The real reason stay at home parents keep postponing their own goals isn’t a time problem. It’s an emotional one.
Most advice skips straight to productivity hacks and calendar blocking. But research tells a different story: the gap between intention and action is almost always about how we manage uncomfortable feelings, not how we manage our schedules. If you’ve been telling yourself “someday I’ll get to it” since your eldest started nursery, this isn’t a character flaw. It’s a predictable psychological pattern, and understanding it is the first step to actually breaking it.
Why do stay at home parents keep putting goals on hold indefinitely?
The “next year” pattern feels rational in the moment. Kids are young, the house is demanding, and personal goals seem selfish or impractical by comparison. But motivation researchers identify something more specific happening underneath that reasoning.
Research paraphrased from Jennifer Duckworth’s publications in Motivation Science journal suggests that avoidance behaviors around goals often stem from emotional regulation challenges rather than lack of ability. When we expect a task to feel difficult or unpleasant, we unconsciously postpone it. The goal doesn’t feel safe to pursue right now, so the brain manufactures a better-sounding excuse: waiting until kids are older, waiting for more time, waiting for the stars to align.
A meta-analysis by Piers Steel, published in Psychological Bulletin in 2007, found that approximately 20% of the adult population chronically procrastinates, delaying important life tasks indefinitely. For stay at home parents, the structural conditions of caregiving make this even easier to justify. There’s always a genuine reason today isn’t the right day.
The trap isn’t laziness. The trap is that the reasons always feel legitimate.
What actually drives the “someday I’ll get to it” feeling?
Psychologist Russ Harris, writing in The Happiness Trap (2007), makes a striking observation about the way humans pursue comfort over action:
“The desire to feel good is the root of all suffering. When we wait for the perfect time or the right feeling to pursue our values, we miss our lives.”
This is the engine behind “next year” thinking. Putting life on pause feels better than starting something uncertain. Waiting preserves the possibility that you’ll eventually do it perfectly, with full energy, full focus, and full readiness. Starting now means risking failure when conditions aren’t ideal.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the framework Harris developed, describes this as experiential avoidance: the tendency to sidestep difficult emotions rather than act in spite of them. The goal isn’t the problem. The anticipated discomfort around the goal is the problem.
Harris has explained, paraphrasing his work in ACT Made Simple (2009), that waiting for motivation before taking action is like waiting to feel like swimming before jumping in the pool. The feeling often comes after the action, not before. For stay at home parents, this means the confident, energised version of yourself you’re waiting to become before you start? That version shows up during the work, not before it.
A University of Scranton study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology in 2015 found that 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by mid-February. The resolutions don’t fail because people stop caring. They fail because people expect motivation to sustain the action, rather than building systems that don’t require motivation at all.
Is this really an emotional problem, not a time problem?
Here’s a contrarian take worth sitting with: most stay at home parents don’t actually need more time. They need a different relationship with discomfort.
Motivation research consistently shows that goals on hold indefinitely share a specific feature: they feel emotionally loaded. The goal of writing a book, retraining for a career, building a business, or finishing a qualification carries weight. It means something. And things that mean something are frightening to attempt, because failing at them says something about you in a way that failing to watch a Netflix series does not.
Research cited from motivation science publications indicates that people cite “waiting for the right time” as the reason for delaying major life decisions approximately 73% of the time in goal-abandonment cases. But the right time is almost never what they’re actually waiting for. They’re waiting to feel ready. And readiness is an emotional state, not a scheduling outcome.
This reframe matters enormously. If your goal-delay is a time management problem, the solution is a better calendar. If it’s an emotional regulation problem, the solution requires working with your inner resistance, not around it.
How does “implementation intentions” research change what you actually do?
Heidi Grant, writing in 9 Things Successful People Do Differently (2012), cuts through a lot of well-meaning but ineffective goal-setting advice:
“People often fail at their goals not because they lack motivation or willpower, but because they haven’t thought carefully enough about when, where, and how they will pursue them.”
