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?

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........

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