Happy New Year from Therapy Smarts!

Small Goals, Big Dreams: Setting New Year's Resolutions with Your Kids

By Team Therapy Smarts

Welcome, 2025! 
As the holiday hustle cools down, many of us are returning to daily routines and familiar normalcy. While the coming months may not possess end-of-year pizazz, their predictability opens a pathway for a new opportunity for you and your family: kickstarting your New Year’s resolution. Feeling skeptical? You aren’t alone! 
A study from Columbia University reveals that only about 25% of Americans keep their New Year’s resolutions after 30 days. You might assume it was a sense of busyness, loss of interest or lack of motivation. More often than not, the root cause is not a personal failing, but a lack of effective planning. 
Below, we’ve compiled our top tips to help you and your family set & keep the New Years’ resolutions that will set you up for success this year!   

Rethinking Resolutions

Right off the bat, it is important to change the way you think about resolutions. A resolution is just a goal — something that you would ideally like to transform into a habit. What is a habit? Habits make up approximately 40% of what we do each day, and, critically, they do not require a great deal of conscious thought. So, the snag of a new year’s resolution often comes when translating a goal into a habit. In order to build a habit, we have to create attainable goals — often a series of goals— to do so. 
Think about going through potty training with your child. While your ultimate goal was to have no more accidents, you likely had to take smaller steps to get there. You might’ve started by letting them explore their training potty, then using it, getting them used to flushing, and finally teaching them to use the toilet consistently, even overnight. Regardless of how long it took for your child to learn these habits, they had to pick up each of these components separately. Habit-building requires the same breakdown of tasks. If you consider a goal you’d like to achieve with your family, you can most likely find more than one smaller step to reach it. 
Make goals as bite-sized as you need, in order to form them into true habits. If your goal is to get more exercise as a family, that might look like putting on your exercise shoes and taking a five minute walk, then ten, then twenty. Try to avoid the urge to rush through these smaller steps — stick with them until they become habits in and of themselves, and then expand on them. Breaking down your goals is a critical step in keeping them. 

Building SMART Goals

A resolution can be a personal goal, or a family goal— each is important for your child’s development! Children should feel empowered to make their own resolutions, based on the things they want to accomplish for themselves. For family resolutions, it is important to keep everyone’ opinion in mind. Consider brainstorming some ideas together, to make sure everyone has a say! 
To give your resolution the best chance at success, they should follow the SMART acronym:  

  • Specific: A goal with a clearly-defined outcome.  

  • Measureable: A goal that’s progress can be calculated 

  • Achievable:  A goal that feels possible to reach. 

  • Realistic: A goal that feels practical and sensible for you and or your family

  • Timely:  A goal that is able to be accomplished within a defined timeframe

Lastly, resolutions should be kept positive — things that we should do, versus things we should avoid. For example: “eat more vegetables” instead of “eat less junk food.” Choosing positively-framed resolutions can help as you are building the accountability to reach your goals. 
Consider getting creative! Have everyone write down their resolutions to keep somewhere that you can see them each day. For example, you might consider writing goals on the mirror with an Expo marker. If your goal includes any sort of daily or weekly task, grab a few old jars and place a small bead or stone in for each day you stick to your goal. 

Breaking Down Barriers 

Once you’ve determined what your resolutions should be, how do you plan to hold yourself accountable? Consider checking in with yourself and your kids, in order to determine how things are going. What kinds of barriers are you coming up against? 
Change— even when it benefits us — is uncomfortable. So, when we undertake a challenge, it’s only natural for us to want to see the payoff. Anything that gets in the way of that process can make it more difficult for us to maintain the resolution we’ve committed to. Perhaps the resolution isn’t specific enough, or we chose a resolution for someone other than ourselves. 
In addressing setbacks with your family, make sure to practice the skill of forgiveness. By showing kindness to yourself and returning to your goal, you can set a good example for your children about how to deal with failure in a positive way, and come back stronger. 
As you and your family set New Year’s resolutions, remember that the key to success lies in small, manageable steps and realistic goals. By breaking down your aspirations into attainable pieces, you create a foundation for lasting habits that will not only help you achieve your resolutions but also strengthen the bond within your family. Keep things positive, be patient with the process, and embrace setbacks as opportunities for growth. 
Here at Therapy Smarts, we’ve resolved to turn challenges into triumphs on a larger scale than ever — and with the grand opening of our Chapel Hill location later this year, we can’t wait to see all that the year has in store for us!
Looking to start services for your child? Contact us at (919) 378-1340 to schedule an evaluation!