After more than 28 years of working in the NHS, specialising in children’s and adolescents’ mental health, the clinical psychologist Dr Tara Porter realised her young patients had something in common. “Whatever their diagnosis, the kids weren’t feeling good enough,” she says. “They had ADHD, they didn’t feel smart enough; they had eating disorders, they didn’t feel slim or pretty enough; they had social anxiety, they didn’t feel popular enough.”
In clinic sessions she would sit with parents who, she says, would be “pole-axed” by the distress of their child — he or she had always been so good. “So great at school, great at swimming, played the guitar, had loads of friends, did so many things.” Porter would see the child wince. “There was this yoke of other people’s expectations on their shoulders.”
So how do we make our children feel good enough? By not being a perfectionist parent; by not relentlessly praising them, or pushing them, or overly valuing achievement, Porter says. “Doing more and more and more in parenting isn’t always better,” she adds. “There’s a middle ground that’s best for kids. I don’t think it’s widely understood.”
Motherhood meets ambition
It’s why Porter, now in private practice, has written a book, Good Enough: A Framework for Modern Parents. What makes our children feel “good” and “enough”, she says, is knowing they’ll be able to cope with difficulty and uncertainty. It’s developing emotional competence and independence. And key to all that is the quality of their relationships (with you and others). That requires us to relax our impossibly high standards for our kids and ourselves — rather than trying to be the perfect parent raising a perfect child. Here’s what she advises.
Parent the child you have, not the child you want
“Having a baby is the time people feel most out of control, so we look for certainty,” Porter says. “You don’t know what to do, you’re looking for an instruction manual.” Adopting an “extreme regime” — like 24-hour baby bonding, where you give constant comfort and instantly meet their demands — gives an illusion of control. But it’s actually “flexible consistency” that helps prepare a baby for life, because they learn about adaptability and others’ needs, says Porter — if they have to wait for your attention while you make food, for example. Also, the regime that suits you may not suit your child. Gina Ford’s parent-led method — of feeding your baby at set intervals rather than on demand — worked for Porter’s first baby, but with her second and third, she says, it simply wasn’t the right fit for their personalities. Aim for “relationship-based parenting” rather than trying to make them fit an external set of standards, she says. “Your relationship is with that unique person. You have to feel your way.”
Don’t organise everything for them
“When we sit and play with kids, we often get into a semi-pompous state of counting everything, ‘What colour is this?’ and ‘This goes here’. We feel we have to teach them,” says Porter. But with toddlers, letting them lead the play boosts self-esteem. “You’re teaching them the skills of playing by just being there, by being open and not directing them too much.” Most important, she adds, “You’re building your relationship, responding to your individual child — and not forcing a learning agenda.” As they reach six or seven, encourage “free play”. Research shows that it boosts a child’s sense of competence and autonomy. “It gives them a belief that what they do makes a difference — and this protects them from anxiety and depression later in life.” It’s the same for tweens — don’t organise or perfectly curate everything. “I used to send my kids off to the shop aged ten with £10 and they had to decide what we’d eat for dinner. When you give them responsibility, they rise to the occasion. It’s giving them that opportunity to be free and independent.”
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You don’t have to meet their needs instantly
If their needs have always been instantly met, you may create a “needy and demanding older child”, Porter says. “If you feel like you always have to be there for your child, your child never gets used to you not being there.” She cites “gentle parenting” — which emphasises empathy and respect for a child’s feelings, such as sitting and waiting as your toddler tantrums — as a potentially “perfectionistic” and unrealistic strategy. “You’re trying to meet an extreme standard, and being harsh on yourself if you don’t,” Porter says. “In addition, when you try to be perfect, you make yourself anxious and that’s not good for your child. Anxiety’s contagious.” Children benefit from some consequences for their actions, boundaries and rules. “When you’re rushing round the supermarket, or getting three kids out the door at quarter to eight in the morning, kids have to learn that they have to get on with it, consider other people’s needs and comply a little.”
