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07/11/2007
Ever since I read about the "good enough" mother, I've aspired to become one. If this sounds like I'm aiming low, read on!
The term "good enough mother" was coined by D. W. Winnicott (1896-1971), a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst whose work with psychologically disturbed children and their mothers helped him develop his widely influential theories about how a healthy mother-child relationship works. This dynamic allows an individual to develop from a fully dependent infant into a relatively independent young person, with a realistic understand of the ways of the world, and with his ego intact.
To understand how this happens, let's look at the stages of human development. According to Winnicott, a well-cared for infant experiences his early days in a state of subjective omnipotence. He cries, and a breast appears to nourish and comfort him. From the baby's perspective, he not only causes the breast to show up, but he actually creates that breast through the force of his will. During this time, the mother is in a state of primary maternal preoccupation. She adapts her own existence to meet the needs of her baby. The baby cries, she responds. This responsiveness is what allows the baby to believe that he is in control, and that mother is in fact merely an extension of himself.
Winnicott calls this the holding environment. The mother literally and psychically holds the infant, keeping him protected even as he has no idea that he needs to be protected. Gradually, the mother begins to present objects to the baby, and as the baby interacts with these objects, he comes to understand that they have an existence outside of himself – that there is such a thing as objective reality. He begins to divide the world into "me" and "not me".
Around this time, mother begins to come out of her state of total preoccupation with her baby and becomes interested in her own personhood again. (Do tell!) She gently, intuitively begins to "fail" her baby by increasing the lag time between her child's cries and her response. The baby begins to understand that mother is "not me", that he is dependent on her, and that she is not in his control. Winnicott refers to this as a transitional experience – the child is traversing the boundary between subjective omnipotence and objective reality. It is the mother's job to make sure this journey is a gentle one – that the baby is not simply "dropped" into an inappropriate level of independence. She gives the baby small doses of what psychologists call "optimal frustration" – that is, just enough to create a proper environment for the child to learn and build his character, but not so much that he becomes overwhelmed and feels abandoned.
This is the essence of "good enough" parenting.
Often, Winnicott noted, a transitional object emerges during this time, such as a security blanket or lovey. The transitional object represents the all-giving, completely responsive mother to the child and allows him to alleviate his anxiety while he finds his balance as he moves from his state of "complete control of the universe" into the real world. He can experiment with being his real self in this new place, which contains other people who will not necessarily meet his needs, while still feeling "held". The child may also begin to project his fears and frustrations onto the mother (I'm hearing "Mommy, you are BAD" quite a bit from my two-year-old lately), and it's the mom's job to treat these projections with equinamity as the child readies himself to reintegrate the feelings back into himself. (I understand from my friends with teens that this stage can last for quite a while!)
When the journey into the real world is successful, the child develops healthy "true" and "false" selves. The "true self" is the child's core personality and his ability to be spontaneous and engage in self-expression. The true self is passionate. The "false" self is also important. This is the child's ability to comply with basic social rules and to anticipate the needs of others in order to build and maintain healthy relationships. (You know those parents who let their child squirt ketchup on a restaurant floor without stopping him because they don't want to interfere with his "creative development"? They're not getting the importance of the "false self".)
Of course, there is such a thing as an unhealthy false self, too. If the mother is not able to anticipate and respond to her child's needs appropriately but instead projects her own unmet needs and desires onto her child – and the child, helpless, complies with this projection – he begins to confuse this compliant "false self" with his true self. Even if he grows up to achieve all measure of apparent success, he will not generally have the experience of feeling truly alive or truly himself. The false self can also become predominant if the child experiences abandonment or rejection – the false self emerges as a shield that protects the child's ego from pain and rejection, and the true self is buried.
Sadly, we've all heard of, or seen, or lived, cases where a parent who was neglected or abused as a child continues the cycle when she becomes a parent. In many of these cases, it may be that the "false self" believes "If it was good enough for me, it's good enough for my child," and the true self, who understands the depths of the pain endured by an abused child remains frozen and unheard. But what about when the mom is more cognizant and makes a vow not to repeat the mistakes her parents made? Are there pitfalls there as well?
Sure, says Gayle Peterson, of Ask Dr. Gayle. Oftentimes when a mom tries to create a different sort of childhood for her baby, she makes the mistake of projecting her own needs and desires onto her child, which keeps her from really seeing her baby as a unique individual. The mom's "false self" is in charge:
There can exist a subliminal drive to re-experience childhood through our own kids, but this time to have it "right". In an attempt to heal past pain, we may unwittingly project it onto our child's behavior because it "looks" similar to our pain, though the meaning for the child may be entirely or significantly different. In such cases parenting reactions that originate to answer our childhood pain miss the real needs of the child who stands before us, a completely different person with a different set of experiences.
