Newcastle mum, Sarah Liebetrau, is the writer of the In Focus column in Sunny Days Magazine. Each month Sarah looks at a parenting theory and brings her own personal experiences as a mum of two to bear on her discoveries. Now we bring you Sarah's column online, starting with her debut - Security Concerns - from August 2010.

Sometimes the hopes we have for ourselves as mums and dads don’t match the reality of down-in-the-trenches, honest-to-gosh, real-life parenting. So how do we reconcile the parent we are with the parent we’d like to be? In her new monthly column, Sarah Liebetrau looks at the theory of ‘good enough’ parenting and discovers that maybe we don’t need to be perfect after all.

I was once a bit of a perfectionist. (Can you even be ‘a bit’ of a perfectionist? Oh, OK, I was a total perfectionist). And a people-pleaser. With a tendency towards anxiety. Then I had children, and for a time my mothering instincts battled with the aforementioned personality traits in an unholy war, until I reached a point where I had to relax a little, loosen control of the reins, or risk losing my sanity. I never went in for routines and I think I adapted well to meeting my baby’s needs, in fact most people around me would have said I was a relaxed and calm new mother, but inside I secretly felt incredibly stressed out about not being able to do it all. I worried constantly that by doing one thing or not doing another, I was somehow setting up my children for problems later in life.

I had to accept that, although I was doing my best, sometimes the wheels would fall off. Despite my best efforts, the baby would cry, the washing wouldn’t get done, the house would be a wreck, I would snap at my husband. I would make mistakes.  I found that while being a people-pleasing anxious perfectionist had served me well in my career (I was organised, I ‘got things done’, I managed people well) or while wrestling a uni deadline (anxiety-fuelled all-nighter anyone?), it wasn’t so useful when looking after a baby 24/7.

Interestingly, it was in giving up my quest to be the ‘perfect’ mother that I came to accept I was ‘good enough’.

The term ‘good-enough mother’ (which can be modernised to ‘good-enough parent’) was coined in the 1950s by D.W. Winnicott, a paediatrician turned psychotherapist who came to prominence in the generation following Freud.

Winnicott was particularly interested in the relationship between the mother (or main caregiver) and infant and its effect on the developing infant. Many of the concepts he developed have been built upon by today’s psychotherapists and remain relevant to modern parenting.

In describing the ‘good-enough mother’, Winnicott referred to an “ordinary mother who is fond of her child”. He emphasised that there is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ mother, as no human being is perfect. Winnicott observed that it is normal to be fully devoted to a child at its birth and shortly after, attending to all the infant’s needs, and to gradually allow the child to develop his or her independence at his or her own rate. As the infant becomes more resilient, he or she can cope with the mother’s normal human failings to a greater degree, by developing a tolerance of frustration. He talked about the ‘good-enough mother’ as the imperfectly attentive mother who does a better job than the ‘perfect’ one who risks stifling her child’s development as a separate being.

My inner perfectionist rears its pedantic head at this and asks, but what of all the adults who had unhappy childhoods? Were their parents ‘good enough’? But Winnicott draws a distinction by saying that a ‘not good-enough’ parent is one who is erratic and unpredictable - especially in the early stages of an infant’s development - sometimes lavishing the child with attention and then withdrawing, so that the child has no way to make sense of his world. This parent cannot even be relied upon to fail to adapt to a need.

But for me, fruitlessly striving for perfection, I was risking sending my children the message that their mistakes would not be tolerated either, and that they too should judge themselves similarly harshly. In other words, the anxiety about the mistakes I’d make was more likely to screw them up than the actual mistakes!

I think this is a dilemma shared by many modern parents. We want to be fulfilled, but also strike a balance between selfish pursuits and meeting our children’s needs. We worry that our children are either too mollycoddled or feel hard done by. Often times, it’s not even ‘selfish’ pursuits that are taking us away from giving our children the attention they deserve, it’s other facets of life - other children, work that we don’t enjoy but need to do to keep the money coming in, elderly parents. It doesn’t have to be ‘me time’ that makes us feel guilty.

It is reassuring to note that Winnicott concluded, “almost all mothers are effective and do not have to meet any one’s definition of perfection to be so.”  It is better for us as parents to accept ourselves as we are, and to do the best we can, than to attempt to be ‘perfect’ and then, necessarily, fail. Winnicott seemed to be trying to move away from the popular idea at the time that there was one set, agreed-upon way to raise children, and if you didn’t do it that way, you were a ‘bad’ parent. Winnicott wanted to do away with the notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parents as they are abstract concepts that cannot apply to real people. Instead there is only ‘good enough’ or ‘not good enough’.

So where is the balance? Obviously downing tools and living completely selfishly would be going to the opposite extreme, and children can suffer more from neglect and cruelty than they do from over-anxious parenting. It’s important, to me at least, to continue to be aware when I am having a bad day, to know what my trigger points are, and to think carefully when I get a pang of guilt about where that emotion is coming from. Once I have thought about why I am feeling guilty, I can either choose to change that situation/behaviour, or accept that it’s the best I can do. I try to remember the words of the great philosopher, Dory, from Finding Nemo, “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...”

In the end, none of us are perfect. We all do some things well and others not so well, and the best thing many of us can do is to start by giving ourselves a break. If we focus on the big picture, by giving our children a secure, consistent base from which to grow and explore the world, a base they know they can count on and always come back to, we may realise that near enough is in fact good enough after all.

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