The Perfect Mother Does Not Exist … But A “Good-Enough Mother” Is as Perfect as Possible

As a mother myself, I repeatedly have seen myself confronted with contradictory ideas and models related to motherhood, education, nurturing, in an ocean of well-meant but more often than not detrimental visions and expectations. The next ten points are intended to deliver some inputs into the overall image of a “good-enough mother” not as an entity of mediocrity, conformism and jadedness but as a symbol of empowerment, freedom and joy.

1. Love your children – and extend that love to other people’s children.

Train yourself in seeing children for who they are in the moment and not for whom you would want them to be at some point as a placeholder for your unfulfilled dreams which might get fulfilled through them is one of the greatest blessings we can give children, while avoiding to project onto them the things we hate in ourselves.

2. Spend quality time with your children, be it playing, cuddling, going for walks, watching movies, reading together, or just sitting next to each other.

It is crucial to take into account what the child himself or herself wants and try to find a middle way or a win-win solution so that they learn such abilities as empathy with healthy boundaries.

3. Love your children – and extend that love to other people’s children.

This might sound as a repetition of number one; nevertheless, the necessity to love children, one’s own and other people’s children, cannot be emphasized too strongly in a world which seems to forget that we are here only temporarily. In addition, it is essential to learn to value children for their own idiosyncrasies, accepting them in whatever they might live and enjoy in the very moments without pressuring them into fulfilling our expectations or healing our disappointments.

4. Set and enforce healthy boundaries.

This is a big one: children need boundaries, they need to know where they end and where other people start respectively where other people end and where they themselves start. The sooner boundaries are established in accordance with the child’s age and specific circumstances, the easier it is to enforce and keep them while gradually expanding them. Because we live such long lives, many parents – too many – forget that their children grow up and turn into adults in the future – or should turn into full-fledged adults, able to live their own lives as self-reliant, self-sufficient, responsible citizens. Therefore, they behave as if children are and will forever be children, not allowing them to develop their own individualities. This is why boundaries are so important: they create an emotional-mental space, which later on metamorphoses into a physical space as well, in which the present-day day can find and establish his/her own identity to evolve subsequently into a specific, fully individualized sense of self.

5. Love your children – and extend that love to other people’s children.

Not a repetition of number one and number three, this point refers to love as an unconditional act of acceptance, respect, compassion. Regardless of the past or of the future, the child deserves unconditional love in the here and now. This does not mean allowing everything he or she wants to do, but accepting him or her for who he or she is and for whom he or she will become. As parents, we are plainly vehicles through which children have found their passage into this dimension of reality – not their masters, creators or gods.

6. Take me-time by yourself.

In order to acknowledge children’s autonomy as human beings, finding and/or creating time for yourself with the purpose of spending it wisely without worrying or obsessing about them or anything else is a very smart move. Experience shows that, most of the time if not ALL the time, one has to plan such me-time and stick to it, because otherwise there will always be other seemingly more important priorities.

7. Love your children – and extend that love to other people’s children.

There is a fine balance between protecting children and transforming oneself into an over-protective helicopter monster which squeezes out the joy of living from anyone around them – and more particularly from their children. The older they get, the more discreet your protection needs to be, so that they can learn to take estimate risks and the potential rewards and dare to move outwards into the world at large.

8. Have activities with grown-ups without children.

This is a no-brainer and still, most of parents either involve their children in all their activities and/or spend time exclusively with other families with children as well, or give up on any sort of social life due to their children occupying their entire life. This leads inadvertently to unhealthy co-dependence behaviors on the side of parents which will be painfully suffocating towards the children once these start to discover their own interests and friendships – the latest in adolescence.

9. Love your children – and extend that love to other people’s children.

Babies have very clear, survival-oriented needs and express them distinctly; the older children become, the more complex their needs become. As parents, it is our duty to “grow” with our children, so that we become able to respond to them emotionally and mentally depending on the stage they are in and to do our best to understand him or her at his or her level of consciousness. It is not ethical to rob him or her of childhood by imposing one’s adult views or to minimize their evolving self due to our inadequacy to evolve in parallel with them.

10. Be sure to build up a future in which your children will be independent autonomous adults.

This relates to number four: due to our long lives, parentification of children, infantilization of adults or a combination of both have become social phenomena which destroys the social fabric of several developed countries and leads to civilizational decline. Extended over generations the sheer inability of parents to see their children as individual entities in themselves and not as extensions of parentally biological bodies leads to intergenerational dysfunction followed by inevitable socioeconomic weakening and national extinction. History offers some interesting examples in this concern even though humans have never lived such long lives as we do nowadays, at least not in terms of entire populations. Letting go of children is a gradual process which, done correctly, is neither painful nor alienating – it is simply natural.

As a final thought, remembering the words of the French writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of the children’s novel The Little Prince, one of the most celebrated classics of children’s literature, might serve as a powerful orientation north-star in times of self-doubt: “We do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children.”