It’s January and many of us have made resolutions for 2026. If you have a challenging child, maybe you’ve made resolutions like: “This year I’m not going to yell. I’m going to keep my cool. We’re going to have a more peaceful home.”

Unfortunately, without calm parenting strategies and a plan, you’re probably going to find yourself having the same fights, feeling the same frustrations, and feeling like a bad parent because you keep losing your cool.

Why does this happen? Why do we get stuck in these repetitive, painful cycles? And more importantly, how do we finally break free?

Why Parents Keep Losing Their Cool

Years ago, I attended a talk where the speaker argued that happy couples have fewer than six big fights a year. A colleague next to me leaned over and quietly said, "I think most couples only have one fight.” He paused dramatically to set up his punch line: “They just repeat it over and over."

Family therapists understand that we tend to get swept up in the same bad patterns time and again. It may seem like a new fight, but if we look below the surface, it’s just the same old fight dressed up in different clothes.

In my work with challenging boys and their families, I see patterns of conflict repeated over and over.

Your kid melts down over being told to turn off the screen and do homework. You double down. They dig in harder. You raise your voice. Before you know it, everyone is feeling angry, upset, and bad about each other. You’re left wondering how asking to put away the iPad turned into World War III. Again.

The details change, but the sequence is usually the same: you ask, your child resists, you hold firm, your child escalates, and soon everyone is emotionally flooded.

In my book Challenging Boys: A Proven Plan for Keeping Your Cool and Helping Your Son Thrive, I describe how to use a parenting journal to help you identify these painful patterns and understand what triggers them so you can finally begin to break free.

What Is a Parenting Journal?

The parenting journal is a positive discipline tool that helps you understand and interrupt these cycles. You’re not writing a diary. You’re collecting data on what actually happens so you can stop reacting and start planning. The parenting journal (which I detail extensively in Challenging Boys) works in three key ways.

It Reveals Hidden Patterns

While power struggles, explosions, and meltdowns occur in predictable circumstances and play out in very predictable ways, we often can’t see the patterns. This is because when we’re in them, we’re flooded with emotions that disrupt our thinking. Writing about bad events after they are over allows us to see the situation more objectively. The journal entries show:

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• What circumstances typically trigger our child

• What triggers us during challenging moments

• What things escalate the conflict

• What calms the situation down

It Enables You to Plan

Identifying the patterns enables us to prepare for them. We can:

• Proactively manage the situations that trigger our child in order to prevent a meltdown from occurring in the first place.
• Do more of the things that our journal shows us help regulate our child, and less of what dysregulates them.
• Proactively recognize and manage our own triggers, practicing emotion regulation so we don’t add fuel to the fire.

It Processes Painful Emotions

After a difficult interaction with our child, painful feelings linger, such as frustration, guilt, anger, and helplessness. The journal allows us to process these emotions rather than bury them. Research on expressive writing (notably by James Pennebaker and colleagues) suggests that writing about upsetting experiences can help people process emotions and reduce stress.

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Example: Tracy and Ryan

Here’s what this looks like in real life. Tracy, mom of a 14-year-old challenging boy, Ryan, used a parenting journal to get more objectivity on her repeated fights with Ryan over homework.

After writing about a few instances of the homework fight, Tracy was able to see that the meltdowns were triggered by Ryan’s executive functioning problems with working memory (he couldn’t remember his assignments) and organization (he didn’t get them recorded in his notebook), as well as intense anxiety about failing. Ryan’s strategy for dealing with this homework anxiety was to avoid doing it, which felt like defiance to Tracy.

Tracy also recognized her own "buttons" were being pushed. She could now see that Ryan reminded her of her brother. Tracy was terrified of Ryan having the lifelong struggles with work and relationships that her brother had. Her fear that Ryan would turn out like him was causing her to overreact in the present.

From her journal entries, she also discovered what doesn’t work. Her insistence on firm limits was actually intensifying Ryan’s anxiety and resistance. The limits also never led to homework getting done. Instead, they were leading to more undesirable behaviors. Ryan started lying that his homework was finished. He was also sneaking his laptop into his room at night and staying up late playing video games.

Tracy could now see what worked better. When she gave Ryan some time to unwind afterschool before asking him to do homework, she had more success.

Armed with information, Tracy was able to make her plan. Instead of taking a hardline with Ryan, she decided to give him time to unwind after school before suggesting that he start his homework. If he resisted, she was going to remind herself that he was probably anxious (not defiant) and, instead of setting a limit, she was going to offer to help. If she felt herself getting upset, she was going to remind herself that Ryan wasn’t her brother, that he was a 14-year-old boy having school problems. Finally, if a homework fight started up, she was going to drop her demand and let her husband, Bob, do the homework with Ryan later. Her journal entries revealed that Ryan often had an easier time getting work done with his dad.

This plan almost immediately led to less fighting, more homework getting done, and a better relationship between Tracy and Ryan.

How to Start Your Parenting Journal

After a challenging moment, wait until everyone’s calm. Then take 5-10 minutes to jot down: What happened? What triggered your kid? What triggered you? What made it worse? What (if anything) helped?

Three entries are all it usually takes. By the third time you write about the homework battle or the morning meltdown, the pattern begins to emerge. That’s when everything can start to change.

Your 2026 Resolution

This year, don’t resolve to be perfect. Resolve to see clearly. Keep a parenting journal for the next month, because you can’t change a pattern you can’t see.