The Good Enough Parent

The job of a parent is to disappoint a child bit by bit into adult realities.

Donald Winnicott was an English paediatrician who proposed that the happiness of the human race depended on the way parents bring up their children. All perversions of humanity were, in his view, a failure of parental provision: from fascism to misogyny to drug abuse. The road to a better society begins in the nursery.

Whether you are a parent or not, y…