The Good Enough Parent

How to Raise Contented, Interesting, and Resilient Children

By: The School of Life

Narrated by: Sonya Cullingford

A parenting guide providing compassionate instruction and insight into raising a resilient, well-balanced child.

Bringing up a child to be an authentic and mentally robust adult is one of life’s great challenges. It is also, fortunately, not a matter of luck.

The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of life lessons, including how to say ‘no’ to a child you adore, how to look beneath the surface of ‘bad’ behavior to work out what might really be going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, and how to handle the moods and gloom of adolescence.

Most importantly, this is a book that knows that perfection is not required - and could indeed be dangerous, because a key job of any parent is to induct a child gently into the imperfect nature of everything. Written in a tone that is encouraging, wry, and soaked in years of experience, The Good Enough Parent is an intelligent guide to raising a child who will one day look back on their childhood with just the right mixture of gratitude, humor, and love.

©1987 The School of Life (P)2021 The School of Life

A breath of fresh air

This book covers a broad range of topics. Don’t expect it to get too much into the nitty gritty of very specific topics. It focuses more on the big picture but does a very good job of doing so. The few short hours you will spend listening to or reading this book are well spent. I appreciate the lack of filler and redundancy making this more easy to absorb and utilize. I think the message of book is much needed while living in a culture that can sometimes put unhelpful pressure to be a perfect parent who can always have a plan to make sure we have perfect children to behave in a certain kind of way that’s perceived to be good. Helpfully, this book doesn’t set the goal up or expectation of perfection but discusses realistic expectations. Its wisdom and insights will help you understand how approaching different facets in certain ways will influence a child in the long run. It’s forthcoming about the messiness and struggles of parenthood but reminds you of the big picture that will really make a difference in the long run. Overall, this message is a rare but valuable one in our culture and very much needed especially if you struggle with perfectionism or anxiety that may cause you to have unhelpful and overly idealistic expectations about parenthood.

Much needed

Excellent, desperately relevant! so happy I found this book and the school of life

Must read

This is a wonderful book. Very insightful. Will bring you back to a place of discovery, whether you have kids or not.

Changed me a lot as a father

Outstanding parenting book. Wish i could have read it earlier. The book gives you a unique understanding of a child's nature and provides many answers for parents about how to parent properly, what to do and what not.

All parents should read this!

An excellent book and good reminder that as long as we are trying we are all good enough parents!

Not my cup of tea

Talking from the historical point of view was hard for me to listen to. It's more about mindset you should have in order to understand a kid's behavior. The book doesn't give you advice about how to react to the kid's behavior.

Totally missed the point

This book totally missed the point. Dr. Donald Winnicott coined the term “good enough mother” in the 1950s to describe how children thrive when parents actually fail them in tolerable ways, teaching them to cope in a world full of disappointments and to manage their own needs. I was hoping for guidance about how to apply these concepts as a working mom 70 years later. This book gave no helpful information. The examples were all about how to be perfect, not about the kinds of “failures” which help children thrive, which areas are important to get it right most of the time and where it’s ok (or even good) to get it wrong sometimes. What a disappointment. The narrator was the only decent thing about this book.