Cate’s Story.
The mother of a nearly three-year-old daughter.

“I remember a few weeks into it, I was just on the couch crying, thinking this is so relentless. How do people do this, day in and day out? Why would people want a second one?”. Cate is the mother of a nearly three-year-old daughter, who was much wanted and planned for. However, the new born period was challenging for Cate, as it is for many, “I didn’t enjoy it because I was so worried about doing the right thing”.

What was particularly challenging for Cate was the oversaturation of parenting information, when she looked to social media, for advice and reassurance. However, there was so much material and much of it was conflicting and confusing, “I was reading all these things about schedules, and at this age they should be awake for this long, and at this age they should be napping for this long, and it’s like the whole time I was measuring things. I even had apps that you could log sleeping, feeding, pooing, weeing – everything. I would do it for a few days and then I would give up because it was just too much”.

This was especially difficult and overwhelming for Cate given her strong sense of responsibility to get things “right”.

Underlying this was her concern that her actions as a mother may have a long-term detrimental effect, on her daughter. For example, she worried about leaving her child to cry to sleep; she had read information about sleep training as a way to help babies develop regular sleep habits, but had also read that sleep training “could be bad for our attachment and cause my baby to have attachment issues with me further down the track”. Cate feared that “something I do now could affect her mental health, or that she would hate, or resent me later on”. She worried that her daughter might blame her in later years, for the way she was parented. As a young mum, the pressure she put on herself, to do the right thing, was exhausting, for Cate, who admitted, “I did sleep train in the end, though, after 2 years of broken sleep”.

Cate found it difficult to trust her instincts and intuition, as a mother, due to her fear of doing something wrong, “I just wanted to do the best for her, you know? I feel like instinct didn’t even come into it. It was just like, this is how you’ve got to do it”. She remembers once her partner saying to her “what would happen if she just didn’t sleep one time – is she just going to combust?”. I said – I don’t know – maybe! I was just so rigid”.

However, Cate recalls some exceptions where, “definitely my gut instinct came into play”, especially when her daughter broke her leg, “I knew there was something wrong so I kept going back to the doctor”. Finally the doctor listened, and sent her daughter for x-rays. Cate’s instinct was revealed to be spot on - her daughter’s leg definitely was broken. “I’m just so glad I trusted my instincts for once”.

Cate’s story highlights the strive for perfection, some parents feel to provide the best possible upbringing for their child.

However, these attempts at getting things right often becomes a source of stress and self-doubt. It also means we fail to recognise that perfection is not the goal, but instead we should be endeavouring to be a  “good enough” parent. Coined by renowned British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, “good enough” parenting suggests that perfection is not necessary or even desirable in raising children. At its core, “good enough” parenting recognizes that parents, like all human beings, are fallible and imperfect. It acknowledges that mistakes will be made along the way, while emphasizing the core needs of our children, including love, care, safety, nourishment, a stable and predictable environment, and parents who are present and responsive to their children's needs, to the best of their ability.