There is a version of you that exists only at two in the morning. This version replays every parenting mistake from the day like a highlight reel nobody asked for. You snapped at your daughter because she would not put on her shoes. You checked your phone while your son was telling you about the caterpillar he found. You served cereal for dinner and called it a meal. You said “because I said so” even though you swore you never would. Two-in-the-morning you is convinced that all of this matters enormously, that each of these small failures is a brick in a wall between you and your child, and that somewhere out there a better parent is handling all of it with grace and organic vegetables.
Dr. Laura Markham wrote “The Good Enough Parent” to talk that version of you off the ledge. Not with platitudes. Not with another list of rules you will fail to follow. But with science, compassion, and a radical argument that might change the way you think about raising children forever.
The argument is this: your imperfection is not the obstacle. It is the gift.
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The Crisis Nobody Talks About
We need to talk about what has happened to parenting in the last twenty years, because it explains why this book exists and why it matters now more than at any other moment in history.
Parenting has become a competitive sport played without clear rules. The information age promised to make everything easier. Instead it made parenting infinitely harder. There are now so many experts telling you so many contradictory things with so much confidence that the experience of raising a child has become less like a natural human activity and more like defusing a bomb while strangers shout conflicting instructions.
Sleep train. Never sleep train. Breastfeed until they self-wean. Formula is fine. Screen time is poison. Educational apps are beneficial. Praise effort, not results. Actually, praise is manipulative. Set firm boundaries. But never say no. Practice gentle parenting. But do not be permissive. Helicopter parenting ruins children. Free-range parenting is neglect. Be present for every moment. But also take care of yourself. But not too much, because self-care is selfish unless it makes you a better parent, in which case it is mandatory.
The result is a generation of parents who are more informed and more anxious than any generation before them. A generation that has access to more knowledge about child development than Freud and Piaget combined but cannot enjoy a Saturday morning at the playground because they are too busy wondering if they responded to the tantrum correctly.
Dr. Laura Markham sees this clearly. She is a clinical psychologist trained at Columbia University, the founder of the enormously popular Aha! Parenting website, and the author of “Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids” and “Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings,” both of which became touchstones of the gentle parenting movement. She has been helping parents for over two decades. She has heard the guilt. She has seen the exhaustion. And with “The Good Enough Parent,” she has written the book that says clearly and without reservation: you can stop performing. You can start living. Your children do not need you to be perfect. They need you to be real.
What Good Enough Actually Means
The phrase “good enough parent” sounds, on first hearing, like settling. Like the participation trophy of child-rearing. Like giving yourself permission to not try very hard.
It is none of those things. And understanding why requires a brief trip to postwar England and the work of a pediatrician named D.W. Winnicott.
Winnicott was a British psychoanalyst who spent years observing mothers and infants in clinical settings. What he noticed changed the field. The mothers who produced the healthiest, most resilient children were not the ones who responded perfectly to every need. They were the ones who responded well enough, most of the time, and who inevitably failed some of the time.
The failures were not incidental. They were essential.
Here is the mechanism. When a parent responds to an infant’s every cry instantly and perfectly, the infant never learns to tolerate discomfort. They never develop the internal resources to manage frustration because frustration never occurs. They remain psychologically dependent on an external world that perpetually accommodates them. This is not resilience. This is fragility dressed up as good parenting.
When a parent responds well most of the time but sometimes is late, sometimes misreads the cue, sometimes gets it wrong, the child experiences small doses of manageable frustration. They learn that discomfort is survivable. They begin to develop their own coping strategies. They discover that they have internal resources they did not know they had. And crucially, they experience what Markham and developmental psychologists call the cycle of rupture and repair.
The rupture is the moment when the connection breaks. The parent yells. The parent is distracted. The parent misunderstands. The repair is what happens next. The parent comes back. Apologizes. Reconnects. Says “I got that wrong and I am sorry.”
Markham argues, with substantial research behind her, that this cycle of rupture and repair is not a regrettable side effect of imperfect parenting. It is the primary mechanism through which children learn the most important lessons of emotional life. That relationships can survive conflict. That people who love you will sometimes hurt you and that this does not mean the love is broken. That mistakes are not catastrophic. That they themselves are strong enough to weather disappointment and come through the other side.
Perfect parenting, if such a thing were possible, would deprive children of these lessons entirely. Good enough parenting delivers them naturally, organically, as an inevitable consequence of being human with other humans.
This is the core of Markham’s book. And it is genuinely revolutionary, not because the idea is new, but because she makes it accessible, practical, and emotionally resonant for the parent who needs to hear it most.
The Three Pillars
Markham organizes her practical guidance around three interconnected principles that form the foundation of good enough parenting. None of them involve buying special toys, following elaborate routines, or transforming yourself into a person you are not.
Your Calm Is Your Superpower
The first and most important principle is self-regulation, and Markham places it before everything else for a reason. You cannot guide a child through an emotional storm if you are drowning in one yourself.
When your child throws a tantrum in the grocery store and you feel rage rising in your chest, that rage is not really about the tantrum. It is about your own nervous system interpreting the situation as a threat. Maybe you feel judged by the other shoppers. Maybe the sound of screaming triggers memories of your own childhood. Maybe you are running on four hours of sleep and your capacity for calm was exhausted before breakfast.
Markham does not minimize how hard self-regulation is. She acknowledges that it is the most difficult thing she asks of parents, particularly parents whose own childhoods did not model healthy emotional management. But she is unequivocal that it is the foundation. Every other skill depends on it. The most eloquent empathic response in the world means nothing if it is delivered through clenched teeth by a parent who is barely containing their fury.
