Being Great Vs. Good Enough

Published on 11.13.23 at garyborjesson.substack.com

The good-enough mother is one who makes active adaptation to the infant’s needs, an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant’s growing ability to account for failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration. – Winnicott

Everyone has a mother. Being a mother is simultaneously a most ordinary and extraordinary role. So, what’s involved in being a good mother, and a good parent generally? The question is important, for how we were parented has an outsize impact on who we become. In addition, as allies there’s a lot we can learn about being helpful from learning what goes into good parenting. Psychodynamic therapy, for example, often includes a “reparenting” process of one sort or other.

One of our best guides to the question is the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), and his powerful and influential idea of the “good enough mother”. Even if you’ve never heard of Winnicott, you probably recognize this phrase. Often he’s thought to be saying something like, ‘Look, bearing and raising children comes naturally to us as a species. There’s a lot of resilience in the process. Parents don’t need to be perfect because children are adaptable. It’s good enough to love them and keep them safe.’ To which the collective response is, ‘What a relief! We can be imperfect parents, and our kids will still turn out fine.’ This is true enough, as far as it goes, but if we stop here we misunderstand Winnicott’s view.

A brief diversion to a story about physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman will help show the misunderstanding. Feynman was teaching at Caltech and the students were a little in awe of him. One day at the board Feynman made a mistake in his calculations. A student pointed it out to him. If Feynman was embarrassed, he was also quick to laugh and thank the student for catching it. Then he noticed something: his mistake had broken the ice, so that the students were less awed, more relaxed and engaged. From then on, the story goes, when needed, Feynman might deliberately make a mistake early on in a course to help bring everyone together.

The moral of the story seems to be that Feynman—so clearly an example of a “great” physicist—sometimes needed to fake being merely “good enough” for the sake of bridging the gap between himself and his students. It reminds me of Aristotle’s humorous observation about friendship, that we wish good things for our friends—but only up to a point: We wouldn’t wish our friend to become a god, since then the gap between ourselves and them would be too great, and so there would be no common ground for the friendship. Similarly, by making a mistake Feynman humanizes himself, crosses the gap, and enters the “good enough” middle realm where most of us live.

Winnicott’s idea of “good-enough” is often taken to mean something similar, that the “good enough” parent stands in the middle range on a continuum ranging from bad to great parent, thus acting as a kind of metric. Bad parents need to aim higher, while great parents can relax a little, comforting themselves that, even when they’re less than perfect, their “failure of adaptation” ultimately serve the child’s best interest. The child learns a valuable life skill, “to tolerate the results of frustration.” Again, true enough, as far as it goes. But at its heart Winnicott’s “good enough” does not refer to a middle range between great and bad. So what does it mean?

Broadly speaking, “good enough” names a growth mindset. You can sees this in the quote at the top of this note (which is consistent with how Winnicott describes the good enough parent at other places in his writing). A growth mindset is, by definition, tolerant of mistakes and failures—they are “correct practice” for learning and growing, as we hope both children and parents are doing. As Winnicott describes it, good enough parents recognize this instinctively; they know how to respond helpfully to mistakes and failures. For this reason, it’s not a surprise that we tend to use “good enough” language at those times when we feel like we’re messing up, “Well, that was not my best effort, but still it was good enough.” We don’t think this way when we’re being an exemplary parent or therapist or…teacher.

Which brings us back to Feynman. Sure, his mistakes humanize him in the eyes of awestruck students, but what really brings them together—their true common ground—is being serious students of physics. Mistakes are part of the bargain whenever we’re learning—whether how to parent, or how to do physics. The fact that Feynman made mistakes doesn’t make him any less great a physicist. Likewise the fact that great parents sometimes screw things up and feel no better than “good enough” doesn’t make them any less great.

So Winnicott’s point is not that it’s okay to aim for the average or middle range; we’re not off the hook from striving to be great parents or allies generally! Of course there will be difficulties along the way. Winnicott reassures us of what the evidence shows, that occasional failures won’t ruin our children or our alliances. On the contrary, unfortunate as our failures may be, everyone will learn from them (one way or the other!). Again, this way of framing it helps cultivate a growth mindset toward our own difficulties, and those of others.

Having said this, we have yet to come to the heart of what Winnicott means with his idea of “good enough” parent. That’s for the next note. Stay tuned! And thanks for reading.

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In Winnicott's Words

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On Helping Others Metabolize Mistakes