When you strive for perfection as a parent, you’re setting yourself up to be repeatedly disappointed in yourself—because you just can’t be perfect.
Are you a parent who spends a lot of time criticizing yourself because you’re falling short of being a “perfect” parent? In this episode, Dr. Nanika Coor describes “good enough” parenting and how being perfect as a parent is not at all what your child needs from you.
Project Parenthood is hosted by Dr. Nanika Coor. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
Have a parenting question? Email Dr. Coor at parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com or leave a voicemail at 646-926-3243.
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Hey parents! You're listening to the Project Parenthood podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Nanika Coor, clinical psychologist and respectful parenting therapist. Each week, I’ll introduce you to the same respectful parenting practices that I use to help parents repair and deepen connections with their children. You’ll get tips for cultivating more parental self-compassion, more cooperation from your kids, and more joy, peace, and resilience in your relationship with them.
In today’s episode, I’m talking about the pitfalls of striving to be the perfect parent and the benefits of being “good enough.” Stick around till the end to hear about ways to counter parental self-criticism.
Almost all parents want the best for their kids—whether or not they’re able to provide it. Parents want their kids to someday be reasonably content and successful in their adult lives and adult relationships. For parents who had challenging upbringings themselves, the desire to break that cycle and do something different can mean holding themselves to higher standards than necessary. You might be particularly hard on yourself if your child is unhappy or upset—feeling as though if you’d done something differently you could have avoided that outcome. When you hear your own parent’s hurtful or unhelpful words coming out of your mouth or notice you’re behaving in ways you didn’t want to pass on to your kids, you might become really self-critical. You constantly monitor yourself and wonder if you're doing parenting “right”—as if there is a “right way” to be a parent!
When you strive for perfection as a parent, you’re setting yourself up to be repeatedly disappointed in yourself—because you just can’t be perfect. You’re a fallible human being. And that means you’re definitely going to make mistakes, and do or say things you wish you could take back.
You’re not going to make yourself do better by making yourself feel worse.
So—what if I told you that the harsh reality that you’re not a perfect parent is actually beneficial to your child?
In 1953, British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott theorized that an infant’s healthy cognitive and emotional development is dependent on the kind of environment it’s developing within—the “holding environment.” This environment is the quality of physical and psychological care provided by the infant’s “mother” which, he specified, is not necessarily the infant’s biological mother—this could be another significant adult.
If things go well, Winnicott suggests, at the start of the infant’s life the mother—or parent—is in complete sync with the absolutely dependent baby and devotedly, actively, and non-resentfully adapts their whole life to the baby, even sacrificing their own personal needs in order to reliably meet all of the baby’s physiological needs. Because the infant is pre-verbal, the care given by the mother is based on empathy and attunement rather than verbal understanding. This near-perfect care is physically loving and protective of the baby, attentive to the baby’s unique temperament, sensitivities, and minute and daily changes in growth and development.
Then gradually, as the baby matures to a state of “relative” dependence, the mother allows the baby to experience brief moments of frustration and disappointment, which the baby experiences as a powerful emotional storm. The mother is both flexible and sturdy enough to meet, validate, and, if necessary, absorb the baby’s protest or rage without retaliating or shutting down. Through repeated experiences of the mother remaining physically and emotionally available during these overwhelming feeling states, the baby begins to develop emotional regulation.
At the same time, the mother stops being essentially “perfect” in the eyes of the baby and so becomes a separate and fallible entity who is “good enough.” Near-perfect empathic attunement gradually becomes a more realistic kind of care based on actual signals of need from the baby. This shift in the relationship mentally stimulates the baby to develop an awareness of the external world that is separate from itself, and the baby begins to understand that it is a separate individual.
“Perfect” parenting that continues past that initial period of symbiosis doesn’t allow for this kind of stimulation of exploration and discovery of the external world, leaving the baby in a kind of fantasy state where they believe their every need and desire will be immediately fulfilled—a belief that has a negative impact on the child’s future happiness and mental health. By failing to immediately meet every need the baby has, the mother helps the baby adapt to external reality: most needs will be met, but not always right away and not 100% of the time.
A “good enough” parent doesn’t have to meet 100% of a child’s needs 100% of the time, and shouldn’t!
Sensitivity is an important component in an infant’s development of secure attachment. A sensitive caregiver is able to perceive, accurately interpret, and provide a timely and adequate response to the baby’s communicative signals. An infant has limited self-regulation skills, so they communicate their dysregulated state through eye contact, vocalizations, facial expressions, and body postures, inviting the parent to provide regulation externally. With countless repetitions of this kind of mutually regulating interaction with the caregiver, the infant goes on to become more and more skillful at regulating themselves as they mature.
But this mutually regulating process doesn’t always go smoothly.
Using videotapes of mother-infant interactions, researchers Tronick and Gianino discovered that parents regularly misperceive the baby’s signals, or they don’t respond fast enough, or maybe the baby is limited in their ability to signal the parent, etc. The dyads were only “perfectly” in sync 20 or 30 percent of the time! They found that these mismatches—when the kind of regulation the baby needs and the regulation the parent is providing don’t align—create a “micro-stressor,” but as soon as either the parent provides accurate regulation or the baby adjusts to their parent’s actions, the micro-stress is alleviated—a process called interactive reparation.
Beatrice Beebe’s research team also studies micro-communications between parent and infant, such as their micro-expressions and body postures. They learned that dyads that had a moderate level of mismatches that were quickly repaired predicted infant secure attachment. However, dyads with high frequencies of mismatches without repair and those with high frequencies of perfect matches both predicted infant insecure attachment.
The next time you notice you’re giving yourself a hard time because of what you perceive as a parental misstep, remind yourself that you’re only human, and all humans are fallible. Repair and reconnect with your child—and with yourself. Show yourself some kindness. Parenting is hard and naturally filled with moments of parent-child out-of-sync-ness. You’re doing the best you can—and you’ve always got another chance to do a little better if you want to.
Test it out and report back!
“Perfect” parenting isn’t possible, and it’s not even desirable. A perfectly parented infant or child wouldn’t have opportunities to internalize the scaffolded regulation skills parents provide and they would get no practice with interactive repair. Moving repeatedly in and out of sync with your child is a natural occurrence, and the process of getting back in sync and reconnecting is rewarding for you both. Parent-infant relationships that include parental empathy, sensitivity, responsiveness, regulation, and repair supply children with what they need to move out into the world successfully.
So stop holding yourself to unrealistic standards. Even if you only manage to be accurately attuned 30% of the time, as long as the other 70% involves repair of most of the disconnections that occur, that’s good enough!
I hope that’s helpful! You can learn more about my work with parents at www.brooklynparenttherapy.com and on Instagram at BKPARENTS.
If you have more questions about good enough parenting or any other parenting questions or stories, leave me a message at (646) 926-3243 and be sure to let me know if it's okay to use your voice on the show. Or, send an email to parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to Project Parenthood on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Catch you next week!