Running on Empty

It doesn't take a parenting guru, a saint, or, thank goodness, a Ph.D. in psychology to raise a child to be a healthy, happy adult. The child psychiatrist, researcher, writer, and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott emphasized this point often throughout writings that spanned forty years. While today we recognize that fathers are of equal importance in the development of a child, the meaning of Winnicott's observations on mothering is still essentially the same. There is a minimal amount of parental emotional connection, empathy, and ongoing attention which is necessary to fuel a child's growth and development so that he or she will grow into an emotionally healthy and emotionally connected adult. Less than that minimal amount and the child becomes an adult who struggles emotionally, outwardly successful perhaps, but empty, missing something within, which the world can't see. In his writings, Winnicott coined the now well-known term, good enough mother, to describe a mother who meets her child's needs in this way. Anything that is good enough takes many forms, but all of these recognize the child's emotional or physical need in any given moment, in any given culture, and do a good enough job of meeting it. Most parents are good enough. Like all animals, we humans are biologically wired to raise our children to thrive. But what happens when life circumstances interfere with parenting, or when parents themselves are unhealthy, or have significant character flaws? Were you raised by good enough parents? By the end of this chapter, you will know what good enough means, and you will be able to answer this question for yourself. But first, if you are a parent as well as a listener, you may find yourself identifying with the parental failures presented in this book, as well as with the emotional experience of the child in the vignettes, because you are no doubt hard on yourself. Therefore I ask that you pay close attention to the following warnings. First, all good parents are guilty of emotionally failing their children at times. Nobody is perfect. We all get tired, cranky, stressed, distracted, bored, confused, disconnected, overwhelmed, or otherwise compromised here and there. This does not qualify us as emotionally neglectful parents. Emotionally neglectful parents distinguish themselves in one of two ways, and often both. Either they emotionally fail their child in some critical way in a moment of crisis, causing the child a wound which may never be repaired, acute empathic failure, or they are chronically tone deaf to some aspect of a child's need throughout his or her childhood development, chronic empathic failure. Every single parent on earth can recall a parenting failure that makes him cringe, where he knows that he has failed his child. But the harm comes from the totality of important moments in which emotionally neglectful parents are deaf and blind to the emotional needs of their growing child. Second, if you were indeed emotionally neglected, and are a parent yourself as well, there is a good chance that as you hear this book, you will start to see some ways in which you have passed the torch of emotional neglect to your child. If so, it's extremely vital for you to realize that it is not your fault.