good enough parenting

I recently lead a parenting workshop and even before I started teaching I noticed how all the parents were coming in feeling somehow not enough – comments like ‘ I can’t believe how late I am” to  ” so sorry I can’t get it together”. As I started the class I was highlighting all the many ways in which we are parents are meeting our children’s social and emotional needs. I was inviting the parents to focus on all the many good things they were already doing.  I noticed how quickly these parents wanted to move to their struggles as parents, to beat themselves up for not being enough. The fact is we will never be enough for our children, the good news is that good enough parenting is, in fact, the best kind of parenting to ensure a secure attachment for our children. We need to give ourselves permission to be human, to fail, to misattune to our children and their emotional needs, we need to stop being so hard on ourselves. The parenting culture of today puts so much pressure on parents to do it all, to be perfect and yet no one can live up to the instagram image. Thankfully decades of research on attachment has come to show us that we can get it wrong 70% of the time and still enable our children to feel loved and secure. So here’s to getting it right 30% of the time and to being good enough.