Your journey as a mother has likely brought up complex feelings about your own limitations, self-worth, and identity. Becoming a mother also forces you to question whether your pre-parenthood expectations are realistic, attainable, or even desirable anymore. So often this manifests as letting go of perfect parenting and working to overcome any shame or disappointment that arises as you come to terms with your own limitations. In the process, mothering becomes one of the most humbling and transformative experiences and often leads to more self-love and self-care.
In this post, we explore “good enough” parenting and how you can take steps to overcome perfect parenting and meet the needs of your children, all while cultivating acceptance rather than striving for perfection.
Notice the influence of society’s expectations
Many of your expectations about the type of parent, employee, or partner you should be comes from societal expectations. These include what you’re programmed to think based on examples from your friends, family, society’s gender norms, the media, and social media. For example, if your closest group of friends are “pinterest parents” who throw picture-perfect birthday parties for their toddlers, you might feel pressure to host a party that also reflects this over-the-top level of quality and planning.
It’s helpful to remember that the pictures and videos (often shared by friends) on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and other social media sites often show the highlight reels of life, not the authentic work, stress and even relational conflict, that goes into the Instagram-worthy outcomes. In another example, when you see perfect family pictures on various social media highlight reels, what you don’t see is arguing over outfits, crying over messy hair, or stressing about rainstorms in the forecast. Social media shows only the most perfect moments and you therefore might expect life to look that way, which results in pressure on yourself and your family to emulate these picture-perfect scenes.
While it’s difficult to detach from society’s expectations and the media’s portrayal of perfect parenting, surrounding yourself with peers who are authentic and honest about the challenges of parenting is important. Sometimes these are connections you make outside your core social circle and might be parents you meet through your daycare, school, gym, kids’ sports, or work. Of course, limiting your exposure to unrealistic examples of parenting on social media and resisting the urge to compare your family to others is core to overcoming the unrealistic influences all around you.
Focus on meeting your child’s needs - imperfectly
When children are infants, they need their parent to promptly, warmly and consistently respond to their attachment signals as often as possible. Through this, they learn that attachment figures will generally be able to meet their needs and internalize a model of being worthy of care and attention as they grow into adulthood. And while the goal is to do this as often and consistently as possible in the first year or so of life, sometimes the most loving and healthy thing you can do as a parent is to set them in their crib and walk away to breathe and calm your nervous system or let them cry for a few seconds while you finish the first shower you’ve had in days.
Later on, as attachment researcher, Donald Winnicott (1953) researched, as children grow, “good enough mothering/[parenting]” involves parents meeting their needs in an attuned way much of the time, while also allowing for tolerable failures in meeting their needs (e.g. having them wait until you finish your conversation before you respond to their request, not cooking them a separate meal, not allowing them to get their way as they tantrum in the store, etc.). Through this, Winnicott believed that children were set up for a world that won’t always meet their needs or expectations.
Applied to modern parenting, these parenting dynamics suggest that if you are meeting your child’s needs pretty well, most of the time, then you are successfully parenting. A “good enough” approach is more attainable long-term and parents can more consistently aspire to “good enough” outcomes, rather than striving for perfection. In fact, these researchers don’t believe that a perfect environment all the time is healthy or realistic for the parents nor helpful to the child’s development. This might look like mostly having your child on a regular healthy evening routine of a meal together at the table as a family, bath time, and reading time. However, on nights when you’re exhausted or your partner is out of town, it might mean skipping bath time or cutting reading time short to preserve your energy, which is a “good enough” approach to the evening routine and an adaptation that still meets your child’s needs.
In the birthday party example, while it’s tempting to one-up your friends with an even more extravagant gathering for your toddler, consider how little this will actually impact the happiness and well-being of your child. Sometimes, you might put twice as much work into something that might yield a child who is 1% happier (or even less happy) despite all the extra effort to make the given experience “perfect”. If you find yourself obsessing over the details, step back and ask yourself whether your child will remember these details in even one day and if the answer is no, consider a simpler approach.
Focus on progress over perfection
Like so many other aspects of life, focusing on progress in both your decision-making and overall mindset is better than shaming yourself for not living up to high expectations of perfection. This means doing your best most of the time and owning your shortcomings. For example, if you were caught up in the desire for a perfect family portrait session and lashed out at your partner or child when they weren’t looking at the camera or didn’t participate fully in the photoshoot, it’s okay to say “I was feeling frustrated and handled this situation poorly” or “I used a term with you that I’m not proud of”. When you engage in the repair, others see you handling emotions and model inspiring behavior. You also teach your child that no one is perfect and it’s okay to own and authentically work on your shortcomings.
At Center for Shared Insight in Denver, Colorado, we work with clients on the dynamics they experience at all phases in life. The transformation that happens as you settle into motherhood can be a particularly challenging one, especially if you feel attached to certain ideals. Embracing “good enough” parenting requires a great deal of introspection and self-acceptance. We’re here to support your journey. Contact us for a free consultation.
