The Good Enough Father
Donald Winnicott served in World War I and graduated from medical school before he reached the age of twenty-four. He accepted a position at London’s Paddington Green Children’s Hospital where he would work as a pediatrician for the next four decades. Early in his career, he became fascinated with theories of emotional development in infants and young children and subsequently trained to be a psychoanalyst. After observing thousands of interactions between young children and their mothers, Winnicott became convinced that the best way for parents to promote their children’s psychological health was to help them navigate interpersonal relationships. Ultimately, he became one of the most influential psychoanalysts of the twentieth century. Perhaps Winnicott’s most enduring insight is the notion of the “good enough mother.” His fundamental precept was that perfect parenting is neither possible nor desirable and that children benefit most when their caregivers do not immediately respond to each and every demand. He maintained that this approach teaches children to tolerate frustration and disappointment. Additionally, when children are allowed to fail in small and manageable ways, they learn to self-soothe and develop the competence to negotiate an imperfect world. Thus, the “good enough” parent is preferable to the “perfect” parent who aims (and inevitably fails) to meet his or her child’s every desire. Recognizing that most caregivers possess the necessary instincts and interpersonal resources to care for their children, Winnicott championed the notion of the “good enough mother” to promote more realistic parental expectations and remind caregivers that children can thrive with loving, competent but “imperfect” parents. This simple but profound idea would prove extremely valuable to the fathers in our group. In Part II, we address four broad challenges that the seven men faced: assuming sole responsibility for all parenting and household duties; helping their children grieve the loss of their mothers; coping with their own grief; and taking steps to move forward with their lives. Every one of them found that the most pressing initial tasks were adapting to sole parenting and managing the home.