New Year, New You? #34

In this episode we explore why parenting resolutions usually fail and show how timing, identity, and community make change stick. We share concrete scripts, fresh start tactics, and small habits that turn calm, respectful parenting into a daily identity.

• why routines and status quo bias keep us stuck
• habit loops that trade short-term relief for long-term regret
• fresh start effect and the power of specific plans
• identity statements that reshape daily choices
• practical if-then scripts for hot moments with kids
• how environment design lowers friction
• the role of community and accountability
• listener resolutions as social proof and motivation

Chapters

• 0:00 Rerun Context And Yearly Resets
• 1:30 Traditions, Loss, And Why Routines Hold
• 5:01 New Year Story And Real-World Slip
• 5:56 Why We Repeat Patterns In Parenting
• 9:20 Habit Loops And Status Quo Bias
• 12:05 Fresh Start Effect And Specific Goals
• 18:16 Identity-Based Change Over Willpower
• 22:21 Practical Identity Statements For Parents
• 24:26 Support Request And Show Sustainability
• 26:16 Conformity: Change Your Surroundings
• 30:16 Community Resolutions And Social Proof
• 33:46 Email, Book, And Resolution Momentum
• 35:31 Ratings, Sharing, And Substack Support

Transcript

Jon @WholeParent: 0:00

Before we jump in today, a quick note. This episode is a rerun. It was originally published on New Year's Eve of 2024. So that's almost exactly a year ago. When our resolution lists were still fresh, we felt hopeful. And I decided to bring it back because this moment is kind of the same every year. Another year turns over, another quiet promise that we make to ourselves about how we're going to show up, especially to our kids. And then slowly life pulls us back towards what's familiar. This episode is about why that happens. Why change is so hard. Even when we want it so badly. The title of it is New Year, New You, but it probably should have been called Why Change is So Hard and What You Can Do to Make It A Little Bit Easier. It covers, among other things, why parenting resolutions usually fail. Not because we don't care enough, but because our brains are built to protect the status quo. And it's about what does work. Not willpower or grit about identity and timing and the people that we surround ourselves with. So if you're listening at the start of new year 2026, or any moment that feels like a fresh start, I think that this episode is still gonna be great for you. And one other thing, the audio is not perfect. It was early stages of the podcast. The style of recording is a little bit different, but I still think it's a great episode. So I hope you love it. A lot of us have holiday traditions. The same place we go for Thanksgiving or Christmas Day, year after year with the same people. Just yesterday I hosted my dad's whole family, all the cousins, his siblings, at our house for our annual Christmas. It's a gathering that's been happening the few days after Christmas, every year since before I was born. Some of the people are the same, some are different. My mom, for example, took up dance as a hobby last year. She wasn't there last night because she was in Tampa Bay competing at her first ever dance competition at age 72. Others are missing too. This is the eighth Christmas now without my dad. It's the tenth without his mom, who I sort of thought was holding the whole thing together, yet here we are, ten years later. But there's also new people. Six kids under the age of five, seven if you count the one that's still cooking. Another four kids in school, three in college. We know, psychologically speaking, that these types of annual traditions and rituals are quintessentially human. Traditions give us a sense of stability in a world that often feels unpredictable. They're more than just rituals. They're these threads that weave meaning into the fabric of our lives. Research shows that traditions create a sense of identity. They remind us who we are, where we come from, what matters the most. Families with strong traditions tend to feel closer and more connected, not just because of who they are, but because of the shared intention behind what they do. Anthropologists and sociologists have been speculating for a long time why humans started to do the whole same time next year thing. I don't think it's that complicated. Change is harder than just keeping things the way that they are. One of my traditions is New Year's Eve. For most of the last 20 years, I've spent some or all of New Year's Eve with my best friend from middle school, Kendall, and before he died, Nate, our third musketeer. A lot of the years blend together, but I'm thinking specifically today of 2009, where we spent the night at Nate's house playing video games and telling jokes until they stopped being funny. And then we kept telling them until they started being funny again, if you ever did that in high school. That night at midnight, we shot off illegal fireworks with Nate's neighbor, who actually happened to be a former Bears player. His name was Mike Adamley. He was a sports analyst on TV at the time. But the thing that I remember most about that night was this feeling that this year, this New Year's, was going to be a real new beginning. I was graduating high school, I was increasingly in this serious relationship with this pretty girl that I had met in Jazz Band. Spoiler, she became the mother of my four children, and I was a week away from turning 18. Chief among my resolutions was to start being more responsible. I never got into like real trouble as far as the responsibility thing, but being late has always been a struggle for me, and I basically never got my work done on time. In fact, I'm doing this podcast last minute too. But I thought in 2009 that I was becoming an adult, so I needed to start adulting, I guess. I walked out into the snow