Some nights I collapse onto the couch after both kids are finally asleep and think about my own mother. Not in some grand, cinematic way. More like a flash—her burning dinner and laughing about it. Her forgetting to sign my permission slip and writing an apologetic note the next morning. Her losing her temper over a broken lamp and then sitting on the floor with me twenty minutes later saying, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t about the lamp.”
She wasn’t a perfect parent. She would be the first to tell you that. But something about the way she moved through her mistakes—without hiding them, without spiraling into guilt for weeks—gave me something I didn’t have a name for until I became a parent myself.
Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, coined the term “good enough mother” back in 1953. His argument was radical for the time and still feels radical now: that children don’t need flawless caregiving. They need a parent who is reliably present, who meets their needs most of the time, and who gradually—naturally—allows small frustrations and imperfections to enter the child’s world. That gap between perfect and good enough? That’s where resilience grows. Winnicott laid this out across his work, and his foundational concept of the “good enough mother” has shaped developmental psychology for decades.
Here’s what I’ve noticed, both in my own childhood and in the families I know: the kids who grow up with “good enough” parents tend to develop a particular sturdiness. Not toughness. Sturdiness. A quiet confidence that they can handle discomfort, navigate uncertainty, and recover from disappointment—because they watched someone do it first.
And the irony is that perfectionist parenting, the kind driven by love and anxiety in equal measure, often accidentally prevents that exact resilience from forming.
Here are nine signs that you were raised by a “good enough” parent—and that it gave you more than you realized.
1. You can tolerate frustration without interpreting it as failure
When Elise can’t get her shoe on the right foot and starts to crumble, I fight every urge to just do it for her. Because I remember my mom letting me struggle with things. Not cruelly. She was right there. But she didn’t swoop in at the first sign of difficulty.
Kids raised by good enough parents experience manageable frustration regularly. Not because their parents are withholding, but because their parents aren’t curating every moment to eliminate friction. Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who had experienced some adversity in life reported better mental health and well-being than both those who’d experienced high adversity and those who’d experienced none at all. The sweet spot isn’t zero difficulty. It’s enough difficulty paired with enough support.
If you can sit with frustration without your nervous system telling you the world is ending, someone probably let you practice that early.
2. You don’t need external validation to feel okay about a decision
Good enough parents don’t hover over every choice their kid makes, offering applause or correction. They let some choices just… happen. You picked mismatched socks? Cool. You built a weird-looking tower? Great.
That benign inattention—Winnicott’s word was “graduated failure”—teaches a child that their internal compass is trustworthy. If you grew up this way, you probably make decisions as an adult without needing three friends, a podcast, and a Reddit thread to confirm you chose correctly.
3. You can apologize without it destroying your sense of self
This is the big one. If your parent modeled apology—real apology, not the performative kind, not the kind that’s actually a justification—you learned that making a mistake doesn’t erase your worth. It’s just something that happened that you now need to address.
Perfectionist parents often struggle with apology because acknowledging a mistake threatens the whole carefully constructed system. Good enough parents say, “I shouldn’t have yelled. I was frustrated, but that’s not your fault.” And the child absorbs something profound: people I love can mess up and still be safe. I wrote more about what this kind of modeling actually looks like in 9 signs you’re not just parenting—you’re actually leading by example.
4. You have a high tolerance for imperfection in others
People raised by good enough parents tend to extend grace more easily. Not because they’re pushovers, but because they grew up in a home where imperfection wasn’t catastrophic. The dishes were sometimes in the sink. Birthday parties weren’t magazine-worthy. And that was fine. Everyone was still loved.
This translates into adult relationships that breathe. You can be annoyed with a friend without writing them off. You can be disappointed in a partner without deciding the whole relationship is broken. You understand, in your bones, that maintaining close bonds doesn’t require perfection—it requires showing up enough.
5. You can self-soothe without numbing
Camille and I talk about this a lot. We want Elise and Julien to develop the ability to calm themselves down—not by suppressing emotions, but by moving through them. That ability almost always traces back to a parent who didn’t panic at every cry, who let the child feel the feeling for a beat before intervening.
