Family This article is more than 22 years oldAs good as it gets
This article is more than 22 years oldAs national parents week gets underway, Ros Coward asks whether we ever really know if we're doing it rightThe British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott was the first to work with the idea of "the good-enough parent". He illustrated its meaning by describing possible interactions between a mother, a baby on the point of crawling, and an interesting toy just out of the baby's reach. The too-good mother can't bear the baby's frustration and immediately hands the toy to the baby. The not-good-enough mother leaves the baby too long with its frustrations. The good-enough mother allows the baby to explore its own capacities but not so long that frustration turns to despair.
This idea of the good-enough parent is so much better than the idealistic nonsense that dominates much childcare advice. Winnicott's idea is non-judgemental. Good-enough parenting is providing a secure environment sympathetic to the child's needs and capacities. It is not about "how to raise your child's intelligence", "how to raise a cancer-free child" or "how to have a baby who never cries". In some of the more emotionally literate childcare books, the term good-enough parent is now beginning to feature and that is a good thing. But there is one crucial way in which the concept of the good-enough parent is itself not good enough.
There's an implication in almost all advice on how to become a good, or good-enough, parent that this is a matter of learning an approach or set of behaviours, which, once acquired, will do for the child's whole upbringing. What has become clear as my children grow older is that no one approach works for all stages of childhood. What is good enough for one stage is not good enough for others. There is no such thing as the good-enough parent for every stage of a child's development.
Parents vary enormously in how competent they feel at various stages of a child's development. Some parents I have observed seemed distant with their toddlers but now have good relationships with their adolescents. The teenagers prefer this lack of direct interest to over-attentiveness. The same is true of working mothers. Some parents who worked incredibly long hours while their children were small seemed almost neglectful. Now, however, they have become the ideal parents for teenagers in that they offer good role models in the working world and provide the all-important empty house.
Most parents admit that they had a favourite time in their childrens' development. This is not always the predictable phase of infancy. Plenty of parents experience this time as unrewarding or depressing, disliking the isolation and the anxiety. Others revel in that physical and emotional intimacy and mourn its passing. One acquaintance of mine is so out of synch with babies' needs, she often makes them cry. Yet as soon as children become more independent and intellectually curious, she becomes highly entertaining to them.
There is too little acceptance in current childcare advice that good parenting is not one set of attitudes or behaviours but a process of constant change, like having relationships with a series of different people with different needs. How could one approach or technique work equally well for a helpless baby, tearaway toddler, inquiring seven-year-old and rebellious adolescent? People have very different strengths and weaknesses, which can work at different phases of a child's development.
Parental competence owes much to our own childhood experiences and personality. Those who are fixated on taking care of infants are sometimes driven by an obsessive need to nurture another as a way of taking care of themselves. When the baby becomes a difficult toddler, such parents can find themselves bored or angry. Teenagers thrive best with those who are still either in touch with their own adolescence or in sympathy with the condition. This is not so easy for parents who would rather not look back.
The suggestion that there might be in existence an ideal of a one-off good or good-enough parent exerts particular pressures on men. Now they are expected to be hands on with their children from birth, but many men - in spite of the contemporary literary outpouring - still don't feel an immediate bond with their babies. They may then find themselves accused of being not-good-enough parents, when relating to babies is simply not their strong point. Indifferent fathers of toddlers can become excellent fathers of teenagers.
To suggest that parents can be good enough at one point and terrible at another should be a source of optimism. It means that bad relationships with children can recover. The relationship between grandparents and grandchildren can illustrate this point. Many parents who had difficult relationships with their own children, find their grandchildren much more satisfying.
The most useful advice I have received for the stage my children are now at, is that no one parent or set of parents will be able to cope with the teenage years alone. So the most useful thing you can give adolescents is a variety of different adults with loosely similar values, in other words a range of adults to turn to. It is not so much the good-enough parent as the good-enough community that counts.
ยท Details of national parents week are on www.nfpi.org.
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