She offers concrete strategies. Breathing techniques that actually work in real time. The practice of pausing, even for three seconds, before responding. The development of personal awareness around triggers. The honest acknowledgment that some triggers require professional help to untangle. And perhaps most importantly, the permission to walk away when you need to. To say to your child “I am too angry to talk about this right now and I need a minute” and to mean it not as punishment but as modeling.
This is not weakness. It is the single most powerful thing you can show your child. A parent who can recognize their own emotional state, name it, and choose a response rather than a reaction is teaching emotional intelligence more effectively than any curriculum ever designed.
Connection Before Correction
The second pillar challenges one of the deepest assumptions in parenting: that behavioral problems require behavioral solutions.
Most parents, when faced with a child who is acting out, focus on the behavior. The hitting, the yelling, the refusal to cooperate, the defiance. They reach for consequences, time-outs, reward charts, or lectures. These tools sometimes work in the short term. They rarely work in the long term. And the reason, Markham argues, is that they address the symptom while ignoring the cause.
The cause, in the vast majority of cases, is disconnection. A child who feels securely connected to their parent is a child who wants to cooperate. Not because they fear consequences but because cooperation is the natural behavior of a child who feels safe, seen, and valued. When that connection weakens, when the child feels overlooked, misunderstood, or emotionally alone, their behavior deteriorates. Not because they are bad. Because they are signaling.
Markham’s prescription is to invest heavily in connection and watch the need for correction shrink dramatically. She recommends daily one-on-one time with each child, even if it is only ten or fifteen minutes. She recommends play, real play, where you follow the child’s lead and let them direct the activity. She recommends physical affection offered freely and without agenda. She recommends listening, genuinely listening, to the small stories about the small things, because to the child those things are not small.
When correction is needed, and it will be needed because children are children, Markham advises holding the boundary within the warmth of the connection. “I won’t let you hit your brother. I can see you are really angry. Come here.” The limit is firm. The tone is warm. The relationship is intact. The child learns that they can be angry and still be loved, that boundaries exist and the world does not end, that their parent is both strong and kind.
Let Them Feel Everything
The third pillar may be the hardest for parents raised in homes where certain emotions were not allowed. Markham argues that every emotion your child experiences is valid and that your job is not to fix, suppress, or redirect the feeling but to help the child move through it.
When your four-year-old sobs inconsolably because their banana broke in half, the temptation is to fix it, dismiss it, or rush past it. “It’s just a banana. Here, have another one. Stop crying.” But to the child, the broken banana is a genuine loss, a tiny fracture in a world they are still learning to predict and control. When you dismiss the feeling, you teach the child that their emotional experience is wrong, that what they feel is not real, that they should not trust their own internal signals.
When you sit with the feeling instead, when you say “Oh no, your banana broke and you are really sad about that,” something remarkable happens. The child feels heard. The emotion crests and passes. And the child learns that big feelings are survivable, that they do not need to be afraid of their own inner life, and that someone they love can be trusted to stay present through the storm.
Markham draws a firm line between feelings and behavior. All feelings are acceptable. Not all behavior is. A child can feel furious at their sibling. They cannot bite them. A child can feel devastated. They cannot throw things. The feeling is honored. The behavior is redirected. This distinction is critical and Markham handles it with clarity and consistency throughout the book.
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What Makes This Book Different
There are many gentle parenting books on the market. Some are excellent. What makes “The Good Enough Parent” stand apart is its focus not just on what to do with your child but on what to do with yourself.
Most parenting books treat the parent as an instrument. Adjust the technique, improve the outcome. Markham treats the parent as a person. A person with a history, with wounds, with triggers, with limitations, with a nervous system that was shaped long before their children arrived. She does not ask you to transcend your humanity. She asks you to work with it.
She also writes beautifully. This is not a minor point. Parenting books are often read at the end of exhausting days by people whose cognitive resources are depleted. A book that is dense, clinical, or preachy will be abandoned on the nightstand. Markham’s prose is warm, clear, and genuinely comforting. Reading her feels less like being lectured and more like being understood. She has the rare ability to deliver hard truths gently and practical advice poetically.
The book is not perfect. Parents dealing with significant neurodevelopmental differences in their children may find the framework necessary but not sufficient. The advice occasionally repeats across chapters. And the emphasis on parental self-regulation, while correct, can feel like one more item on an already impossible to-do list for parents struggling with their own mental health.
But these are minor criticisms of a major work. The book’s central message, that your imperfect, messy, sometimes-yelling, cereal-for-dinner parenting is not just acceptable but genuinely good for your child, is one that the current generation of parents desperately needs to hear.
Who Needs This Book
If you have ever lain awake replaying a parenting moment you wish you could take back, this book is for you.
If you have ever felt that the gap between the parent you want to be and the parent you are is unbridgeable, this book is for you.
If you have read every parenting book and still feel like you are failing, this book is especially for you, because it will explain why the reading itself might be part of the problem.
If you are a new parent terrified of getting it wrong, read this book before you read anything else. It will inoculate you against the perfectionism that makes parenting so much harder than it needs to be.
And if you are a grandparent, a teacher, a caregiver, or anyone who loves a child and worries about doing right by them, this book will remind you that love, imperfectly delivered, is still love. And it is still enough.
The Bottom Line
“The Good Enough Parent” is not a book about lowering your standards. It is a book about understanding what actually matters. Not the organic baby food. Not the screen time limits. Not the perfectly executed bedtime routine. What matters is the relationship. What matters is that when you get it wrong, and you will get it wrong, you go back and make it right. What matters is that your child knows, in their bones, that they are loved by someone who is trying.
Dr. Laura Markham has given parents something more valuable than another set of instructions. She has given them permission. Permission to be human. Permission to fail. Permission to repair. Permission to be good enough.
And good enough, it turns out, is everything.
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