"Good Enough" Parenting

When I had a 6-week-old infant and a 3-year-old son I started social work school.  It was challenging to parent young children and be in graduate school but I was fortunate to be able to do it part time, and like all parents I juggled my different commitments. 

In the mandatory Human Development class, which covered birth to death, I learned about all the major theories of child development.  It was daunting to be aware of all these important impacts of parenting while I was so busy juggling life with two young children.  So I vividly remember sighing a deep sigh of relief when we learned two aspects of child development profoundly reassuring and comforting: “good enough mothering”, and “necessary empathic failure”.

Donald W. Winnicott in The Child, the Family, and the Outside World (Middlesex 1973) talked about the idea of “good enough” mothering.  He wrote specifically about mothering in the context of his times, which didn’t include the concept of fathers’ involvement or the idea of other caregivers.  I will use an expanded version of “good enough” parenting to include all of them. 

The idea is that there is no need or ultimately even no desire for parents to be perfect at what they do.  Parents need to be loving towards their children, to try and become attuned to their communications and needs, and of course to keep them safe.  However, parents can’t always succeed in anticipating needs and addressing them and more than that-they shouldn’t!

In fact it is when we are not able to meet every need, in the context of a safe and loving environment that the baby and then the young child begins to build important skills like soothing themselves and being able to fall asleep.  It allows them to be able to develop some age appropriate separation from their parents.  This leads to children learning to tolerate disappointment and develop problem-solving skills for themselves.  Heinz Kohut the founder of self-psychology referred to this concept as “necessary empathic failure”. 

When we are present and attuned most of the time, the child learns to trust that her parents will be there for her and that the world is a safe place. Then when she experiences some disappointment or mis-attunement in a given instance, she is able to trust that everything will ultimately be okay and in that context begin to develop her own skills in soothing herself.  Thus these lapses are necessary empathic failures.

In our culture today there is a strong tendency towards parents aiming for perfection, and for meeting children’s needs as fully and immediately as people.   This continues even after the infant years in the idea that children have to have the “important toys”, go to the best specific preschools, cultivate numerous extracurricular activities, do the best on standardized tests… the list is long and seemingly endless.  One of the sad by-products of this pressure is that parents judge themselves harshly if they feel they are not providing all these things. They can also put undue pressure on their children to always excel.

The reality is there is no way to be a perfect parent and in fact it would be detrimental to the child if we were perfect.  We need to have those small lapses in empathy and attunement in order that our children develop vital capabilities of self-soothing, learn how to tolerate disappointment and build problem solving skills.

With most of us juggling work, school, children, caring for elderly parents, community responsibilities, some of us single parenting, we can’t meet every need of our child.  We can take comfort in the fact that as long as we are loving, attentive when we can be, provide a safe environment, we are doing a good enough job.  Our children will grow, and thrive, and develop the needed skills to become safe, happy, independent adults.