Research on attachment and emotion regulation by developmental psychologists like L. Alan Sroufe has long shown that secure attachment—which comes not from perfect responsiveness but from consistent-enough responsiveness—predicts a child’s ability to regulate their own emotions later in life. If you can sit with discomfort, feel it, and let it move through you without reaching for a screen or a drink or a shopping cart, someone helped wire that into you early.
6. You don’t associate love with performance
Good enough parents love their kids when the report card is great and when it isn’t. When the recital goes well and when the kid freezes onstage. The love isn’t conditional on output because the parent isn’t measuring their own worth through the child’s achievements.
Perfectionist parenting, even when driven by genuine love, can accidentally wire in the belief that love is earned through performance. If you grew up feeling loved even in your mediocre moments—especially in your mediocre moments—that’s the good enough parent’s gift.
7. You can handle uncertainty without needing to control everything
Last week, Elise asked me what we were doing on Saturday. I said I didn’t know yet. She said, “Okay,” and went back to drawing. That “okay” is not nothing. That’s a kid who trusts that not-knowing doesn’t mean not-safe.
Good enough parents don’t script every weekend. They don’t have color-coded activity schedules. Sometimes the plan is no plan. And the child learns that ambiguity is survivable—even enjoyable. Adults who grew up this way tend to handle career shifts, relationship changes, and unexpected disruptions with more flexibility. People who grew up without technology saturating every moment often have a similar comfort with unstructured time.
8. You understand that repair matters more than rupture
Every relationship has ruptures. Every parent loses patience. The difference isn’t whether the rupture happens—it’s what happens after.
Ed Tronick’s research on the “still face” paradigm and interactive repair demonstrated that what matters most for infant development isn’t unbroken attunement—it’s the cycle of mismatch and repair. Babies and parents are misattuned about 70% of the time. What builds security is the coming-back-together. If your parent fought with you and then came back—genuinely, not performatively—you internalized a template for resilience in every relationship you’d ever have.
I think about this constantly. When I snap at Elise because Julien’s been screaming and I haven’t slept and the dog just tracked mud through the kitchen—the snap isn’t the story. The twenty minutes later, when I kneel down and say, “Hey, I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair,” is the story. That’s what she’ll carry.
9. You have a core belief that you are, fundamentally, enough
This is the quiet architecture underneath all the other signs. If you were raised by a good enough parent, you absorbed—not through lectures or affirmations but through thousands of ordinary interactions—that you are acceptable as you are. Not perfect. Not optimized. Not performing. Just… enough.
Perfectionist parenting, with all its good intentions, can accidentally communicate the opposite: that there’s always another level to reach, another flaw to fix, another version of you that would be more lovable. I’ve seen how that shows up in adults who grew up in overly controlling homes—the chronic self-doubt, the difficulty resting, the sense that relaxation has to be earned.
Good enough parents give their children the gift of ordinary love. The kind that exists on Tuesday mornings over cereal that came from a box, not on a Pinterest board.
What this means for how we parent now
I’m not saying we should aim low. I’m saying that the gap between what we do and what we think we should do is not a failure—it’s the breathing room our kids need to become people who can handle a world that will not be curated for them.
Camille and I have a rule: we don’t debrief our parenting “performance” after bedtime unless something genuinely went sideways. Because most of the time, what happened was good enough. Julien ate some of his dinner. Elise heard a story. Everyone is safe and sleeping. That’s the whole job. And if you’re thinking about the parenting lessons you wish you’d learned sooner, this might be the biggest one: your imperfection isn’t the thing standing between your kids and a good life. It might be the very thing giving them one.
Some nights I still think about my mom burning that dinner. Laughing instead of crying. Setting the smoke alarm off and opening all the windows and saying, “Well, it’s a cereal night.” She wasn’t performing resilience for my benefit. She was just living. And I was watching. And that was enough.
