"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.

Towards A Middle Ground Approach to Parenting

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A few thoughts about getting to a middle ground approach:

In my last post I talked about finding a middle ground approach between very strict, directive parenting, and focusing mainly on building self esteem at the expense of limit setting and accountability.  Where to start?  Often when I am working with parents I find that they feel very worried about whether they are doing a good job, whether other parents know more intuitively how to parent, whether other people's children are just better behaved than their own.

When parents talk about this I get a very strong sense that they are feeling a sense of shame, and that they personally are "not good enough".  They are often much harder on themselves than anyone else would be towards them. It makes me think that a good place to start is for parents to find a way to be kinder to themselves.  This reminded me of some things I have been thinking about in my own life.

Sometime around New Years my 24 year old daughter asked me if I had made any resolutions.  I was surprised by the question and said I don’t tend to do that, but I wondered if she did.  She told me that she regularly makes resolutions 3 or 4 times a year, and proceeded to tell me about her current one.  I was so impressed by her self-insight, wisdom and this practice of resolutions.  I decided that I would make a resolution this year to be more compassionate to myself.

I often advise parents I am working with to be compassionate towards themselves. How can I advise others to do it, if I am not practicing compassion towards myself?  Also, how can you actually make yourself be more compassionate towards yourself, how does one operationalize it?

I started to read a few books on the topic; I’ve been thinking a lot about it and talking about it with my husband and close friends.  (I’ll list some of the books I am reading below.)

One approach I decided that I could do was to look at myself with curiosity, not judge what I was noticing, but let myself be interested in it, in a kind, empathetic way that I would use towards others. 

I decided to try to meditate every day, alternating between a few guided meditation DVDs that were recommended to me. (See below)

The very first time I did it I noticed that during the meditation, when my thoughts were wandering, as they naturally do for everyone during meditation, I was even sometimes having imaginary conversations in my mind with different people in my life about what they thought about what I was thinking.  I was very taken aback; I was imagining other people’s judgments about my thoughts.  It was all coming from me. I thought about it, gently, for a few days and I realized I don’t really want so much of my thinking time to be spent like that.  And I try to notice when I am doing that, and let it go.

Around the same time, I had a day where I had no scheduled appointments, and a long list of non-urgent things I wanted to do.   In my head I started making a schedule of how I could get the most things done, in the most efficient way and I started to feel very anxious about everything I had to get done.  In the spirit of noticing with curiosity I stopped, and thought, “wait a minute, this is a day with no scheduled commitments,  nothing on my things to do list is urgent, but I am about to make it a very stressful day”.  And I changed my plans.  I thought about what actually needed to be done in a timely way, and what I felt like doing, as opposed to what I felt compelled to do.  And I kept reminding myself that nothing I was doing was urgent.  I had a calm day.

A few days later I thought to myself, in a gentle way, “You know, I think 80% of my stress is self generated". I just let that thought sink in.

Last weekend I was having a hard time with something, and I found that I was constantly ruminating about the problem.  I did talk about it with my husband, and then said, “okay, enough I need to focus on something else”.  As I did other things I realized I was having conversations in my head about it with the other players and I would keep getting more and more anxious and upset.  I decided at one point to just write out those ruminations in a letter I would not plan to send.  I found the process amazingly freeing.  And I was able to make a choice to stop ruminating.

In keeping with my current, "being compassionate to myself" theme, I know that I can’t always stop and be curious and not get lost in my own self-judgmental thoughts.  I can’t always keep perspective about what stress is coming from a really urgent situation or a self generated urgent situation.  And I certainly don’t want to be harsh about the times when I can’t be compassionate!  It’s a process, and the goal is to be noticing, to be kind to myself, and make some small changes, as they feel manageable.

I realized that this whole process is very relevant to what I was noticing when meeting with parents. Brene Brown, Ph.D., LMSW, in The Gifts of Imperfection writes about shame.  Shame is the feeling that we are bad, as opposed to the idea that sometimes we might behave badly.  Shame is a horrible physical and emotional feeling and we generally try to avoid it like the plague. 

If we think that a way we have been approaching parenting isn’t working effectively, we jump to thinking we are bad, we feel shame and it's hard to actually do anything differently, tell other people about our struggles, and get help.  We judge ourselves so harshly as parents and assume everyone else is judging us just as harshly as well.

What if parents could make a conscious choice to be compassionate to themselves instead of harsh?  We could look with curiosity at parenting situations we are in, and think about what is happening, what is working, what is not working, and how in small ways we could start changing those things that are not working.  If it's hard to come up with some strategies, we could think about asking for help from someone who also wouldn't approach it in a judgmental way. If there is any unsafe parenting behavior going on, parents immediately need to get outside help.