Don’t accidentally raise kids into being people-pleasers
We can reduce the risk of our children feeling inadequate by not inadvertently training them to become “hooked on praise”, Porter says. It can start early (throw out your star charts). “We can do too much of this outcome-focused parenting — the opposite of ‘good enough’ parenting — when we’re constantly focusing on how our toddlers perform,” Porter says. “Then they go into school and have learning objectives and certificates. Kids can get inadvertently trained, particularly girls, into people-pleasing.” She advises using praise “like salt” — while a judicious amount can help to guide their behaviour, too much can make them overinvested in the opinions of others. Many teenagers in her clinic don’t have a sense of what makes them happy, just what everybody else wants from them. “By being curious and chatting to them, parents can help their children to think about when they’re at peace, when they’re happy, what they believe, what their values are, what they want.”
Why distress can reveal itself in adolescence
The fallout from kids caring too much about others’ opinions often shows up in the teenage years, peaking at 14, 15 and 16, according to Porter. “In adolescence people-pleasing doesn’t work any more because the demands on you aren’t simple and they’re often contradictory,” she says. “Your friend phones at 11pm and you want to be a good friend, but you want to study for your test and please your teacher, and your parents want you to go to bed and you want to please them.” It can create a “prison of expectation”, she says.
How to help them build a protective sense of self-worth? “Maintaining your relationship with them, their sense of being valued, even if you disagree with them, is key to their self-esteem for life. Whereas building self-esteem through their achievements is like a bucket with a hole in it.” Why? Because they get their GCSE results, feel happy for one day, then move on to the next achievement. “They don’t hold on to the self-esteem.”
And if you do disagree with them over something, be firm, but not “sledgehammer” firm, she says. “You can get into an escalating cycle. You end up threatening to throw the phone out of the window because they haven’t emptied the dishwasher. It’s better to say, ‘Come on, we need to find a way through this.’ What we don’t want is to squash out of kids their capacity to argue back and say ‘no’.”
Beware of too much busyness in middle childhood
The roots of teenage unhappiness are often in middle childhood, and a big contributor is too much busyness. “Many kids I see in clinic have an extensive extracurricular adult-led timetable,” Porter says — piano lessons, karate, coding, drama. “Parents want to give their kids everything — they talk about ‘opportunities I never had’ — but the word ‘enough’ has been lost. When you reach for perfection in your parenting, you’re modelling that to your kids, and that will get in the way of them feeling good enough. But, equally, it stops you, the parent, from feeling good enough and from enjoying your child.”
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Even the much-vaunted “growth mindset” — praising effort to give children the sense they can improve “rather than seeing ability as fixed and innate” — feeds the myth that hard work conquers all, she says, and sets them up to feel a failure if they can’t eventually be “the best” or as proficient as their friends. Choose one activity for your child, she suggests, and let them choose another. “Otherwise you’re in this relentless stressful cycle of ‘Come on, we’ve got to get out of the house, do this, do that.’ Your relationship with your kid gets missed. And it’s hard to be kind. You’re in ‘firm’ gear all the time.”
Promote thriving, not relentless academic striving
Parental support of schoolwork and academic ambition can tip into being unhelpful, Porter says. In her clinic it often has one of two outcomes. “Children decide they can’t reach the standards set by their school or parents, so they may as well not try at all. Or it plays out in this internalising of not feeling good enough and working all hours.” Even when they get great results, they still feel “meh”, she says. American research shows that high-achieving schools and seemingly privileged teens experience six or seven times the national average rates of anxiety and depression.
One challenge of being the “good enough” parent is not getting sucked into what she calls the “competitive vortex”, where you get pulled into what other parents are doing, where you stop trusting your instinct. “Accept that not all children are academic.”
If you have a child who must always get As? “Puncture that belief,” she says. “I hear so often in clinic, ‘My teacher will be disappointed in me if I don’t get a top mark.’ Your teacher might be disappointed for you, but you don’t always have to get the top grade.” Show them that school work is important, but not the be-all and end-all for you, she adds. “For example, at parents’ evening, don’t always lead by asking about grades.”
Stay calm if they don’t want to go to university
“Find that sweet spot between giving your children opportunities and weighing them down with your expectations,” Porter says. That provides the best foundation for kids to discover what they want to do in life — though not all know what that is at 15, 18 or later, she says. “They’re on much more of a conveyor belt now, and sometimes it’s good to pause that and have a careful think. If you panic as a parent, it will be counterproductive.” And if they declare they don’t want to go to university? “Respond with empathy and curiosity. Explore it with them.” You might say, “OK, have you got other plans? What are you thinking?”