on that New Year's morning after we had stayed up way too late, ready to quit being a boy and finally start being a man. As I approached my first car, it was a 2002 Ford Focus hatchback, black. I noticed that I had something wedged under my windshield wiper. It was a parking ticket. Expired tags. A hundred bucks. Shoot. On this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast, we're going to talk about why we keep doing the same things over and over, even when we don't want to. Why it's so hard for us to change, why it's so hard to do the things that we desperately want to do, why we often fall short of becoming the parents that we long to be, and how we can start keeping our resolutions. If you want to actually make 2025 different, keep listening. When I was initially outlining the book that would eventually become Punishment Free Parenting, I was struggling through how to articulate the structure of the book. At that point, I had just been contracted to write the whole parent book, and it lacked, maybe we should say, direction. My editor at the time, he's not my editor anymore, had me read this book. It was called How to Change by a researcher named Katie Milkman. He thought it had a really nice flow. And actually, rereading the book for this episode, I realized that I did kind of organize my book similarly. A lot of stories, trying to move people from point A to point B. But actually the thing I remember most about the book is not the structure, which is what I was supposed to be paying attention to. It was the research that was incredibly intriguing. Katie, who unfortunately was not available last minute to record a guest spot for this episode, is one of the world's leading experts on how people can actually change. I knew her work was going to be central to what I was trying to communicate to parents. Most parents that I work with don't just want to parent differently day to day. They actually want to feel different about parenting. And that's the key. We all want to be calmer and more patient and more present, but the truth is, it's even harder to make that happen than to just change our actions. One of the reasons that it's so hard to change is that our brains are built for routines. Scientists call this a habit loop. It's a mechanism, a neural pathway that rewards us for doing the same things over and over, even when it's not good for us. I think about a moment like I had last week. My toddler, we're at the grocery store, and we're walking through the cereal aisle, and he sees something with about 115 grams of sugar on the top shelf, bright colors sparkling down at him. I didn't get it for him. I knew for a fact that it was something that nobody in our house liked, including him. And as we walked away from it, in the middle of the grocery store, here is my two-year-old now dissolving onto the floor, total and complete meltdown. I know that you've probably been there too. Maybe you know, like I know in those moments in theory how you want to respond with this calm, compassionate, empathetic tone. But what do most of us wind up doing? We fall back on whatever worked before, even if it's yelling or punishing or reaching up and getting that serial box and just handing it to them. But in those moments, it's important to remember that it's not that you're failing. It's just that your brain is designed to seek the quickest way to reduce the stress of the moment. It's that neural pathway, that habit loop in action. And then there's what psychologists call status quo bias. It's this idea that we're all wired to stick with what feels familiar. Even when we know something that we're doing isn't working, the devil that we know feels safer than the devil that we don't. Status quo bias, even though I don't call it by that name in punishment free parenting, is an idea that permeates throughout the whole book. I talk about it as factory default settings. We all have them. There are ingrained responses that show up when we're tired or stressed or overwhelmed, and especially around the holidays when we're surrounded by our own families. The goal isn't to blame yourself when your factory default parenting takes over, it's to learn how to rewrite your factory defaults so that your go-to reactions align with the way that you want to parent rather than the way that you've been parenting. But here's the thing: it's not a willpower problem. Willpower alone isn't enough. Studies show that most of us think that we can just white knuckle change. We can just muscle through if we try hard enough. But as Katie Milkman points out in How to Change, many of us tend to overestimate our willpower as our actual path to change. It's not really about trying harder, it's about trying smarter. But here's the good news. If we actually implement targeted strategies, change not only is possible, it's likely. And if you're listening to this episode on New Year's Eve, the best news of all is that there may be no better time to start than tomorrow. This leads me to change tip number one. Change your start date. One of the interesting things that change researchers found when they started looking at how we actually change effectively is what Katie Milkman calls the fresh start effect. It's this idea that certain moments in time, like New Year's or a birthday, or when you start a new job or your first day of school, feel like natural opportunities to start over. She actually highlights in the book that really any Monday is a fresh start effect, but not nearly as impactful as those big milestone fresh starts like New Year's. These moments represent for us this kind of psychological do-over, a place where we can have a clean slate to start from that feels more capable for change than just repeated patterns. Here's two quotes from Katie's book that I stitched together that come from the section on fresh starts. They're going to be read by my wife.

