The Virtues of the Good-Enough Mother

Published on 11.20.23 at garyborjesson.substack.com

I think you will agree that there is nothing new about the central idea. Poets, philosophers and seers have always concerned themselves with these ideas. -Winnicott

As for me, I can already see what a big part has been played in my work by the urge to find and to appreciate the ordinary good mother. - Winnicott

My first job in this second career as a psychotherapist was at Dragonfly, a residential-treatment program for young adults. My job involved working with my clients and their parents, who were usually paying for treatment. I remember an awkward conversation with a mother who heatedly demanded to know whether I’d ever been a parent. When I said no, she replied, “Then what do you know about parenting, much less being a mother? Why should I trust your advice?” She said this during a family session that included her husband and her son. She was reacting to my suggestion that she reflect back what she heard her son saying, before she responded to it. This advice is standard practice when communication is breaking down—much less completely broken, as it was between this mother and her son. Even so, she was right that there’s a lot I will never know about being a parent, and even more that I’m constitutionally incapable of knowing about being a mother.

Yet I humbly suggest that the basics of good parenting are not so hard to know, though they are hard to practice. Part of the therapy for her son—and for her, if she was willing—included learning about how his early experience and the way he was parented had affected him. The point was not to blame anyone, but to understand how they got here, including why it was so heartbreakingly hard for her to hear what her son was trying to tell her.

This is a long windup to the famed pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s ideas about mothering. But it’s good to remember that we all have an interest in what it means to be a good-enough parent. We were all shaped by parenting, so exploring it deepens our knowledge of ourselves. Even if we don’t become parents ourselves, there are moments in all our lives when we’re called on to play a parental role.

Fortunately, as Winnicott noted, the central ideas are clear enough. Indeed, he coined the term “good enough” to emphasize that his ideas about parenting were drawn from observing what good-enough parents typically know and do. The language of “good enough” indicates that parenting comes naturally, that there is no special knowledge or technique required, that the “ordinary, devoted mother” possesses everything needed to raise a healthy child.

Winnicott thought this needed emphasizing because he saw how “expert” opinions threatened to override the sound instincts of mothers. In 1969 he wrote a letter to the editor of Child Care News, in which he criticized “Behaviour Therapy”. In the letter he explains why he capitalized it: “I give it capitals to make it into a Thing that can be killed.” In his time, and and even more so in ours, parents are inundated with “expert” opinions about how to raise a child. He saw that an educated mother following the latest advice may do more harm than an “ordinary mother” who follows her heart’s sound instincts. In Winnicott’s view, fortunate are the mothers who haven’t read the latest news: that they shouldn’t pick up their babies when they’re crying; or that they should punish them if they’re not potty trained by two; or that they should guard their child against experiencing failure, etc. Like so much else in our culture, the ever-changing advice of the expert class militates against honoring the good-enough parent’s sound instincts. This will become obvious as we dig deeper into what good mothering involves.

Winnicott noted the importance of what he called “primary maternal preoccupation”, which occurs during the fetus and infant’s early phase of absolute dependence. He saw the role of the father or other caregiver as to protect the mother’s ability to be fully preoccupied with the child, “which she does simply through being devoted to her infant.” Contrast this devoted attention with a mother who doesn’t have a partner who can protect her precious preoccupation; or who struggles with mental illness; or whose attention is drawn away to other concerns during this critical period. Now add a culture that resists supporting extended maternity leave. Winnicott’s point is that, however it may happen, the failure to be fully preoccupied in this early phase exposes the infant to discomfort, fears, and anxieties they aren’t yet able to metabolize. The resulting insecurity can become a lifelong source of anxiety and distrust, as attachment science is showing.

As the child develops beyond these early weeks and months, the mother naturally becomes less preoccupied. Winnicott takes the mother’s primary virtue throughout to be holding. This begins with actual holding, but he intends the word expansively, to include things like encouraging a child to try out for the school play, or enforcing a regular bedtime, or prohibiting them from having an iPhone (and tolerating the ensuing hate). Because the mother is attuning to the changing needs of her child, her holding is “an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant’s growing ability to account for her failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration.” To leave an infant alone to cry herself to sleep is not good holding; whereas to let a 12-year-old express anger and cry tears of frustration that they can’t have an iPhone is good holding. (I use the example of devices because the damaging effects on children’s mental health are obvious, yet here again our culture makes it hard for parents to hold their children in this way.) As the child matures, holding them well means letting them go. It means encouraging independence and autonomy, and enduring the lonely ache of coming home to an empty nest; or that comes from respecting an adult child’s request not to call or text so often. That was one of the things my client was trying to tell his mom that she didn’t want to hear. She couldn’t hold it.

I’m relieved I’m not a mother. It’s incredibly hard work to raise a human soul, even in the best circumstances, and ours are far from the best circumstances. It’s a relief to hear in the expression “good enough” that we needn’t be perfect. It’s good enough to love the child for who they are, and to enjoy supporting them becoming their true self. The good-enough parent is free (mostly!) of the need for the child to meet their needs, or those of society. So at least Winnicott hoped.

At our best, psychotherapists and other allies bear a kindred love for those we help. This love helps us get out of our own way and attune to what the other needs in order to grow. The philosophical love of wisdom has a similar character—of being more in love with getting to know the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be, or think it should be.