The Good Enough Parent Quotes

“As a result, there’s an unexpected outcome: the good child is heading for problems in adult life, typically to do with excessive compliance, rigidity, lack of creativity and an unbearably harsh conscience that might spur on suicidal thoughts. Meanwhile, the naughty child is on the way to healthy maturity, which comprises spontaneity, resilience, a tolerance of failure and a sense of self-acceptance.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“In other words, people who truly understand the meaning of life know that it is all about children. Like Cornelia’s, their attention is devoted to the welfare and education of the next generation.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“The good parent isn’t looking for a balanced relationship. It is happy to give unilaterally. It doesn’t need to be asked how its day was or what it thinks of the government’s new policy on insurance. It knows that a child should be able to take a parent substantially for granted. The parents’ reward for all their work won’t be direct; it will arrive by noting, in many years’ time, that their child has developed into a very good parent themselves.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“Good enough’ is a cure for the sickness of idealisation.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting and resilient children

“Work and family Unfortunately, the new ambitious ideals of parenting have developed at exactly the same moment as has modern capitalism. In other words, just as unprecedented demands have been made on us in our working lives, so too the parenting sphere has become more exacting than it has ever been. We are no longer expected just to show up at work in order to get a wage. Work has thrust itself forward as the intended obsession of all admirable people. We are to come to work early and stay up late. We are to take up all possibilities for labouring on weekends and travelling to remote corners to attend conferences and congresses. We are to expend every last bit of energy in reaching the top of the corporate pyramid – this at exactly the point when society has also started to expect us to be home every night to read bedtime stories and to take an intimate interest in every detail of a child’s inner life. Capitalism and childcare are at loggerheads, but neither admits as much; indeed, both sides torture us by promising that we might be able to achieve ‘work–life balance’, an ideal as sentimental and humiliating as expecting that someone manage to be simultaneously both a professional ballerina and a brain surgeon.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting and resilient children

“Applying pressure on someone to be content when there is no authentic reason to be so is not kindness. It is a form of well-meaning coercion that forces a child to lose connection with their own reality and to distance themselves from an honest relationship with who they actually are.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting and resilient children

