Encore: Why you should aim to be a “good enough” parent, with Tim Cavell, PhD, and Lauren Quetsch, PhD

In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 47% of mothers and 34% of fathers said parenting was tiring most or all of the time, and a third of mothers and a quarter of fathers found it stressful all or most of the time. Psychologists Tim Cavell and Lauren Quetsch argue that a major driver of this exhaustion is the modern expectation that parents must be perfect—or at least “effective” in a hyper-prescriptive sense. Their antidote is an older idea, borrowed from pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott: being a “good enough” parent. Winnicott believed the perfect parent is actually less effective than the good enough one, because a parent who does not always meet every need forces children to learn to cope on their own. Cavell and Quetsch’s book, Good Enough Parenting: A Six-Point Plan for a Stronger Relationship with Your Child, aims for a sweet spot between folksy advice and rigid, science-heavy manuals, distilling the research into what matters most without wearing parents out.

The relationship is the point, not the tactics