This is the research base for what Grant calls implementation intentions: specific if-then plans that remove decision-making from the moment of action. Instead of “I want to write more,” the implementation intention becomes “When the children nap on Tuesday, I will sit at the kitchen table and write for twenty minutes.”
The specificity isn’t aesthetic. It’s functional. Vague goals require fresh motivation every time you return to them. Specific implementation intentions transfer the decision to a context trigger, so you’re not relying on willpower or the right emotional state to get started.
Grant has also noted, drawing from NeuroLeadership Institute research on motivation science, that one of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming that motivation comes before action. In reality, action often creates motivation. For stay at home parents, this is genuinely useful: you don’t need to feel inspired to write the first paragraph or research the first course. You need to show up at the specific time and place you designated. The feeling follows.
Practically, implementation intentions work best when they’re small enough to be non-threatening. “Work on my career change” triggers avoidance. “Open one browser tab about evening courses on Wednesday after school drop-off” doesn’t.
What does breaking the cycle actually look like in practice?
Combining ACT principles with implementation intentions research produces a clear, if unglamorous, approach. It doesn’t require perfect timing or emotional readiness. It requires three specific shifts.
Name the emotional avoidance. Before scheduling anything, identify what emotion you’re actually avoiding. Is it the fear of wasting money on a course you won’t finish? The discomfort of being a beginner again? The guilt of taking time away from the children? Naming the feeling doesn’t dissolve it, but it stops the feeling from disguising itself as a practical barrier.
Replace outcome goals with process anchors. Instead of “I want to get fit,” try “On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I will do fifteen minutes of movement during CBeebies.” The outcome goal keeps you stuck because it’s always in the future. The process anchor happens today.
Expect friction and plan for it. The ACT approach explicitly prepares practitioners to encounter resistance and act anyway, rather than waiting for resistance to disappear. This means writing the implementation intention for the hard days too: “If I feel too tired to work on my goal, I will do five minutes anyway and then stop if I need to.”
None of this requires waiting until kids are older. None of it requires a free Saturday or a quiet house. It requires accepting that conditions won’t be perfect, and that perfect conditions were never the real prerequisite anyway.
Breaking the “next year” cycle doesn’t mean ignoring the genuine demands of parenting. It means refusing to let those demands become a permanent indefinite delay on a life you actually want.
FAQ
Is it normal for stay at home parents to keep delaying their own goals?
Yes, and it’s well-documented. Research from Piers Steel’s 2007 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin found around 20% of adults chronically delay important personal goals. Stay at home parents face an additional layer of socially accepted justifications, making the pattern easier to sustain without recognising it as avoidance.
What’s the difference between being genuinely too busy and procrastinating?
General motivation research suggests that genuinely time-constrained people reschedule specific plans. People experiencing goal-avoidance tend to keep the goal vague and future-dated rather than rescheduling concrete actions. If your goal has been “next year” for three or more years, the barrier is unlikely to be purely logistical.
Do I need to feel motivated before I start working on a goal?
Research cited by Heidi Grant from the NeuroLeadership Institute suggests the opposite: action tends to generate motivation, not the other way around. ACT psychologist Russ Harris makes a similar point in ACT Made Simple (2009): waiting to feel ready before starting is one of the primary mechanisms that keeps goals on hold indefinitely.
How small can an implementation intention be and still work?
Very small. Heidi Grant’s research in 9 Things Successful People Do Differently (2012) shows that the specificity of the when-where-how plan matters more than the size of the action. Five consistent minutes on a concrete task beats an hour of vague “working on my goal” every time.
What if I genuinely don’t know what my goal is anymore after years of putting life on pause?
This is more common than it sounds, and ACT has a direct answer for it: return to values rather than goals. Ask what kind of person you want to be, or what would matter to you if nothing were standing in the way, rather than trying to reconstruct a specific ambition. Goals can emerge from clarified values even when the goals themselves have gone blurry.