SPEAKER_00: 10:38

When we surveyed a panel of Americans about how they feel on fresh start dates such as New Year's or their birthday, we heard again and again that new beginnings offer a kind of psychological do-over. People feel distanced from their past failures. They feel like a different person, a person with a reason to be optimistic about the future. We're more likely to pursue change on dates that feel like new beginnings because these moments help us to overcome a common obstacle to goal initiation. The sense that we've failed before and will thus fail again. In my opinion, New Year's resolutions are great. Anytime you make a resolution, you're putting yourself in the game. Too often, a sense that change is difficult and daunting prevents us from taking the leap to try. Maybe you like the idea of making a change, but actually doing it seems hard, and so you feel unmotivated to start. Maybe you've failed when you attempted to change before and expect to fail again. Often change takes multiple attempts to stick. I like to remind cynics that if you flip the discouraging statistics about New Year's resolutions on their head, you'll see that 20% of the goals set each January succeed. That's a lot of people who've changed their lives for the better.

Jon @WholeParent: 11:47

Basically, it boils down to this. In fact, over a year ago, when we were initially discussing publication dates for my book, this fresh start effect actually came up. I wanted the book to be released as close to January 1st as possible because if people were going to change their parenting, I knew that this was the time to do it. But here's the key You can't just think about resolutions, you actually have to plan for them. Research shows that when we set goals that are specific with specific dates, we are way more likely to follow through. Instead of just saying, I want to be more patient with my kids this year, start saying something like, starting on January 1st, I'm going to take five deep breaths every time I feel myself getting frustrated with my kids. It's way more likely to be effective. The fresh start effect works because it gives you a sense of momentum. It's a way of telling yourself, this is the beginning of something new. And because the calendar date lines up with that, it's so much more easy for us to actually believe it. And because it's parenting that we're talking about here, we are going to need all the help that we can get.

SPEAKER_02: 15:17

Always with you what cannot be done. All right, I'll give it a try. No, try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.

