After failing as a parent, I gave up resolutions for two words

Editor’s Note: Channon Hodge is a video producer at CNN, overseeing digital video content for Travel and Wellness.

I understand the benefits of making New Year’s resolutions. I’ve seen the brain science on how to make them work. The idea of slicing and dicing goals into micro-atomic resolutions that will make life so much better all sounds lovely.

I just can’t do it.

I’m a news producer coming out of a year filled with one horrific global event after another. I’m also a single mom by choice of a 20-month-old. I adore him but I barely made it to 2025. I’m not sure I’ll make it to 2026.

That’s why I’ve made no plans to try harder, set an intention or try to improve on anything.

What I did do, however, was revisit some of the six months of company-sponsored therapy I tried in 2024 to figure out why I’m so enraged by my friends’ well-intentioned New Year’s Instagram posts. I also did some research, called up a psychologist and queried my discussion groups of single moms.

Then it was Niecy Nash-Betts and Snoop Dogg to the rescue. Their speeches after being honored for their work popped up as viral videos on my social media feeds, giving me the words I needed to tie all that advice together.

What was going on with me?

I started searching online to learn more about my lack of motivation, and I found a theory called the “progress principle.” It came from researchers who poured through more than 12,000 diary entries from over 200 people working at several chosen companies.

In 2007, researchers Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer found that what separated a worker’s good day from a bad one was whether that day contained progress or setbacks. (Amabile is now the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, Emerita, at Harvard Business School, and Kramer is an independent researcher and writer.)

Good days contained some sort of minor but meaningful step forward in completing a project. A setback proved to be demotivating, and multiple setbacks led to burnout. This simple and somewhat rational finding became the foundation of the book “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work” by Amabile and Kramer and an important thread in the study of productivity and motivation in the workplace.

Clinical psychologist Melanie McNally also touched on the importance of recognizing progress when she wrote about a high-achieving but frustrated client. McNally’s article in Psychology Today spoke to me about my yearslong lull, so I called her up to learn more.

“So often what people do is they’re just constantly moving the goalposts, just moving on to the next thing,” McNally told CNN. “And that’s not helpful. That’s what leads to burnout.”

I realized this theory doesn’t just describe work. It describes parenthood.

One step forward, two steps back

When my son finally stopped waking up three times a night for feedings, he suddenly stopped taking a bottle (which meant I could never leave his side). Ugh.

When he finally started taking a bottle again a few months later, he refused to try solids other than applesauce. When he started trying solids, he regressed on sleep training. I spent 18 months moving from one goalpost to another, feeling the entire time like I was nearly failing as a mom.

My parenting chat groups are full of these dominoing challenges, none more vivid in my recent chats than that faced by Melissa Carter, also a single mom by choice. Her toddler spent days in the intensive care unit for respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV, and pneumonia.

For parents who are couples, hospitalization for your child is devastating. For a single parent, it is also lonely and completely destabilizing. It leads some single parents to question whether they can manage at all.

Melissa was the first to answer my query asking if anyone was making resolutions. Yes, she told me, sort of. She’s thought about this “moment of beginning” a lot, and as an adjunct assistant professor of public service and senior director for Global Spiritual Life at New York University, she’s developed a resilience I admire. She doesn’t care for resolutions either.

Instead, she focuses on one word for the year. Last year’s word was “alignment.” It helped her think about staying true to who she was, which she has discovered can be two different people when it comes to parenting her son, Sage.

“Sage’s mom is a bad ass,” she told me. “She was like a pit bull in that hospital. You know? And then there’s Melissa, that is also quite amazing, successful, and has her own wounds and her own history that she also has to work through.”

The application of progress theory to parenthood makes sense, McNally told me. It’s also a connection therapists have made to help all sorts of struggling clients reinforce positivity. Half of McNally’s clients are teenagers and, by extension, their parents are included. She holds parent group meetings and starts each one by asking everyone to share a small win, a moment of progress, for a key reason:

To profit from progress, Amabile and Kramer’s research and other findings that followed realized that small wins must be celebrated. Big wins are rare, these advocates said, but celebrating a small one can be a powerful catalyst for the brain and for self-esteem.

If you’re just moving from one challenge to the next, the brain associates achievement with stress, which, over the long term, can lead to burnout, McNally said. She added that instead, you want the brain to connect achievement to pleasure. Celebration gets you a little hit of dopamine and then comes the bigger benefit.

“Your brain gets to really feel what you’ve done and what you’ve achieved,” McNally said. “You make that direct connection between the reward and the achievement. So now when you go on to the next thing, it’s almost like you have some closure because you’ve celebrated this thing.”

I started to think that I inadvertently missed out on a whole lot of celebration. And look, throughout the year, people told me I was a great mom, but it felt strange to hear and I didn’t know why.

So what was wrong? McNally said these accolades can sometimes feel too generic and that can then feel disingenuous, even when they’re kindly meant. In acknowledging progress or wins, specificity and even material rewards can help. So buying myself two croissants the morning after my son slept through the night after a week of nightly wakeups was right for me. (But there are not enough croissants in all of Brooklyn for the year I’ve had.)

My one word for the year appears

So here comes Niecy Nash-Betts. After decades acting in movies, hosting one of my favorite reality shows, “Clean House,” and creating a deadpan yet hilarious cop on “Reno 911!,” Nash-Betts finally won an Emmy in 2024 for a dramatic role. On stage, she thanked God, Netflix, the voters and then added:

“I want to thank me for believing in me and doing what they say I could not do! And I want to say to myself, in front of all of you beautiful people, go on, girl, with your bad self,” said Nash-Betts, who won the best supporting actress award in a limited or anthology series or movie for “Dahmer-Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”

She later told “Entertainment Tonight” she had to push hard to get the industry to realize she was more than just funny.

“It’s not called mamma-esteem and us-esteem and them-esteem,” she said while holding her Emmy that night. “It’s called self-esteem because done nobody gotta believe it but you.”

She wasn’t the first to go viral for thanking herself. Snoop Dogg did the same in 2018 when he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

What Snoop Dogg and Nash-Betts led me to believe is that it shouldn’t be unorthodox to acknowledge your own accomplishments. In doing so, you can believe in yourself without waiting for others to believe in you, too.

Saying thank you was the least I could do for a mom who tried really, really hard. My “one word” — thanks — is a small way to celebrate a year of wins. I could add some croissants for good measure. I told McNally, the clinical psychologist, that I was going to spend some time in 2025 acknowledging my progress over the past year.

She told me that was a good idea, adding, in a way only a therapist can, that it might help me approach challenges differently this year. That sounds like a resolution. She told me to go for it but to be specific and write it down.

The note all parents need to write out

So, for the first time in the four decades that I’ve spent writing journals, essays and stories, I start to write it out.

Channon, I want to thank you.

Thank you for trying to scoop up all that water using a dishpan when it started flooding your garden apartment.

Thank you for giving up your garden and moving somewhere new with a toddler in tow.

Thank you for spending six months carrying your breast pump, your laptop, your measly collection of milk, your container of cafeteria food that would turn into your dinner and your 15-pound child up two flights of stairs into your new apartment all those days you had to go to the office.

Thank you for eventually thinking of those two flights of stairs as your gym substitute and then still joining a gym because the one-month free promo got to you.

Thank you for crying when you needed to, even that one time in Bryant Park after your eye doctor’s receptionist snickered because you’d missed an important appointment while trying to get to a funeral you also missed, but you’re doing amazing and the sobs came, and those two teenage girls in the park were glaring at you and you didn’t give them the finger.

Like, that specific? Yes.

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