Whenever I hear about saintly parents, I get suspicious. It’s not that I’m looking for problems. It’s just that no parent is a saint. Most of us end up being the “good-enough” parents that Donald Winnicott, the influential English pediatrician and child psychiatrist, believed was sufficient to raise a well-adjusted child. Even so, the poet Philip Larkin put it best: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.”
