"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.

Curiosity Helped the Parent

“Socrates told us, "The unexamined life is not worth living." I think he's calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.”
― Roger Ebert

In my last post I talked about “Middle Ground Parenting” (I may need to come up with a better name, I don’t mean to indicate mediocrity or settling in any way) by which I mean the ways in which we get to our desired parenting outcome: to help our children grow into responsible, mature, capable, happy adults.   The main principles are listening empathetically, setting appropriate limits and boundaries, using positive discipline, and spending quality time with our children.

So how do we actualize middle ground parenting? I started in my last entry with the parents need to exercise self-compassion.  The most important factor in child behavior is modeling.  Children end up acting the way they see us behave.  If we set a tone of self-compassion they are learning that one need not be perfect, everyone makes mistakes; that everyone deserves to be treated in a kind way, and that they are loved just as they are.

The next important concepts I want to emphasize are listening and curiosity. When our children are babies we learn to discern and attend to their needs by listening to their cries.  Over time we begin to notice how the cries sound when they are indicating hunger, sleepiness, boredom, and loneliness.  We learn to comfort and care for the child based on those signals.  The baby steadily comes to see the parents and caregivers in their lives as interested in them, and making every effort to try and meet their needs.  Developmental psychologists refer to this dynamic as “attunement”.  We can’t always be correct when we are discerning a baby’s communication, and we can’t always succeed in soothing them, but as Donald W. Winnicott writes in The Child, the Family, and the Outside World (Middlesex 1973): we can do “good enough” at it.  I will return to the concept of “good enough” parenting-it is important and comforting!

These same listening skills-as well as noticing and curiosity about what the child is communicating- can guide us as parents all through their childhood and teens. When a one to two year old child is just starting to put together sounds, then words, then short phrases, we can listen to what they are trying to communicate and approach it with interest and curiosity.  Why is she repeating the sound gah so often? Is that her newfound way of communicating to us that she wants to be held?  How excited does she get when she says gah, and you give her a squeeze!

Children are always growing and changing.  When a toddler is repeatedly falling asleep while trying to eat her lunch, we can be curious and notice that she is now more active, doesn’t always take a morning nap and gets tired earlier.  We can adjust her meals and snacks accordingly to meet her new needs.  And she will feel better if she is able to eat enough to fuel all that activity.

When a preschooler is always falling down, bumping into things, and crying at a certain time in the evening, we can notice, be curious about that, and try adjusting her bedtime accordingly.  She will have a more pleasant experience of bedtime, as tears don’t always precede it.

When our school age child seems like they are always being unduly mean to their siblings, and having frequent meltdowns, it can drive us crazy.  We often jump to the step of punishment, and often the punishment does not turn out to be effective.  I am not at all suggesting that parents tolerate that behavior, but as we set appropriate limits we can take a step back and notice the patterns of behavior.  When is this behavior happening? What is going on before and after it?  We can acknowledge our own anger and frustration with the behavior and also apply curiosity.  This may lead us to a larger picture of what is behind the behavior in order to come up with effective strategies to deal with it.  I will address this approach more fully in later postings.

Parents aren’t magicians or mind readers.  We can’t know all our child’s needs and even always understand the sounds and words they are using to communicate them.  But we can establish a pattern of being curious about our children, listening carefully to the words they say to us, noticing the behaviors they are exhibiting and then adapting our approach accordingly.  Listening, noticing and being curious will lead towards parents who know how to communicate and children feeling heard.

Parenting Goals

In my first blog entry I wrote about finding a middle ground in parenting, somewhere between overly involved and protective (helicopter parenting), and rigid, oppressive parenting, (as described in The Tiger Mom).  Last time I addressed the importance of being compassionate towards ourselves.  If we don’t love ourselves, it is hard to authentically love others.

Now I want to take a step back.  If we are thinking about any important goal, and are working to find the most effective ways to approach getting to those goals, we often start with defining what the desired outcome is that we are looking for.  When we explore approaches to parenting, we want to have pleasant, peaceful loving day-to-day lives (short term goals) and we are also trying to raise children who grow into successful adults. (long term goals)  The long term parenting outcome we are looking for is children who grow into successful adults.

We all have different ideas and expectations for our children about what success looks like based on our own history and culture-it’s a very personal thing.  But over all we want children who feel good about themselves and behave in a kind, compassionate and respectful way towards others.  We want them to care about family and friends, and strive to have strong such relationships in their lives.  We want them to be curious and interested in the world around them.  We want them to be able to work hard and be successful at work, to be resilient and to be capable of problem solving.  We want children who engage in their larger community and help others that are in need.

Every parent has their own unique hopes and dreams about their children but using this definition as an approximate desired outcome we are looking to achieve, how can we get there? What can we do as parents to help our children grow into responsible, mature, capable, happy adults?

I believe that “middle ground” parenting approach is the answer.  We need to be sensitive to self-esteem issues, by setting limits without shaming our children. We need to keep our children physically and emotionally safe but within that safe space allow them to try things, to experience disappointment, and sometimes to fail.  We need to provide a warm nurturing environment, but encourage independence.  I believe we do all this by listening empathetically, setting appropriate limits and boundaries, using positive discipline, and spending quality time with our children.  In this blog I will continue to explore how these approaches lead to both a more pleasant day-to-day life currently and also lead to the qualities we want to see in our children as they grow.