The Good Enough Parent

A recent debate on the mommy blogs and in the New York Times got me thinking about a psychological concept that I learned in my training as an art therapist, and that I have kept returning to again and again as a therapist and as a parent as well. It’s the idea of the “good enough parent”. Coined by Donald W. Winnicott , a British pediatrician and world-renowned child psychologist, in 1971, the term refers to parenting as a process rather than a fixed state or set of ideas.

What he explains is that for a child to develop in a healthy way, there must be a gradual “disillusionment”, or learning to tolerate frustration, but that it can only occur when there has first been a solid foundation of trust that the parent can provide and respond to the child’s instinctual needs.

In other words, there is no dichotomy between attachment parenting and its counterparts, rather, there is a natural and healthy progression from deep attunement and responsiveness to a wider and wider space between the child and parental gratification. Over the course of development, this space gets filled with all the coping skills that we need to make it in this world.

If there is not enough of a solid foundation of attunement, the child doesn’t develop healthy trust that he or she can express his or her needs and see them be met by the people who care for him or her. If there is no gradual learning of frustration, the child does not develop the ability to manage their feelings of upset until the need gets met, nor can they learn the skills required to become independent, self-reliant and competent individuals. Winnicott describes this process as “weaning”, not just from the breast, but from the dependence and reliance on the parent. Thus the child moves from the illusion that they are omnipotent: i.e., that that can make anything happen with a cry or a groan, to the gradual capacity to wait for their need to be met, or to meet their own needs themselves.

This process is a fluid one, which varies based on both the parent’s and child’s temperament. But what I love about Winnicott’s stance is that there is no perfection, only the notion that one is “good enough”, and that each parent and child knows what that means to them.

Thus the good enough parent is the parent who can navigate this process, who can be attuned, and also model for the child the ability to be separate. It is the idea that it is useful for the child to have both a responsive parent, as well as a not immediately available parent, as they learn important life-skills from both situations. And we can allow ourselves the possibility that we may need to tend to other things besides our children from time to time, and we can allow ourselves to trust that they will be ok when we do so.

Whenever these debates start to rage, there is so much underlying guilt, judgment, shame, etc. We parents struggle so hard to get things right for ourselves, and our children. So every once in a while, when I get crazed and try to be all things to all people, I remind myself that I don’t have to be perfect, just “good enough”.