Jon @WholeParent: 15:29

One of the most powerful lessons from Katie Milkman's book, How to Change, is this. True lasting change begins with how you define yourself. It's not about what you're trying to do, it's not really even about what you do, it's about who you are. Katie shares research showing that people are more successful at sticking to goals when they anchor their actions in their identity. For example, if your resolution is the most common resolution, admittedly, it's my resolution almost every single year, that you're gonna try to get into better shape. The difference between saying I'm trying to work out more versus I am a person who works out might seem subtle, but actually, psychologically, it's a total game changer. When you say that you're trying to work out more, working out becomes a temporary struggle. When you say that you are a person who works out, it becomes part of your identity to the core. In the world of parenting, you're not trying to be a punishment-free or respectful or conscious or gentle or whatever you want to call it, parent. You have to believe that you are one. As Yoda says, do or do not, there is no try. When we make our resolutions as parents, we often focus too much on the what. I'm going to stop yelling or I'm going to spend more time with my kids. But those are actions, they're behaviors. What if, instead of resolving to do something, we resolve to be something? I'm the kind of parent who stays calm, even when things are chaotic. I am the kind of parent who listens to my kids before I respond. I am a parent who gets curious before I get furious. When we frame our goals around identity, something powerful happens. Every choice becomes an opportunity to affirm our identity. If your goal is to be a calm parent rather than just to respond calmly, and you manage to take three deep breaths instead of snapping at your child, it becomes a win to your core, not just a temporary tiny victory. It's evidence that you are that kind of parent, the kind of parent that you want to be. Here's a practical way to start if you're looking to set this type of resolution for 2025. Pause the episode right now and write down the kind of parent that you want to be. Not the actions that you want to take in parenting, but specifically the kind of parent that you want to be. Literally, take out a piece of paper, open your notes app on your phone, whatever, and write down these words. I am the kind of parent who, and then fill in the blank. If you're looking for the resolution that I'm using this year, it's I am a punishment-free parent. That might seem obvious coming from the guy who wrote the book called Punishment Free Parenting, but honestly, I struggle. I am not perfect every single day, not by any stretch of the imagination, but by identifying myself with the idea of being punishment free rather than just trying not to punish my kids, I have had immense strides. Once you've got those identity statements down wherever they are, I encourage you to read it out loud to yourself. Better yet, record yourself reading it so that you can play it back for yourself, or if you're really brave, play it back for somebody else in your life. Once you can hear that on loop for yourself, you can start looking for those small moments in your life with your kids, that grocery store moment that I described earlier, where you can actually live into that new identity. Remember, this is not about getting it perfect every time. It's not even about trying to do the right thing. It's about who you long to be as a parent and then actually believing that you can be that person. And then every single choice that you make that affirms that identity helps you to rewrite the story that you're telling yourself. It starts to work with those factory default settings, creating a better version of yourself, better neural pathways, more in line with your values as a parent, for your kids to look up to, and for you to be Hey, I want to pause for a moment and talk directly to you because if you've been listening for a while, you know that I don't have any sponsors on this show. I have done very few ads. I take the ones that I get, but the truth is this podcast actually costs me money to produce. It takes time, it takes me getting child care, it takes equipment, and it's something that I do genuinely because I believe in helping parents feel less alone and more supported. It's like social media videos that I make. I don't make money off of those. I don't make money off of my email list. And so if this podcast or any of those other things has helped you have that moment of like, oh my gosh, I'm not failing, my kid's not broken, I can actually do this and have that confidence to parent consistently with brain-based techniques or or evidence-based strategies, I want to gently ask you to consider supporting the show on Substack. It's completely voluntary, there's no paywall, there's no real exclusive content that you're missing out on. It's just a way to go in and make the podcast sustainable. Think of it like tossing a few dollars in a hat for work that matters to you, for conversations that you want to keep alive in the world. If you're the type of person who puts a dollar or two in a tip jar of a barista that you really like, if you're the type of person who throws five bucks in the case of somebody busking that's playing music in the subway, this is that. Except you're doing it online on Substack for a podcast that I try and put out basically five days a week, which is a huge undertaking. Every single one of you who chooses to contribute actually makes it possible for me to keep doing this work week after week, episode after episode. So if that's something you want to do, the link is in the show notes. Again, it's on Substack. And truly, I want to thank you just for giving me the time and attention to even consider this. Uh, it is the reason that I am able to keep doing this. All of the money that goes into the podcast basically just gets put back into producing the podcast. I do this because I love it, and I want to get back to doing that. And so that's the end of my little pitch. Please, please, please consider it. I love doing this work. I love making these episodes, and I want to get back to doing that right now. Proud of. Tip three, change who you're around. To be honest, my favorite part of Katie's book was the chapter called Conformity. In it, she tells the story of these identical twins who decide to go to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. And immediately upon arriving at the Air Force Academy, they are separated into different squadrons. I didn't know this about the Air Force Academy, even though I've had family members who have actually gone and graduated from the Air Force Academy. But apparently all the freshmen are separated into squadrons of about 30. And then those squadrons are like the only people that you spend your Time with for the entire first semester, maybe even the first year. And so these identical twins are split up and they're not in the same squadron. But back in high school, there was one who is clearly better at academics than the other. The one that's better winds up with a squadron that's not as, let's say, polished. They're just not that academically inclined. They're not as rigorous, they don't study as much. And the one who struggled more winds up in this very rigorous group of 30 cadets who are just like absolutely killing it, getting straight into all of them. And I think how the story goes is that the when they come back for like Thanksgiving break, or maybe it's Christmas, the one who is less academically inclined announces to the whole group that he that his commanding officer wants him to be like a physics major or something. Some some high-level thing that you're just blown away that he would be the type of person who would do that. And his twin, who has been kind of struggling up to this point, is just like, what the heck? And eventually his twin goes on to like research this and actually study how his less academically inclined, identical twin was able to outperform him in their first year of college. And the evidence basically comes down to the fact that one was surrounded by people who he was emulating. This really isn't news to us. We know that psychologically this happens, but to see it in such a very clear way is helpful. I've heard it said in a bunch of different ways. One is that you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. I think that that quote is supposed to be attributed to somebody famous, but it actually isn't them. And then David McClelland is this 20th century psychologist. He was attributed saying something to the effect of, and again, I don't actually have a citation for this. I don't know if you ever said this, or this is just something that everybody says that he said, but 95% of our success or failure is influenced by the people that we associate with the most. So that's a pretty bold claim. But if you think about it, almost everything that we do is shaped by the company that we keep. If you want to make lasting changes, you have to look at who you're actually spending time with. Are they helping you become the parent that you aspire to be, or are they unintentionally reinforcing the habits that you're trying to leave behind? Are you spending a lot of time with people who are triggering your factory default parenting settings, or are you spending time with people who you want to emulate? Along with leveraging the fresh artifact and truly becoming identified with the type of parent that you want to be, I think this is the most essential piece. In isolation, it's almost impossible to change, but when you're surrounded by a community, it's almost impossible not to. That's why I wanted to end this episode a little differently. Hearing from members of our community, the whole parent community, about their New Year's resolutions.

