If you are doing this simply because you want the Child to provide a re-usable trait to its parents, then you might consider doing that using render-props instead.
That technique actually turns the structure upside down. The Child now wraps the parent, so I have renamed it to AlertTrait below. I kept the name Parent for continuity, although it is not really a parent now.
// Use it like this:
<AlertTrait renderComponent={Parent}/>
class AlertTrait extends Component {
// You will need to bind this function, if it uses 'this'
doAlert() {
alert('clicked');
}
render() {
return this.props.renderComponent({ doAlert: this.doAlert });
}
}
class Parent extends Component {
render() {
return (
<button onClick={this.props.doAlert}>Click</button>
);
}
}
In this case, the AlertTrait provides one or more traits which it passes down as props to whatever component it was given in its renderComponent prop.
The Parent receives doAlert as a prop, and can call it when needed.
(For clarity, I called the prop renderComponent in the above example. But in the React docs linked above, they just call it render.)
The Trait component can render stuff surrounding the Parent, in its render function, but it does not render anything inside the parent. Actually it could render things inside the Parent, if it passed another prop (e.g. renderChild) to the parent, which the parent could then use during its render method.
This is somewhat different from what the OP asked for, but some people might end up here (like we did) because they wanted to create a reusable trait, and thought that a child component was a good way to do that.
