What Does It Mean to Be a Good Enough Parent?

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I didn't realize every protest or cry my daughter made was perhaps— just maybe—not my fault until after my second child was born. My first woke every other hour for five months until I finally bit the proverbial bullet and tried sleep training. She clung, wanting to ride on a hip well into her second year. She didn’t walk until long past the growth curve said she should. She slithered around like a snake, then walked on her knees for months before pulling upright. (Spoiler: she is a grown, healthy woman.)

My second started smiling at three or four weeks, long before any child was “supposed to.” Positively grinning, she began giggling soon thereafter. She has never stopped. I know she’s in the building because I hear her laugh ring from out from rooms away. (Spoiler 2: she is also—gratefully—grown and healthy.) I wasn’t a different person after she was born. If anything, I was a doubly harried and anxious mom, as anyone who has two children in a few years can attest.

I read every parenting book, and the authors of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and Your Baby & Child From Birth to Age Five (bestselling classics of the time), had terrified me. According to them, because my baby cried, I was not attuned. I didn’t read her cues, anticipate her every need. I was—clearly—not good enough.

Luckily, after my second-born, I realized my girls were simply different. Their behavior had little to do with me, but instead with who they were. Attuning to them every moment to ensure ideal development had to be a myth. Unfortunately, this idea still holds way too much sway over mothers and parents everywhere: if your child is not perfectly happy, there must be something wrong with you.

Later, studying to be a psychiatric nurse practitioner, I learned about Donald Winnicott. Originally an early 1900s British pediatrician, Winnicott became a child psychoanalyst. The pediatrician part is key. By the time he began theorizing about babies as a child analyst, he had seen, examined, cared for, and treated countless children. And watched parents (primarily mothers) interact with them. He came up with the term, “good enough parenting.” According to Winnicott, parents only needed to meet infants’ needs about 30 percent of the time.

Although he was theorizing, as psychoanalysts tend to do from observation (in his case, robust observation), he wasn’t far off. Researchers Beatrice Beebe (a long-time mother-infant expert) and Susan Woodhouse (a parenting and infant researcher) independently found responding to infants about half the time seems to be ideal. This is the “Optimum Midrange,” according to Beebe.¹ She found babies in relationships with caregivers in this midrange of responsiveness actually became more resilient than babies of caregivers who didn’t respond—or responded too much. Babies use time without a caregiver’s involvement to learn self-regulation, which offers an essential skill for resiliency.

To Woodhouse, a good caregiver provides a secure base.² They do this not by responding every time, but by giving chest-to-chest soothing of a distressed, (not simply fussing) infant; by picking up a baby who reaches; and by helping to avoid frightening situations. Promptness is not critical to Woodhouse’s secure base; resolution of distress is. A mother needn’t respond all the time, but when the baby is in most distress. This way, a child learns they can engage and count on a parent when truly needed, which promotes secure attachment.

So if you respond to your child (or children) in distress or fear, you are good enough. You can’t ignore your children, of course, or be openly hostile to distress on any regular basis (we all have bad days). But often, you can let children figure things out. You can wait to see if fussing turns into distress, or if they’re reaching up for comfort. You can choose to respond when they’re fearful or anxious more than when they simply may want attention.

You needn’t meet or even know their every need, every moment. Just enough moments. The moments that count. That's good enough.

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