Are you a 'good enough' parent?

Mama, educator and researcher, Miriam McCaleb unpacks the concept of 'good enough' parenting and explains why we should take the pressure off.  

What if you’re already doing a good enough job of being a parent to this little person?

Some say that motherhood is a long series of emotional contradictions. The sadness of missing your old life versus the joy of a new family life, the misery of long sleepless nights versus the happiness of newborn cuddles, the distress when your baby falls and hurts themselves versus the excitement when they take their first steps. 

While there are tons of things about being a parent today that are fantastic (I mean, those swivelling car seats? Game changer!), some aspects of parenting in the 2020s are hard flipping work. Harder than they need to be.

Scientific discoveries of the past few decades have brought miracles, like brain scanning technologies to document the importance of the first thousand days. With this knowledge comes a burden of responsibility for today’s parent: “Ah! She woke up and was crying and my reckless enjoyment of 10 minutes of gardening outside meant I didn’t hear her! She was so distressed and sweaty by the time I got to her and I just feel terrible!” (All this said while visualising the brain scans of orphans in eastern Europe in the 80s, with frontal cortexes missing due to severe childhood neglect).

Meanwhile, we swim in a cultural soup which normalises comparison. Social media pits our imagined bloopers reel (messy kitchens! Hairy legs! Grizzling baby!) against the edited highlights of others (rustic picnics! Perfect makeup! Laughing cherubs!). Those addictive algorithms work hard to keep us online, their business models require it. They’ll feed us more of whatever guilty pleasure keeps us connected – even though those things don’t always make us feel better.

May I suggest that there is an additional force adding to those pressures? Another modern obsession which has arguably gone too far. That, my friends, is the obsession with hacks. Lifehacks, mumhacks, even snackhacks. You know what I mean. There are corners of the internet which are devoted to maximising each moment, to constant improvement, and squeezing out every last drop of potential from... well, everything. Does anyone else find this to be thoroughly exhausting?

Frankly, I’ve had enough. And with my child development theory hat on, I’m going to try and rally support for doing less, leaving well enough alone, and embracing Good Enough.

Good Enough parenting is a concept promoted by renowned British Paediatrician and Psychologist, D.W. Winnicott, and it is as relevant now as it was when he first shared it, all the way back in 1971. I can’t help but contrast an acceptance of Good Enough with the culture of hacks, which seems to suggest that there is always a way to be more, to do more, to always strive for more. Full disclosure – I have compassion for the seductive power and practical appeal of this mindset.

I am a woman who has been known to do body weight squats whilst brushing my teeth, or knee tucks on the monkey bars when I’m at a playground with the kids. And while it’s great to squeeze in some exercise during a busy day, the flip side of that is a kind of low-grade anxiety that I might be constantly missing other opportunities for more. This is likely to rob the joy from being in whatever moment you’re in. Have you ever been with one of those people who cannot sit still and appreciate what’s right in front of them? Sometimes children will be playing quite happily and a well-meaning adult will try to "make it even better" (adding a toy, suggesting a different location) and completely fluff up the whole scene.

Meanwhile, responding to our babies is more difficult when we have a set notion of what we “should” be doing, or what a “perfect” mother would look like in this situation. At the Harvard Centre for the Developing Child they describe responsiveness as part of something they call “serve and return” interactions, which are one of the foundational building blocks of healthy development.

What if we let go of perfect, accept Good Enough, and just allow the moment to unfurl? Instead of trying to sneak in one hack or another, what if we left space to notice what already is? What if we were to just share a quiet smile with our kiddo, or lie down and look at the clouds instead? Can you just… let it be? All hail daydreaming and gazing out of windows!

Here’s a caveat: this is not permission to spend more time on your phone! That’s one area where not many of us are genuinely managing Good Enough parenting. Next time your phone sends you that alert of your weekly screen time average, don’t just swipe it away. Have a good, long look and decide if that really was the best use of your precious time. Sometimes it will have been, so no worries. But if you notice that you spent 14 hours on TikTok last week, and this doesn’t reflect your vision of good enough, you might decide to make some changes.

