reasonably believe your child or somebody else is in immediate danger of serious harm, intervene. If you genuinely aren’t sure in an acute safety situation, err on the side of safety. 

Other risks are more complicated. Substance use, deteriorating school performance, unhealthy relationships, or patterns of increasingly dangerous behavior may eventually require parental intervention, but they don’t necessarily require an immediate takeover. Those situations give parents more time to think, consult, observe, and decide how much intervention is appropriate.

That distinction matters because train track parenting should not become everyday parenting.

If we treat every poor decision as an emergency, we become controlling and prevent children from developing judgment of their own. If we treat genuine emergencies as opportunities for children to learn through natural consequences, we abdicate a fundamental responsibility of leadership.

Good parenting requires being able to do both: step back when your child needs room to grow and step forward decisively when your child truly needs you.

Most of the time, leadership means having enough confidence to stay out of the way.

Occasionally, it means pulling your child off the tracks.