Dr. Peterson has a nice illustration of the "false self" in action. Sally, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mother, turned to her for help with her four-year-old's tantrums. She and her husband had enrolled Elia in a part-time preschool. Although he enjoyed his time there, he seemed unable or unwilling to get through the drop-off experience without a tantrum. Nights were also rife with stress – Elia had trouble sleeping in general and would not let his mother leave him in his room without profuse crying. Elia's parents worried that their son was experiencing some distress that they couldn't help him resolve, but a counselor who met with Elia assured them that their son was actually a very capable and happy child while in school and did not appear to be in distress over real or imagined abandonment. What was going on?
With help, Sally came to understand the nature of the problem: She herself had received insufficient care when she was a child and was pushed into a inappropriate level of independence at an early age. Her parents were busy with their careers, and their other energy was given to Sally's brother, the family "troublemaker". Although Sally had worked through her feelings of abandonment and had a positive relationship with her mother as an adult, she was now unwittingly projecting her own unmet needs onto Elia. In her zeal to avoid the mistakes her parents made by failing to see her own anxiety over being abandoned, she was failing to recognize Elia's own anxiety for what it was – the normal stress and frustration experienced by a child as he moves toward independence. She was over-identifying with Elia. And Elia's dad, struggling with his own abandonment issues, did not have the parenting tools to help resolve the situation.
Sally came to understand that she had projected her own intense fears regarding any distress that her son might have, to such an extent that the had learned a pattern of getting what he wanted by increasing his demands, which indeed became distressful as his parents were unable to assure him that he in fact would be just fine in his own bed. He had somehow internalized the idea that he should never be left alone by his mother, or left alone at night. Though most of his development progressed smoothly, transitions involving separation became highly charged between mother and son.
In time, Sally and her husband were able to better attune themselves to their son's actual needs, and not their own unmet needs from childhood. They stopped giving in to his demands and instead reassured him that he was OK, that he was capable of sleeping by himself or taking on other new tasks of childhood. And he was. An added benefit is Sally and her husband became more of a parenting team as each helped the other sort out their own childhood issues from the needs of the living, breathing child they were raising. Dr. Gayle concludes:
As research on patterns of child abuse bear out, parents are less prone towards repeating abuse when they have become aware of their own past hurt. But we must go beyond simply understanding our childhood pain to be truly attuned to our children. When we respond to a child as if they bear our own scars we fail to see them in their own rite. The child's needs can become distorted, leaving him or her vulnerable to misattunement, as in the above example. Finding a neutral path, one that is not reactive but truly thoughtful and aware, is sometimes the hardest one to walk.
And so I am striving to gently guide my boys into an appropriate level of independence while not letting my own hangups and insecurities cloud my judgement. My own mom often reminds me that being a mother is the hardest job in the world. And I guess this is true even if we're "only" called to be good enough.
The term "good enough mother" was coined by D. W. Winnicott (1896-1971), a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst whose work with psychologically disturbed children and their mothers helped him develop his widely influential theories about how a healthy mother-child relationship works. This dynamic allows an individual to develop from a fully dependent infant into a relatively independent young person, with a realistic understand of the ways of the world, and with his ego intact.
To understand how this happens, let's look at the stages of human development. According to Winnicott, a well-cared for infant experiences his early days in a state of subjective omnipotence. He cries, and a breast appears to nourish and comfort him. From the baby's perspective, he not only causes the breast to show up, but he actually creates that breast through the force of his will. During this time, the mother is in a state of primary maternal preoccupation. She adapts her own existence to meet the needs of her baby. The baby cries, she responds. This responsiveness is what allows the baby to believe that he is in control, and that mother is in fact merely an extension of himself.
Winnicott calls this the holding environment. The mother literally and psychically holds the infant, keeping him protected even as he has no idea that he needs to be protected. Gradually, the mother begins to present objects to the baby, and as the baby interacts with these objects, he comes to understand that they have an existence outside of himself – that there is such a thing as objective reality. He begins to divide the world into "me" and "not me".
Around this time, mother begins to come out of her state of total preoccupation with her baby and becomes interested in her own personhood again. (Do tell!) She gently, intuitively begins to "fail" her baby by increasing the lag time between her child's cries and her response. The baby begins to understand that mother is "not me", that he is dependent on her, and that she is not in his control. Winnicott refers to this as a transitional experience – the child is traversing the boundary between subjective omnipotence and objective reality. It is the mother's job to make sure this journey is a gentle one – that the baby is not simply "dropped" into an inappropriate level of independence. She gives the baby small doses of what psychologists call "optimal frustration" – that is, just enough to create a proper environment for the child to learn and build his character, but not so much that he becomes overwhelmed and feels abandoned.
This is the essence of "good enough" parenting.
Often, Winnicott noted, a transitional object emerges during this time, such as a security blanket or lovey. The transitional object represents the all-giving, completely responsive mother to the child and allows him to alleviate his anxiety while he finds his balance as he moves from his state of "complete control of the universe" into the real world. He can experiment with being his real self in this new place, which contains other people who will not necessarily meet his needs, while still feeling "held". The child may also begin to project his fears and frustrations onto the mother (I'm hearing "Mommy, you are BAD" quite a bit from my two-year-old lately), and it's the mom's job to treat these projections with equinamity as the child readies himself to reintegrate the feelings back into himself. (I understand from my friends with teens that this stage can last for quite a while!)
