Sustainable Parenting | Positive Discipline for Raising Resilient Kids

140. 2026 Family Goals

• Flora McCormick, LCPC, Parenting Coach

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What if setting family goals didn’t feel overwhelming—or like one more thing to get right?

In this episode, I’m sharing a gentle, realistic approach to setting family goals for 2026 that offer direction without pressure and intention without perfection. Instead of rigid resolutions or systems that fall apart by February, we talk about how families can choose a shared target—and allow the path there to flex as life unfolds.

You’ll learn:

  • Why family goals work best when they function as a compass, not a contract
  • How to create goals that support calm, connection, and cooperation
  • What to focus on if you want lasting change without power struggles
  • How small shifts (not big overhauls) create meaningful momentum

I also walk you through a simple Family Goals Reflection Guide: https://www.etsy.com/listing/4434156021/family-new-years-resolution-goals-pdf-to, you can download in the show notes—designed to help your family reflect on tech, connection, fun, service, wellness, and relationships in a way that feels supportive and doable.

If you’re craving a calmer, more intentional year—this episode is your starting point.

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SPEAKER_01:

2026 could now be an opportunity to not feel behind, but instead have direction that your family can gently use to return to all year long. Because here's the truth when families don't choose a direction, life chooses one for them. And it's usually busy, loud, reactive, and exhausting. So today let's talk about how to set family goals for 2026 in a way that feels supportive, flexible, and sustainable. And friend, I have a very interesting question to ask you today that stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it as I reflected on how I was living out my life. And I'm going to share this question with you at the end of the episode. Welcome back to the Sustainable Parenting Podcast, friend. This is a place where we bridge the gap between overly gentle parenting and overly harsh discipline so you can lead your family with both kindness and firmness at the same time. I'm your host, Flora McCormick, licensed therapist, parenting coach, and I'm so glad you're here. So let me reframe this to be super clear. These family goals I want to give you today aren't about performance. They're about intention and direction. And here's why direction matters so much. If we don't name where we're headed, we are sure as heck not gonna get there. But we when we do name the things that we want to head in the right direction of, something powerful happens. Even if we move slowly, pause, beer off course, or take the scenic route, that direction's gonna hold us. So here's what family goals are and what they are not. First of all, what they are not is a personality overhaul. Like, I'm finally gonna be a good mom. Ooh, friend, if that is at all the words coming out of your mouth, I want you to know 1000% you are already a good mom because you just are. You love your child, you adore them, you work hard endlessly to make lovely lunches and dinners for them and take them on adventures and think about the types of toys and activities that they enjoy and buy those things. You are a good mom. I don't want you to be in that space at all. You're already a good mom. That's not what this is about. This is also not about rigid, perfect routines. Like we are going to do this number of things this many times. Oh my gosh, I remember a year where I set out a goal before the summer, which was that the kids were going to write a letter to someone in our family every day of the summer. Oh my God, we failed by like the second day going in, I think. And we never got back to it because it felt then too overwhelming that I just dropped it completely. I was like, clearly, that's nowhere close to doable. And as soon as I had missed one day, two days, three days, four days, it was like, well, I'm not gonna have them write five letters today to catch up. So make sure it's not so rigid and structured that it is not possible. Third, it is not about promising that hard moments won't happen. If you set a New Year's goal that you're not gonna yell at your kids, I'm sorry, but you might have to be superhuman to meet that. We all have moments where we just hit the edge of our patience, we hit the line where we are overstimulated, overtouched, and just overworked and we break. And so let's not have some expectation of us that the hard moments aren't going to come up. In fact, friend, I have a whole episode, episode 64, on how we can repair when mistakes have happened. And in fact, Positive Discipline talks a lot about how mistakes are wonderful opportunities to learn. So let's not say we're not going to yell, we're not going to ever lose our temper. Let's instead have intentions that work within the framework that mistakes are wonderful opportunities to learn, that nobody is perfect, and that we love each other and our family in ways that go way deeper than tiny mistakes. Okay, here's what the goals are. Number one, they are a shared language. I'm going to be giving you a document in, or you can download the document if you choose to in the show notes of this episode that gives you a structure for setting goals with your family. And one of my favorite parts is that you get to create a family mantra and name your three top family values. Now, this gives us shared language to use throughout the year. One of those in my family is that we are kind to all people, places, and things. That gives me a simple phrase I can return to again and again and again. And yes, you can say things in more verbose, like explanatory ways. But when it's simple and clear and you repeat it and you repeat it and you repeat it, something like we are kind to all people, places, and things, that is going to burrow its way into being carved on their hearts. So a shared language is part of what we're going for here. Secondly, a reminder of what matters when things feel messy. When we set goals around how we're going to connect as a family, how we're going to have fun together as a family, whether we want adventures