Parenting Series: 30% Is More Than Good Enough

Have you ever heard of the “good enough” parent? It’s a concept that comes out of Donald Winnicott’s work on child development in the 1950s. The idea is, small failures to meet our children’s every need are actually important moments of growth in our children’s development, giving them opportunities to learn emotional regulation, self-soothing, and delayed gratification. Perpetual attunement to a child’s needs is not just unreasonable, it’s actually unhelpful.

The mythological perfect parent is empirically rejected in favor of the parent who tries, struggles, fails, and tries again.

Isn’t that a relief?

In the 70s and 80s, Dr. Ed Tronick went on to show that a “rule of thirds” can be used to describe parents’ attunement to their children’s needs. His research found that parents are perfectly in sync with their kids only about a third of the time, and that 30% is enough to create strong, secure attachments that will form the bedrock for healthy relationship patterns throughout a child’s life. Another 30-ish percent of the time, parents fail to meet the moment. They just can’t figure out the problem, or they are unavailable and the kiddo has to sort things out for themself. The final third is the really important one. In these moments, parents started out misaligned, whether misreading their child’s cues or simply distracted by other events. Crucially, they worked their way back to meet the need, bringing relief to their child, increasing resilience, and strengthening the relationship. In this way, kids learn that relationships can survive mistakes, and that the adults who care for them are safe, warm, and loving even when they get it wrong at first.

Being responsive and attentive to our kids’ distress at least a third of the time means that we will stay in loving connection— but moments of rupture or disconnect allow our kids to build self-soothing skills and our willingness to try again helps them learn how to repair relationships. Our kids don’t need us to be perfectly calm and available all the time. They just need us to do the best we can— and that’s enough.