One day, when my older daughter was being particularly…ahem… challenging, she said something to me that hurt my feelings.
“When I have kids, I’m not going to be like you, I’m going to be a perfect mother!” she hollered.
That stung because, as a parent, I strive for perfection and I always fall short. As much as I want to be Mrs. Cleaver, I’m more like a Tina Fey version of a parent.
I make mistakes. I make them all the time. Sometimes I get annoyed too quickly because I’ve had a hard day and I just want to go to bed. Sometimes I let my kids watch too much TV or feed them pizza for dinner. I let the laundry pile up, I don’t treat stains when they happen, I follow the five second rule because I’m too lazy, I don’t make lists and I tend to put stuff off.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my kids and I do everything in my power not to screw them up. But despite my best intentions, sometimes they get hurt.
To my daughter, the perfect mother is someone who never lets her child get hurt. The perfect mother lives for her children and caters to their every whim. But most of all, the perfect mother has no identity other than mother.
Of course, that’s a child’s perspective, but is this type of perfection possible? Well, apparently child development experts and child psychiatrists have looked at the idea of the perfect mother for decades.
And the results are surprising.
The ‘perfect’ mother—the ideal mother in my daughter’s eyes—is actually one of the worst kinds of parent. The best mother is the ‘good enough’ one. Donald Winnicott, a child psychiatrist and eminent expert in the field, developed the theory of the “Good Enough Mother” in the 1940s and most child development experts still follow it today.
The ‘good enough mother’ nurtures her baby at birth and caters to their every whim. But as her baby grows, she makes mistakes. She’s maybe not as empathic or maybe the cries of a younger sibling draw her attention away and the older child is left feeling sad.
But that sad child learns some very important lessons. The first lesson is, “I am not the centre of the universe.” The second lesson is, “I can cope on my own and be okay.” Without those lessons, a child cannot grow to become an independent, functioning member of society.
The mother my daughter wants would never let her child feel sad. She would never expose her child to situations where he might feel challenged to do it alone or where he might fail. The result is a child who will never learn to live independently, will never cope with failure and will never function properly as an adult.
Since the aim of most parents is to rear kids who can make it on their own, the ‘perfect’ mother fails at parenting.
So even though my hair is always askew, my clothes are always stained and I don’t always cut my daughter’s grapes in half, I’m doing okay. Now, if only I could convince my daughter of that. I wonder if there’s a theory on the perfect child?