“Being loved How much a parent of the gender we are drawn to finds us loveable is, to a humbling degree, likely to influence how acceptable we end up feeling about ourselves. The memory of having been cherished and deemed interesting by a parent guides the way we evaluate the face staring back at us in the mirror in adulthood or moulds how we imagine strangers might respond to our invitations for dinner. Those who failed to interest their parents may struggle to believe that anyone will ever notice them.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“Bookshops, the toy shops of big people, end as places where our disappointments with others can be mediated and redeemed, and friends not found in life can be secured through the grown-up game we soberly call ‘literature’.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“Every new human provides our species with a chance to return to first principles and rethink everything from the ground up. We should allow the child to ask its questions and to pop as many things as safely possible into its mouth. And when one can’t say why or how, rather than look cross or bored, we should say that we’ll find out together.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“Put simply: love is the considerate, tender, patient behaviour displayed by an adult over many years towards a child who cannot help but be largely out of control, confused, frustrating and bewildered. Over time this will allow the child to grow into an adult who can take its place in society without too much of a loss of spontaneity, without too much terror and with a basic trust in its own capacities and chances of fulfilment. It should be a matter of global consternation that, despite our many advances, we are still only at the dawn of knowing how to ensure that we all have the loving childhoods we deserve.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“Loving parents instinctively understand that what ‘attention-seeking’ children need isn’t punishment and a lecture about being difficult, but the right kind of attuned care that will coax them out of their frantic bids for love.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“By straining every sinew, we will have a good chance of sparing them our specific problems. We might have been scared of our parents, but our children won’t have to be scared of us. We lacked material goods, but they will have plenty. But in seeking to avoid one problem, we are always at risk of generating another. Perhaps their lack of fear of us will lead them to an undisciplined and lax approach to their work. Or their material comfort will inspire ingratitude and lethargy. There are so many fresh ways for lives to go wrong that in sparing our children certain forms of misery, we are only heightening their risk of exposure to others.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“Your life will in certain ways be a long sequence of different kinds of homework. Horribly, maths or French is the easiest version: a beginner’s guide, almost a pleasure.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“Nature appears to have arranged things so that we can’t get to certain insights without suffering. The real distinction is between suffering with a purpose and suffering in vain. For all the horrors of adolescence, one of its glories is that the suffering it inflicts is largely rooted in some of the most crucial developments and realisations of adulthood. These fascinatingly miserable few years should be celebrated for offering us a taste of the most fruitful kinds of grief.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“The really worrying teenagers aren’t those who misbehave around their parents and take out their random misery upon them; it’s those who are so worried about not being loved that they can’t afford to put a foot wrong.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“At the root of adolescent sorrow and rage is the recognition that life is harder, more absurd and less fulfilling than one could ever have suspected, or had been led to suppose by kindly representatives of the adult world. The sentimental protection of childhood falls away, and, to one’s great anger, a range of horrible but profoundly important realisations come into view.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“We don’t ultimately prompt anyone to grow kind by making them think about manners. We do so by helping them to think about the fear and self-hatred that others can lapse into without the comforts of kindness. In order to generate thoughtful children, parents shouldn’t insist on the rules of propriety without a commentary. They should help their children by opening their eyes to an implausible thought about human nature: the extent of the insecurity felt by other people (even very big ones) and their corresponding susceptibility to shame and loneliness, their longing for reassurance and their craving for any sign (however small, even the size of a card with a pretty hand-drawn bird on the front) of their right to exist.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“We should give our children an early, gentle taste of how much unhappiness and resignation all halfway decent lives exact.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“With all this in mind, we should take care not to toughen up our children too much. We should never call them cry-babies; we should give them permission to be vulnerable. In sensible households, we should all – however old we are – have signs, a bit like those in hotels, that we can hang on our doors and announce to passers-by that we are spending a few minutes inside doing something essential to our humanity and inherently connected to our capacity be content: sobbing for a little while like a lost small child.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“Yet to understand and accept one’s younger longings belongs to the essence of genuine adulthood – and parenthood. There is no maturity without an adequate negotiation with the infantile, and no such thing as a proper grown-up who does not frequently yearn to be comforted like a toddler.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“Moments of losing courage belong to a brave life.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“Being able to share issues belongs to a slow pattern of progress whereby humans have learnt to come to terms with their vulnerability and accept themselves as only intermittently rational; our strength lies in being able to accept our own fragility.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“The path to confidence is not to banish fears that one might be silly; it is to not let knowledge of one’s silliness become grounds for a refusal to act. The task is not to tell children that they are amazing; it is to model for them how one might live a decent, self-accepting, humour-filled and confident life knowing one is very imperfect – but, fortunately, so is everyone else.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“There is a kind of child who won’t dare to act, thinking that one mistake will place them forever in the camp of the contemptible. One should reassure them that being a fool is not a personal risk; it is a common and inviolable rule. If they took action and ended up doing one more silly thing, it wouldn’t be special grounds for shame; it would merely be confirming what they had understood from the start: that we are all, often in rather endearing ways, error-prone beings.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“We should remind children that they know themselves from the inside, but can know others only from the outside – that is, via what these others choose to mention, which results in an unhelpfully limited and edited picture of normality.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“In this context, it may help a young person to be given access to some apparently dark but in the end liberating truths about the adult world. Despite certain appearances, and a lot of puffery and decorum, human beings are not on the whole an especially clever, competent, knowledgeable or respectable species. Indeed, as a rule, they are properly idiotic and rather damnable. The path to confidence is not to build up a child; it is to knock down society as a whole.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“The ideal position of play in life was first explored by the Ancient Greeks. Among all their gods, two mattered to them especially. The first was Apollo, god of reason and wisdom. He was concerned with patience, thoroughness, duty and logical thinking. He presided over aspects of government, commerce and what we would now call science. But there was another important god, a diametrically opposed figure whom the Greeks called Dionysus. He was concerned with the imagination, impatience, chaos, emotion, instinct – and play. The ‘Dionysian’ involved dreams, liberation and a relaxation of the strict rules of reason. Importantly, the Greeks did not think that any life could be complete without a combination of these two figures. Both Apollo and Dionysus had their claims on human lives, and each could breed dangerously unbalanced minds if they held undiluted sway.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“Children don’t see a need to wait until every practical detail has been sorted out before beginning to imagine fresh schemes and develop original proposals. They know the gist of what has to be done and are keen to sketch out at speed the broad strokes of their plans. They have none of the normal adult respect for so-called sensible objections to every new idea, or obedience to the many reasons why something should not be tried and the status quo left morosely undisturbed.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“It isn’t an insult to us or a sign that we have failed our children if we sometimes find them in their rooms disconsolate and in tears. It could be a sign that we have been brave enough to allow them to understand life on their own terms.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children

“We need a chance to feel sad if we’re to be able to be authentically happy; we need to be able to say that we want the whole world to die in order gradually to become responsible and kind. What hard-of-hearing parents forget is that feelings, especially difficult feelings, invariably weaken when they’ve been aired. Feelings get less strong, not stronger, as soon as they’ve been recognised. We scream when no one has listened, not when they have listened amply with care.”
― The School of Life, The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting, and resilient children