Don’t openly fret. “Some parents express worry as a sign of caring. Because we’re thinking about a situation so much it can feel like we’re doing something. It’s that illusion of control.” But your anxiety erodes your child’s self-confidence, as it sends the message that you don’t trust them to be competent. “A better approach is trying to ‘scaffold’. That means giving them emotional support, holding back a bit, letting them become competent, autonomous and find their own path.”
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How to create a balanced relationship with food
“Food is an area where we get sucked into the idea of being a perfect parent and providing the perfect nutrition to our kids,” Porter says. It can become emotionally fraught. “You’re trying to meet that external standard where they’ll eat quinoa, and you end up creating friction and tension because you refuse to give them pizza.”
If we are too precious, it can raise the risk of disordered eating, Porter says. The first time they go to a party without you, she says, “They see this food, they know you don’t like that food, so they key into their ‘good child’ mode — they want the food but they repress that.” They try to live up to your exacting standards. “Or they see the food, know they’re not going to have it tomorrow, so they binge-eat it.”
It can begin a wave of unhealthy patterns. “What they will be less able to do is to say, ‘I’ll have a KitKat because I like KitKats, but I don’t need to have three, or none, because we’ve got KitKats at home and they’re not special.’”
The ideal? “We want to give them nutritious food but we don’t want to be so precious about it that they never have any exposure to high-sugar, high-fat foods,” she says. “That isn’t preparing them for the world they live in.”
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Rebellious boys still crave their parents’ approval
When boys rebel, their underlying feeling is often anxiety or sadness because they don’t feel good enough. “The education system seems to suit boys less,” Porter says. Recent government statistics show that 75 per cent of girls are ready for school at four or five — and just 60 per cent of boys. “They’re less ready to sit still, do as they’re told, to hold a pencil, learn to read and write. We risk that this can be the thin end of a wedge where they start to disengage or it undermines their confidence.” It raises the risk that boys look for alternative identities as a source of self-esteem. “Because we all need to have a sense of being good enough. They’re looking for that. So they become the class clown. Or, worse, the class bully.”
It might not be apparent that your teenage boy cares what you think, but Porter says, “They really want our approval.” The main reason teenagers lie is they don’t want parents to be disappointed in them, she adds. If there’s a problem, “Our way often is to talk, and say, ‘What’s going on, are you OK? Tell me about it,’” she says. But with boys, talking isn’t always the answer. “Doing” can be more effective — “Going on a walk, or joining them in their activities, or just being with them,” so they feel supported, accepted and cared for, just the way they are.
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Parental high standards won’t help your daughter navigate the mean girls at school
When parents are perfectionists they hold their children to a high standard, believing “my child should behave like this”. But, Porter says, “that gets in the way of attaching to the child you’ve got”. Even unconsciously, that can make a child feel not good enough and settle for friends who don’t truly value her — or, worse, make her more prone to game-playing in friendships. “We get self-esteem through our relationships and mattering to other people. If young people haven’t had enough of that in their childhood, and believe feeling valued is contingent on them meeting X or Y standard, then they might feel more insecure.”
With girls in particular, she says, this can play out in friendships. Often the “leader” of a trio makes the others vie for her attention. “She plays games to try and keep other people near her,” Porter says. These manipulative friendships can start as early as age nine, she says. Your daughter needs to know that she doesn’t need to enter the dynamics of the “popular” girls. Parents can help by discussing the difference between popularity and being liked.
“Popularity is associated with social power, being ‘cool’ — smart or pretty or having access to boys — and can be slightly bitchy,” she says. “Being liked is being easy-going, relaxed and kind.” She advises parents to say, “‘Oh, she sounds like an on-off friend. She’s friends with you the first day, then the second day she’s friends with someone else. She whispers behind her hand. That feels really awful, doesn’t it?’ You’re puncturing the power of it. It either helps them detach or it gives them a narrative about it that isn’t self-blaming.”
Good Enough: A Framework for Modern Parents by Dr Tara Porter is published on April 10 (Yellow Kite £20). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