However, I am referring more to the fact that most parents love their children, and do the best within their own abilities, experiences, knowledge and intuition to parent their children.  Maybe the best place to start is with compassion and curiosity.

Some books I have been reading:

The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown, Ph.D., L.M.S.W., Hazeldon, 2010

The Mindful Path to Self Compassion, Christopher K. Germer, Ph.D.,The Guilford Press, 2009

Far From The Tree, Andrew Solomon, Scribner,2012

Some Meditation Tapes

Meditation Made Possible Volume I, Bhavani Lorainne Nelson

The Mindful Way Through Depression, Jon Kabat-Zinn

Creating Calm in Your Life, Rivka Simmons

Mindful Meditation, Susan Wood

Thoughts on Parenting

In the past year or so I have thinking a lot about the issue people call “helicopter parenting”; the tendency for our generation of parents to be intensely involved in every aspect of our children’s lives. 

The book The Tiger Mom, by Amy Chua, addresses one helicopter approach but ironically it is also present in parents who focus strongly on self esteem, try to shield their children from all disappointment and distress, try to be their child’s “friend”, don’t ask their children to take responsibility for their behavior, or for chores around the house.

Parents I work with say “I would never have talked back to my parents like my child does, they wouldn’t have tolerated it.”  On the other hand when I ask if they really talked to their parents, they often say no. And, “after school I went out with my bike and my friends in the neighborhood and my parents didn’t see me until dinner.  They didn’t know what we were doing.”  These parents reflect with nostalgia on that sense of freedom, that ability to explore, and problem solve, but often also express a sense of sadness that their parents didn’t know they were being bullied, didn’t realize they sometimes got into real trouble.  Parents say “I wrote all my college applications myself, my parents were hardly involved at all” they rue the fact that there is an expectation on them to be so involved with their children’s college application process, but they also feel they may not have received enough guidance in their own process.

We live in a very different world now than when we were children.  With good reason there’s a lot more concern about safety.  It seems like it is much harder to get into a “good” college, and the expectations of the extracurricular activities, grades and AP courses on our children are so much higher than for us. It’s all very complicated and fraught.  But we tend to swing to the opposite extreme in an attempt to correct what we felt didn’t work for us.

In a great article in the Atlantic,  Lori Gottleib writes about the “20 something’s” she sees in therapy. They often don’t have the necessary skills for day-to-day living perhaps because they did not participate in chores at home.   They expect things to always be perfect for them perhaps because they were sheltered from distress by parents intervening on their behalf even into the college years. They were not raised with firm limit setting, so perhaps they don’t know how to handle disappointment and frustration.  These children fear making choices because they were given so many choices they began to fear choosing any option because it precluded other options.  They have expectations that everything will be perfect for them perhaps because their parents always emphasized how special they were and put building self esteem as the most important goal of raising children.

I started to think about all this and came to the conclusion that in the swing to put more focus on self esteem, be more involved in our children’s lives, make sure they get into good colleges, prevent some of the pain we experienced,  some of us swung to an opposite extreme of not setting firm limits with our children, not promoting appropriate age level independence and problem solving and therefore we now have a problem with our children being equipped to handle distress and disappointment as well as be able to independently problem-solve. I don’t think the answer is to swing to the “Tiger Mom” approach.

I have spent a lot of time trying to think about how to find a middle ground approach and I hope to share my ideas and thoughts about that in this blog.

Welcome Parents on the Edge!

I have the best job in the world-helping parents with the hardest job in the world, parenting effectively and when possible joyfully and developing the tools to understand who their child is, how to communicate with them, how to handle the bumps in the road along the way, how to help them reach their potential, and how to do it in an atmosphere where both the parents and children can thrive.

In this blog I would like to explore ideas parents can use to understand their children developmentally, strategies for improving communication, the importance of and how to set limits, and how to keep yourself sane while actually doing the work of parenting!

I want to share thoughts from my own experience as a parent, from being part of a community of friends who have parented, from working with parents on a professional basis, from books I have read, am reading and will read in the future.  I want to stress the importance of:

• keeping a sense of humor through it all

• talking with other parents

• when you love your child, let them know that and provide for their basic needs, all the rest is gravy

• perfection is both unattainable and profoundly undesirable

• when you are overwhelmed its okay to ask for help, and there are good sources for that help out there.

I am very passionate about parenting.  I would like this blog to be a forum for sharing that passion, and continuing the ongoing dialogue on how we can best provide for our children’s needs, help them develop the foundation to thrive as they grow up and enter adulthood, and best support parents in that task.