Good Enough Parenting

Hi, everyone, and welcome to TeenSights!

I’m so excited to launch this Substack to share with you some of my favorite work in the field of adolescent educational psychology. I’d love to include you all in these conversations, so feel free to reach out with ideas and questions you’d like for me to cover, and please engage with one another and with me in the comments section!

I am assuming the vast majority of you found my Substack through Emily Oster and, therefore, don’t know me very well, so let me take a moment to introduce myself.

My name is Katie, and I am a clinical neuropsychologist in Manhattan. My private practice focuses on treating individuals—mostly teenagers—with learning and attention disorders. I’m also a researcher at Johns Hopkins, and I study interventions to enhance learning in adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The bulk of my clinical and research work focuses on the co-occurrence of cognitive, academic, and emotional problems, and I am a firm believer in the need to combine therapeutic and educational interventions to maximize success both in and out of school.

Outside of work, I have a daughter, Eleanor, who is four, and a brand new son, Mac, who was actually born the same afternoon that my ParentData post was published. It’s really interesting to be both a child psychologist and a parent. Having kids of my own has vastly increased the empathy I feel for the parents with whom I work, but parenting is such a raw, emotional, and instinctual experience that I seldom—if ever—find myself applying clinical knowledge to interactions with my children. In fact, I think I feel just as clueless, overwhelmed, and madly in love with my kids as all of you.

On that note, I want to take this opportunity to discuss the work of one of my favorite psychologists, Donald Winnicott.

Dr. Winnicott is the genius who coined the idea of “good enough parenting.” His main point was that, not only do we not have to be perfect parents, but it’s actually better for our kids if we make mistakes. When our kids are little, like Mac, we feel compelled to respond immediately to their every need, which is reasonable—they depend on our responsiveness for survival. But as they grow up, we respond later and less, and that’s a good thing. First of all, our kids learn to manage frustration on their own. And second, they develop realistic images of us as parents and as people, which is necessary for developing healthy attachments.

I like to summarize this body of research as, Don’t worry; you’re not going to mess up your kid. Raising kids is such a personal experience. What works for one kid or one parent may not work for another. But, generally, healthy development is pretty hardwired, and it’s really hard to throw it off track. Of course challenging behaviors (and even disordered behaviors) happen, but rest easy knowing that parents can’t cause them, and a wide range of interventions can help manage them in a way that allows kids to grow into healthy, functioning adults. Schools and pediatricians can certainly provide suggestions about how to help; some of those suggestions will work, but remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. You can try stuff out until you find what works for you.

There is such a wide range of parenting strategies that leads to basically the same outcome. Parenting is difficult and frustrating, and you may totally lose your patience, but conflicts with kids are reparable, and you’ll have plenty of opportunities to try again and to do things better in the future. Not only do you not have to get everything right all the time, but you shouldn’t. Make sure you provide consistent love and set consistent limits, but beyond that, do your best, and make plenty of mistakes. Most of the details don’t matter anyway.

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Unrelated, but I want to end each post with a link to a video that brightened up my day, and I hope it brightens up yours, too! In honor of the awesome Eras movie that my daughter and I saw over the weekend, here are Cynthia Erivo and Shoshana Bean singing Taylor Swift’s “I Did Something Bad.” Enjoy!