Good-enough mother
At the end of 2014, the Oxford English Dictionary entered over 500 news word and phrases into its dictionary. One of these was the term “Good-enough mother”.
”Good-enough mother” is a term coined by Donald Woods Winnicott (April 1896 – 28 January 1971), an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst who influenced a significant change in attitudes towards motherhood during the first half of the twentieth century. He advocated a less regimented approach to raising children, which had been dictated by “experts”, stating that “It is when a mother trusts her judgment that she is at her best.” Perhaps most importantly, Winnicott introduced the idea of the mother “failing” and encouraged women to put less pressure on themselves to be the perfect, devoted mother that the rulebooks and experts described. In an article for the International Journal of Psycho-analysis in 1953, he defined the term “good-enough mother” as follows: “[she]…starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure. Her failure to adapt to every need of the child helps them adapt to external realities”. Winnicott believed that the good-enough mother did as much as was reasonably possible in terms of responding to her child’s needs, but accepted her “failures” (as her child might perceive them) as a natural part of encouraging her child on his path to independence.
Here in the twenty-first century, the debate surrounding when exactly a child is ready to face such “failures” and what those failure might be never ends. Mothers are inundated by “expert advice” regarding every detail of their child’s upbringing. Every issue from what kind of mashed food you fed your baby (surely you only gave them organic?) to potty training is scrutinized, analyzed and criticized in the media and online these days. You only have to take part in an online discussion between new mums for a short while before you find yourself being condemned for feeding your child a cornflake before the age of six months (the rules say no solids before six months!) or letting your child have a lollipop at the supermarket to curb a tantrum (what a dreadful mother!) In many ways, it often feels like Winnicott’s “good-enough mother” simply doesn’t make the grade – this is the age of the supermum.
And perhaps one such supermum was the mother photographed for the cover of Time Magazine in 2012. The photo showed the mum breastfeeding her three-year old son (who was stood on a chair) with the title “Are you mum enough?” The article inside discussed the latest “attachment parenting” trend which advocates extended breastfeeding into toddlerhood, sleeping with your child, wearing a baby in a sling rather than using a pushchair. Despite the many positive points of the theory, it divides women: some find it exhausting and simply not possible to maintain as part of a normal lifestyle, other women swear by it. But the sad thing, which was highlighted by the title on the Time Magazine cover, is that despite those wise words of Donald Winnicott many years ago, we are still living in a society where mums are constantly being questioned about their parenting choices and asked questions like “Are you mum enough?” Maybe some of us are not mum-enough, but we accept that we are good-enough mothers.
