Good Enough

Tara is a clinical psychologist, and mother, who is passionate about helping parents -and children - navigate the current mental health crisis. During her 30 years of work, she has seen scores of troubled children, young adults and families in her clinics, and she is totally plugged in to the needs and concerns of young people today. Tara suggests a manifesto for parenting with six aims: children who grow up feeling that they are 'good enough', who aren't controlled by anxiety, feel relatively happy, and can regulate their emotions generally; and are able to leave home, with an intact relationship with their parents. The route to these aims? Not through trying to be a perfect parent, but rather by parents embracing their own good enough self. She looks how accepting our own flaws and limitations, and that of the hurly-burly world, we can help children adjust to this in their own lives. Exploring the cultural zeitgeist, the pressures on parents and children today and the fast-moving and highly nuanced world we live in, the book returns to the themes of firm and kind; good enough; and the relationship between parent and child again and again. She develops these themes through every age and stage, jumping backwards and forwards to think about how the decisions we make at one age play out in the longer term. In doing so she addresses many of the common difficulties in family life: in the early chapters focusing on babies, thinking about sleep; in the toddler section she looks at tantrums, in the childhood section there will be chapters on phones, food and friendship and in the teenage chapters, qualifications, expectations and sex and relationships will come to the fore. Throughout the book she will weave personal experience, research and clinical material to consider meeting the manifesto aims and in doing so she offers a straight-talking, easy-to-read road map for every parent.