When the journey into the real world is successful, the child develops healthy "true" and "false" selves. The "true self" is the child's core personality and his ability to be spontaneous and engage in self-expression. The true self is passionate. The "false" self is also important. This is the child's ability to comply with basic social rules and to anticipate the needs of others in order to build and maintain healthy relationships. (You know those parents who let their child squirt ketchup on a restaurant floor without stopping him because they don't want to interfere with his "creative development"? They're not getting the importance of the "false self".)
Of course, there is such a thing as an unhealthy false self, too. If the mother is not able to anticipate and respond to her child's needs appropriately but instead projects her own unmet needs and desires onto her child – and the child, helpless, complies with this projection – he begins to confuse this compliant "false self" with his true self. Even if he grows up to achieve all measure of apparent success, he will not generally have the experience of feeling truly alive or truly himself. The false self can also become predominant if the child experiences abandonment or rejection – the false self emerges as a shield that protects the child's ego from pain and rejection, and the true self is buried.
Sadly, we've all heard of, or seen, or lived, cases where a parent who was neglected or abused as a child continues the cycle when she becomes a parent. In many of these cases, it may be that the "false self" believes "If it was good enough for me, it's good enough for my child," and the true self, who understands the depths of the pain endured by an abused child remains frozen and unheard. But what about when the mom is more cognizant and makes a vow not to repeat the mistakes her parents made? Are there pitfalls there as well?
Sure, says Gayle Peterson, of Ask Dr. Gayle. Oftentimes when a mom tries to create a different sort of childhood for her baby, she makes the mistake of projecting her own needs and desires onto her child, which keeps her from really seeing her baby as a unique individual. The mom's "false self" is in charge:
There can exist a subliminal drive to re-experience childhood through our own kids, but this time to have it "right". In an attempt to heal past pain, we may unwittingly project it onto our child's behavior because it "looks" similar to our pain, though the meaning for the child may be entirely or significantly different. In such cases parenting reactions that originate to answer our childhood pain miss the real needs of the child who stands before us, a completely different person with a different set of experiences.
Dr. Peterson has a nice illustration of the "false self" in action. Sally, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mother, turned to her for help with her four-year-old's tantrums. She and her husband had enrolled Elia in a part-time preschool. Although he enjoyed his time there, he seemed unable or unwilling to get through the drop-off experience without a tantrum. Nights were also rife with stress – Elia had trouble sleeping in general and would not let his mother leave him in his room without profuse crying. Elia's parents worried that their son was experiencing some distress that they couldn't help him resolve, but a counselor who met with Elia assured them that their son was actually a very capable and happy child while in school and did not appear to be in distress over real or imagined abandonment. What was going on?
With help, Sally came to understand the nature of the problem: She herself had received insufficient care when she was a child and was pushed into a inappropriate level of independence at an early age. Her parents were busy with their careers, and their other energy was given to Sally's brother, the family "troublemaker". Although Sally had worked through her feelings of abandonment and had a positive relationship with her mother as an adult, she was now unwittingly projecting her own unmet needs onto Elia. In her zeal to avoid the mistakes her parents made by failing to see her own anxiety over being abandoned, she was failing to recognize Elia's own anxiety for what it was – the normal stress and frustration experienced by a child as he moves toward independence. She was over-identifying with Elia. And Elia's dad, struggling with his own abandonment issues, did not have the parenting tools to help resolve the situation.
Sally came to understand that she had projected her own intense fears regarding any distress that her son might have, to such an extent that the had learned a pattern of getting what he wanted by increasing his demands, which indeed became distressful as his parents were unable to assure him that he in fact would be just fine in his own bed. He had somehow internalized the idea that he should never be left alone by his mother, or left alone at night. Though most of his development progressed smoothly, transitions involving separation became highly charged between mother and son.
In time, Sally and her husband were able to better attune themselves to their son's actual needs, and not their own unmet needs from childhood. They stopped giving in to his demands and instead reassured him that he was OK, that he was capable of sleeping by himself or taking on other new tasks of childhood. And he was. An added benefit is Sally and her husband became more of a parenting team as each helped the other sort out their own childhood issues from the needs of the living, breathing child they were raising. Dr. Gayle concludes:
As research on patterns of child abuse bear out, parents are less prone towards repeating abuse when they have become aware of their own past hurt. But we must go beyond simply understanding our childhood pain to be truly attuned to our children. When we respond to a child as if they bear our own scars we fail to see them in their own rite. The child's needs can become distorted, leaving him or her vulnerable to misattunement, as in the above example. Finding a neutral path, one that is not reactive but truly thoughtful and aware, is sometimes the hardest one to walk.
And so I am striving to gently guide my boys into an appropriate level of independence while not letting my own hangups and insecurities cloud my judgement. My own mom often reminds me that being a mother is the hardest job in the world. And I guess this is true even if we're "only" called to be good enough.
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