The Case for Being a B-Minus Mom: Good Enough Parenting

I remember standing in the hallway of a preschool during my years as a director, watching a mom arrive with cupcakes for her daughter's birthday celebration. She was dressed in a cute outfit, the cupcakes looked great, and she was also in the middle of chemotherapy for breast cancer. She had gone through enormous effort just to be there.

And what she said to me was: "I'm such a terrible mom. I forgot my camera."

That moment has stuck with me for over twenty years because of how familiar it feels. One forgotten item erased everything she had managed to pull off. If you recognize that voice, the one that tallies every shortcoming and dismisses everything you accomplished, you're not alone. And decades of research suggest that voice is not only unfair, it's working against the very thing you're trying to achieve.

What "Good Enough" Actually Means

In the 1950s, British pediatrician and child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the term "good enough mother" after observing thousands of mother-infant interactions. His finding wasn't that most mothers were falling short. It was that perfection wasn't the goal and never had been.

Winnicott observed that a mother who starts out hyperresponsive to her infant's needs naturally relaxes her responsiveness as the child grows, and that this relaxation is healthy and necessary. As he wrote: "Her failure to adapt to every need of the child helps the child adapt to external realities. Her imperfections better prepare the child for an imperfect world."

This wasn't just theory. Developmental psychologist Ed Tronick's still-face experiments, beginning in the 1970s, demonstrated that what builds trust in the parent-child relationship isn't unbroken attunement. It's the cycle of disconnection and reconnection.¹ Tronick found that infants and caregivers are attuned to each other surprisingly little, with life being a series of mismatches and misattunements that are quickly repaired, thousands of times a day.² The repair is the mechanism.

Why Perfectionism Is the Real Problem

When I work with parents, I sometimes ask: What grade do good parents get? When I suggest a B-minus or C-plus, their faces change, and usually not in a good way.

But the research backs me up. A 2018 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that feeling pressure to be a perfect mother was positively associated with parental burnout.³ And a systematic review spanning 15 years of parental burnout research found that burnout carries serious consequences: sleep disorders, increased substance use, suicidal thoughts, marital conflicts, and even child abuse and neglect.⁴ Perfectionism doesn't protect your family. It puts your family at risk.

Research on self-compassion from Kristin Neff at the University of Texas shows that being hard on yourself is counterproductive to growth. When kids and adults are stressed and afraid of not performing well, it restricts their ability to be creative, take risks, and expand.⁵ Softening toward yourself isn't weakness. It's the path to becoming a stronger parent.

What Repair Looks Like in Real Life

So what does a B-minus morning actually look like? Here's an example I share with parents:

"This morning I lost my cool, and it wasn't okay. I could tell it scared you when I yelled, and I'm sorry. I'm working on not yelling as much. At the same time, tomorrow morning when it's time to turn off the TV and put your shoes on, I need you to cooperate so we can both have a calm start to the day."

That's accountability, empathy, boundary-setting, and modeling, all in a few sentences. It doesn't require perfection. It requires showing up after the mess and doing the work of reconnection. And research on parental responsiveness confirms that children of parents who engaged in higher responsiveness, including after moments of rupture, displayed lower emotion dysregulation over time.⁶

How to Apply This Today

1. Answer honestly: What does a "good mom" look like in your head? Where did that image come from?
2. Give yourself a B-minus today. Not as defeat, as a goal. Make the lunches. Skip the Pinterest-worthy presentation.
3. Practice repair instead of perfection. When you mess up, come back around: "I'm sorry. I'm working on it. I still need this from you." That cycle builds more trust than getting it right the first time ever could.

I like to describe growth not as a straight line but as a slinky stretching upward. You circle back to things you thought you'd learned, but each time with a little more wisdom and a little more grace. A good enough mom isn't a lesser mom. She's a real one.

This blog introduces the good enough mindset, but the full journey includes the emotional skills that make it practical. In Mental Health for Moms, I teach a complete framework for noticing, validating, and regulating your emotions as a parent, so you can stop chasing perfection and start showing up as the calmer, more grounded mom your kids actually need. Available through Charis Courses with Pay What You Can pricing (minimum $10). Start the course →

About The Author:

Beth Hewitt, RMHCI, is a therapist at Charis Counseling Center in Orlando, Florida, who has spent over 25 years working with mothers and young children in church, school, and clinical settings. Before entering the counseling field, she directed a preschool program of 160 children for over a decade, giving her firsthand insight into child development and the pressures parents face daily. She holds three degrees including an M.S. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling (CACREP-accredited) and is a mom of two. Learn more about her counseling →

Source References

1. "The Still Face Experiment overview" — Gottman Institute, gottman.com. Cited for Tronick's research on rupture-repair cycles building trust. Accessed Mar 9, 2026.
https://www.gottman.com/blog/research-still-face-experiment/

2. "Ed Tronick and the Still Face Experiment" — Scientific American. Cited for detail on mismatch frequency and repair as mechanism. Accessed Mar 9, 2026.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/thoughtful-animal/ed-tronick-and-the-8220-still-face-experiment-8221/

3. "Pressure to be a perfect mother relates to parental burnout" — Meeussen & Van Laar, Frontiers in Psychology (PMC). Cited for the perfectionism-burnout link in mothers. Accessed Mar 9, 2026.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6230657/

4. "15 years of parental burnout research: systematic review" — Mikolajczak et al., Current Directions in Psychological Science (SAGE). Cited for consequences of burnout: sleep disorders, substance use, child neglect. Accessed Mar 9, 2026.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09637214221142777

5. "Self-compassion research overview" — Kristin Neff, University of Texas / self-compassion.org. Cited for self-compassion being more effective than self-criticism for growth. Accessed Mar 9, 2026.
https://self-compassion.org/the-research/

6. "Transactional dynamics between parental responsiveness and child emotion dysregulation" — Multiple authors, PMC. Cited for higher parental responsiveness reducing child dysregulation over time. Accessed Mar 9, 2026.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12448099/