Being "Good Enough"

New expectations for teaching and parenting in whatever this is

With the exception of loading a dishwasher, I like to do know that I’m doing things right. As a 22-year-old special education teacher, the idea that no one was expected to review my teaching and tell me if I was doing a good job or not made me completely insane. I gathered the only bits of feedback I could get; Christmas cards from parents (thanks for the weird scarf!), hugs from kids, the occasional look of approval from my boss, like an ant gathering crumbs from an underwhelming picnic.

Actual photograph of dishwasher I recently loaded. Not interested in feedback :)

As a parent, my feedback loop is loud, constant, and comes from mostly unreliable sources. Am I a good parent when my kids are happy? (Answer: No, and that’s a reeeaaaal dangerous myth to buy into.) When people like my children? When I maintain a politician’s level of faked calm and self-possession in the face of tantrums, insults, and/or skin-breakage? I am quite hard on myself about being a great mother, but something hard and somewhat freeing has happened in the last week - the rules have changed.

The idea of “good enough” parenting started with Donald Winnicott in the 1950’s, but it really entered American pop-psych-culture in the late 80’s with Bruno Bettelheim’s (yes, I agree, great name) A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing.

In it, Ol’ Bruno argued that there is no one script for raising a child. It’s all about following your instincts and accepting your child for who they are, not who you want them to be. This man survived the concentration camps. How’s that for perspective?

He offers this:

“Perfection is not within the grasp of ordinary human beings.  Efforts to attain it typically interfere with that lenient response to the imperfections of others, including those of one’s child, which alone make good human relations possible.”

Basically, to hold ourselves to unrealistic standards makes us do the same to others. Now is the time to have very, very realistic standards. And reality is changing every day, so those standards must be fluid, simple, and light.

For example, last weekend I thought about hiding treasures all over my neighborhood for my children, making a map, and going on a glorious, perfect-parenting-parade (equipped buckets of hand sanitizer) wherein my child would find said treasures, experience untold joy in the face of the world’s terrors, and turn to me and say “Mom, I promise to be a happy adult and never try heroin.” I made a daily schedule. I ordered activity kits.

This weekend I literally told my four-year-old “I just can’t take it anymore!” and screamed so hard into my pillow I got a sore throat.

As a professor, by the time I find a quiet space, log on to The Almighty Zoom, help one student with his audio, tell another student it’s fine if she’s late cause she just got a scary call from her mom, and look into the sweet, exhausted faces of 16 adults who have no idea if they will get their degrees on time, protect their families from harm, or tolerate listening to my voice for three hours straight today, I no longer remember the insightful, relevant lessons I carefully prepared. I just stop and stare at them. I change their weekly assignments to a Google Form that ends in “how are you???” I tell them they are all getting A’s. I lead them in guided meditations and cry a little while I do. I have very, very high expectations for the minutes I spend with my students. Am I being a good enough teacher? Yurp, I think so.

Another one from Bruno:

“The erroneous modern conviction is that problems should not occur and that someone has to be at fault when they do; this causes untold misery within the family unit… An ancient Chinese proverb says that no family can hang out the sign ‘Nothing the matter here.’“

We parents, we teachers, we are holding space for these kiddos, for ourselves, for poor Idris Elba. But there isn’t enough room for all that. Some shit is gonna spill out. Out into our conference calls. On the virtual P.E. class we’re teaching. All over the Play-Doh set. Kids are spilling over too. Being good to them means grabbing a towel and giving them a hug (even if it’s after we’ve tended to our own spillage) and apologizing for when we yelled earlier. It means saying “It’s okay to be scared, I’m scared too.”

Something is the matter here. Hang the sign in your window. Write it on your new, heavily modified syllabus. And under it you can add, “And we’re all doing good enough.”

More:

Jennie Weiner’s “I Refuse to Run a Coronavirus Home School”

Rebecca Barrett Fox’s “Please Do a Bad Job of Putting Your Courses Online”