That’s the thing with a Good Enough mindset – it doesn’t demand perfection. It invites us to meet in the middle. It’s not an excuse for harmful behaviours and it’s not permission to abandon all maternal duties. Instead, it’s an invitation to let go of striving for perfection and the pursuit of more, and an opportunity to focus on what’s really important. Because truly, for the people who are reading this magazine – it’s likely that the thing you need to do is cut yourself some slack. If you’re like the hundreds – nay – thousands of parents I’ve known in my years as an early childhood teacher, parent educator and all round baby enthusiast, you possibly spend too much time questioning your decisions and feeling angst about the minutiae. When we embrace Good Enough parenting, we concentrate on the most important thing – and that’s our relationships with our children. Hack free. No shortcuts. Relationships. Nothing else matters as much.

That said, I do think there are some helpful ways that a Good Enough philosophy can inform other hot button areas of family life. Think about mealtimes. Ah yes, the age-old tension that accompanies the question “What’s for dinner, Mum?”. My primary school aged child likes to request “Talk me through it!”.  If you share my role as the #1 cook in your family, this can be a minefield. While ready-made meal kits might lessen some of this tension, those of us freestyling in the catering space can find it fraught to juggle the moving parts: there’s the nutritional analysis versus the cost of produce versus available time versus individual preference. Every. Single. Day.

If I add a sprinkle of that lifehack pressure to that cauldron of mealtime masochism, I can wind up feeling worse about myself and my kitchen – not better. Alright, random internet momfluencer, maybe there is a cute trick for using empty squeezy bottles to make mess-free pancakes… but that doesn’t mean I have to do it! Or that I even have to pay attention to you and your hack! Because guess what… I happen to like the tiny, weird-shaped pancakes that result from the messy drips. And anyway, I already put the squeezy bottle in the recycling... so there.

A Good Enough vibe in the kitchen looks at the family’s diet across the week, not necessarily obsessing about each individual meal. Good Enough parents overcook things sometimes, embrace frozen vegetables as a viable ingredient in ‘most everything, and know that eggs on toast can be dinner – just not every night!

Next, have a moment to think about how Good Enough parents might negotiate technology use in our screen-saturated world. I’m the first to encourage solid limits around this – no phones in bedrooms overnight, full stop – but it would be foolish to let my concerns about predatory weirdos, rampant data harvesting and unhelpful comparisons to overtake from the other awesome things that can happen online. There are ways of engaging with tech that are Good Enough. Family movie night – I’m all in. Staying in touch with friends and whānau is wonderful – just not for hours and hours each day! Updating your Spotify playlists? Righty ho. Creating music, making movies, writing stories? Have at it. There is evidence in the scientific literature that reinforces what you probably intuitively know – the thing that saps our happiness with regard to our phone use is mindless scrolling. Stay mindful, darlings, and encourage your kids to do the same. That might be Good Enough!

Finally, although I don’t think this is what Winnicott meant when he was writing about being a Good Enough parent, I have found it to be a really helpful benchmark for areas outside my mothering, too. My sister-in-law has this excellent saying: “Don’t let the great get in the way of the good”. That is, if we wait until conditions are perfect, we’ll never begin anything. Often, beginning is the hardest part, and I have found that just giving ourselves permission to begin imperfectly is better than doing nothing at all. 

This saying has an extra meaning for me, as someone who is a little bit hopeless at being hopeless at stuff. I’m guilty of the very adult trap of having decided what I do and don’t like, and what I can and cannot do. And that’s that. The thought of falling on my face and, well, sucking at something… it can break me out in a sweat.

One of the gifts of becoming a parent has been that – in order to model trying and failing, I’ve got to try new things! Kids do it all the time. We throw them into lessons or present them with untried flavours, even though we might have not learned anything new since we got our driver's licence, or eaten an unknown substance for years. I want to model a lightness of spirit as I bang about as an adult beginner on the drum kit (yes, really). With the support of a dear friend, I was able to laugh as I fell off the stand up paddleboard on my first go. Alright, that was my only attempt thus far, but that’s more about geography than my surly attitude! And, having tried olives annually all my adult life – I finally like them! Trying new things is good for us, and can take courage. If we were all able to accept that Good Enough might be good enough, we might accept that turning up is sometimes the hardest part.

Again, there’s no hacks for this stuff. Just an acceptance that sometimes Good Enough can be the best policy.

As a teen at Rangiora High School, Miriam McCaleb was part of an unofficial group called 'Overachievers Anonymous'. Years of meditation, radical self acceptance and studying child development have led her to a more peaceful, 'good enough' place. Reheat leftovers for dinner, then visit her at her barely good enough website baby.geek.nz.