Reset Child Field on Parent Change in Airtable Forms

Let’s say you’re building a form with two linked fields: Country and State. You want the user to first pick a Country, and only then the list of States should appear, filtered based on that selection. Simple, right?

And it mostly works — until the user changes their mind.

Let me explain with an example. The user selects a Country, and the State field appears, filtered accordingly. They pick a State — everything works as expected.

But then they go back and change the Country, maybe because they chose the wrong one.

The problem here is the State field remains unchanged. Even after selecting a new Country, the State field still shows the previous selection, which may no longer be valid.

That’s a problem. Because now the State doesn’t match the Country. Worse, the user might not even notice it — and that can lead to inaccurate or inconsistent submissions.

And this happens more often than you’d think.

This behavior occurs because Airtable forms do not automatically reset field values when a parent field is changed.

So what can you do to fix this?

Use Fillout. It is a powerful form builder that works with Airtable — and it solves this exact problem.

In Fillout, if you change the value in the parent field, the linked child field will be cleared automatically, preventing any inconsistent data from being submitted.

And that’s just the beginning. Fillout gives you many features that aren’t available in native Airtable forms. Best of all, Fillout is free for most use cases. Paid plans start at $20/month if you need more advanced features or higher usage limits.