SPEAKER_07: 24:56

My 2025 parenting resolution is to listen before I respond and to handle each of my children as individuals and not just like clump them together or have expectations on them that are unrealistic.

SPEAKER_02: 25:12

My New Year's resolution is to look after myself better so I can look after myself better.

SPEAKER_06: 25:17

My parenting resolution for 2025 is to have kindness and gentleness cover my parenting to the point where my kids start to mirror it. Because I find when I'm like harsh or like just like a bit snappy with my kids, they start to mirror that. And so I just want to start turning that on a bad solution to focus more on the good and stuff on the bad resolution.

SPEAKER_03: 25:48

Find more strategies things that help me recognize myself so I can be uh my new year's resolution is to quit losing my call on the small things with myself.

SPEAKER_07: 26:08

My resolution for new year would be to get curious about your ears first. And understand why he's having this emotion and react accordingly instead of getting angry or frustrated with it.

SPEAKER_04: 26:28

I know it's frustrated to get better at myself before really getting angry or upset with my kids when I do it to be a better grandparent that I was a parent to be more patient, be kinder, be more curious.

Jon @WholeParent: 26:52

Thank you to all those who sent the resolution to be featured on this episode. Anna, William, Victoria, Rebecca, Fabiana, Joy, Marielle, and Nina. I had you do these for two reasons. First off, so that all of those listening to the podcast can hear that you're part of a community that do things differently. Second, for those of you who took the plunge and actually sent in these resolutions, research from the American Society of Training and Development says that now that someone else knows about it, you're about three times more likely to succeed. Congrats. Which brings me to one final point. If you're listening right now and you want a 3x year parenting resolution success, feel free to shoot me an email and let me know what your resolutions are. The email for the Whole Parent Podcast is podcast at WholeParentacademy.com. Thank you to my wife Jess for reading the section of Katie's book for us. And a special thank you also, of course, to Katie Miltman for writing a book that has helped me and so many others change. If you want another book that will help you achieve any of the resolutions that we heard about from our community, help you to become the parent that you aspire to be, go ahead and pre-order my book. Coming out in less than a month, Punishment Free Parenting, the Brain-Based Way to Raise Kids Without Raising Your Voice. Thank you for listening to the Whole Parent Podcast. Happy New Year, and I hope this episode helps you to become part of the 20% of people who actually keep their resolutions in 2025. See you next year. We have a ton of five-star ratings and it helps our podcast get out to more people than almost any other parenting podcast out there. And so it's a really quick thing that you can do if you have 15 or 20 seconds. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, I'd love to read a review from you. I read all the reviews that come through. If some of you particularly like one part of the podcast or you like when I talk about something or whatever, imagine that you're writing that review directly to me. The second thing that you can do is go and send this episode to somebody in your life who you think could use it. Think about all the parents in your life. Think about your friends, your family members who could use a little bit of help parenting. It's vulnerable to share an episode of a parenting podcast with them. I get it. But imagine how much better your life is as a result of listening to this podcast, following me on social media, getting the emails that I send out. You can share that with someone else too. And so I encourage you, just go over, shoot them a quick text, share this episode with them, or share another episode that you feel like is particularly relevant to them. The last thing you can do is go down to the link show notes at the bottom. And like I said, in the mid-roll, you can subscribe on Substack. It's$5 a month or$50 a year. I I don't have that many people doing it, and yet the people who are doing it have made this possible. And so if you like this episode, if you like all of the episodes, if you want them to continue, the only way that I can keep making them is through donor support, free will donations to the podcast. Please, please, please, please, as you're thinking about the end of this year, as you're thinking about your charitable giving. I know I'm not a 501c3. You can't write it off on your taxes, but if you'd like to give me a little gift to just say thank you for what you've done this year, the best way to do that is over on Substack. Again,$5 a month,$50 a year. It's not going to break the bank. It's probably less than you spend on coffee every week. Definitely less than you spend on coffee every week. Maybe uh less than you spend on almost anything, right? Five bucks a month is very, very small, but it goes a long way when it's multiplied by all of the different people who listen to the podcast and sending that over to me. I get all of that money. It's just my way of being able to produce the podcast. Spend money on equipment, spend money on subscription fees, hosting fees for the podcast, all of that stuff. Email server fees, all that. So if you're willing to do that, I would love it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I'll see you next time.