or more small moments of joy, which these are all in that document. It gives us a reminder of what matters when things feel messy. When we start to feel disconnection, we know what we can come back to. That is our goal and can help us to feel a little bit more clarity and simplicity. Number three, it gives us a way to come back to center when we have those inevitable tough moments, tough weeks, or even tough moments, or even tough months. Think of it like a compass, not a contract. So I created a simple reflection guide you can download in the show notes to help with this process. It's called the Family New Year's Resolution Goals. You don't have to do it all at once. You can do it over dinner, one section at a time, over a month, even just skim it and only answer the questions that feel valuable to your family. Here are some key areas it invites you and your family to reflect on. Number one, how do we want to feel this year? How do we want 2026 to feel? Do we want to feel busy? Oh, that's one of my least favorite words. I call it the B word. Because gosh, when someone asks me, how was your summer? I don't ever want to say busy. I want to say it was so full of adventure or it was really filled with a lot of chill downtime. Those are the values I want to create. So what do you want your year to feel like? Or and you can also break that into the seasons of the year. What do we want winter to feel like? Maybe that's a cozy inn and chill, or if you live in Bozeman like I do, it's you it's a time of big adventure and skiing and getting out and doing what people love the most. Or maybe you're someone who wants the spring to be your time of gardening and nurturing, like me. That is one of the things I love most. And in the summer, you want it to be full of outdoor time. Want it to be more playful, more grounded, more connected. So let these opportunities of reflecting on what you want it to feel like become your anchor for that season and for choices you'll need to make along the way. It also, I want you to invite you to reflect on technology. Friend, if you have not yet read The Anxious Generation, I highly recommend it. I'm now in the midst of reading another book about the coddling of the American mind. And my goodness, there's just so much I'm learning about how we are drowning in the influence of influencers. And friend, I know that you're probably nodding your head, like, oh yes, I just listened to these Instagram um reels and if you start to feel flooded with so many shoulds, it's exhausting. And guess what? Our kids are drowning as well. They're drowning in constant YouTube videos that just scroll to the next and next and next and build in addiction. They are drowning and scrolling through TikTok videos. They are drowning in the adrenaline rush of too much time on video games. So I invite you to consider pulling away some amount of tech detox, whether that's one hour less a day, one day a week that is tech-free for everyone, sections of the day that are tech free and protected, like never in the bedroom overnight, or never at the dinner table. So just looking for some intention in reflecting on how technology is affecting you and what kind of boundaries you want to set and with intention, knowing you may go off course, but you can come back. The third area is service. Not doing more, but if there's anywhere on your heart that like I'd like to give back, whether that's introducing the idea of random acts of kindness to my kids where we just leave a note on a couple neighbors' doorsteps, or that we look to volunteer once a month at a local nonprofit, or encourage the kids to give a portion of their lemonade stand money to donate to a cause, or ourselves as a family to commit to donating a certain amount towards the nonprofits in our community or the world. What do we want that intention to be this year? And fourth and five, go together. Four is fun and adventure, and five is relationships. I'm gonna let you dig more into those and checking out the document. But these are ways that you can be able to think about how do we have fun together and how do we want to feel connected with one another? How do we want to sustain that? If you're in a partnership and you've been having a hard time meeting together to like talk about how things are going with the kids and the family and this calendar, you might say, God, there's just never a moment we can really just talk. Well, perhaps we could explore this year with sending each other emails or sending voice memos. I've known couples that find little ways to create those avenues of connection and communication, even when it feels impossible. And the final um area is wellness. That might be exercise, that might be food, and what are we doing with our family that we would like to improve? Have we just given in to always chicken nuggets and uh tater tots and pizza? And we think our kid will never eat anything but that. But wait, maybe this year is the year of opportunity of working with a professional to learn if there are ways to change those patterns. Side note on that, I love to help parents with this and with improving sleep and many other areas of wellness in the family through my parent coaching. You can always check that out in the show notes information as well. So, friend, now is the point where I want to share the magic question with you that stopped me in my tracks as I reflected on how I was living out my life. It was this if an alien came to our planet and hovered invisibly above you in your home, in your places you drive, and all the things you do, and just observed you for two weeks. At the end of that two weeks, if they were asked to say, What does this person value by looking at their actions and how they spend their time, what would their answer be? That really stopped me in my tracks to say, am I living out my values in my actions? Or do I just hold them in my head and heart? And if someone really watched me, they would they would never know that's what I value. So I invite you to consider this year being a place to not only set these intentions but let your actions live them out.

SPEAKER_00:

Listeners, if you need parenting advice, talk to my mom. Sustainable parenting with Flora McCormick.

SPEAKER_01:

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