I recently listened to a podcast episode on the Tim Ferriss Show called Books I’ve Loved: Alain de Botton. Alain is a bestselling British philosopher and author, and the co-founder of the School of Life. He is also one of the narrators for the School of Life YouTube channel and has a phenomenal reading voice. One message Alain shares comes from D.W. Winnicott’s collection of essays Home Is Where We Start From, called the ‘good enough parent’.

The idea is, many parents are obsessed with being perfect. They want to set the best example for their kids. To cook the healthiest meals. To show the purest love. To have highest moral standards. And what’s more, they do this so their children can have the best upbringing, attend the best school and be the happiest child possible.

The problem is, perfection is very dangerous concept to strive for. It’s much better – and practical – to be simply a good enough parent. Alain says, referring to Winnicott’s writing:

Another great idea from Winnicott is the concept of the good enough parent. Many parents came to Winnicott very worried that they weren’t doing a good enough job as parents. They wanted to be better. They were worried that they weren’t educating the kid right, or there was some eating problem, or school problem, etc. And Winnicott could see that these worries were actually getting in the way of the parents doing the fairly good job that they were doing. And so Winnicott made a fascinating intervention. First of all, he told parents, no child needs a perfect parent. Indeed, a perfect parent is very dangerous. It’s a one way route to psychosis, a psychotic incident because essentially the job of a parent is to disappoint a child bit by bit and induct them into adult realities. If the parent is perfect, how can the child grow used to living in the world that we all have to live in, which is a deeply imperfect one?

So in an ideal world, a good parent is able to break bad news well to the child until the child can accept the whole panoply of difficulties of adult life, amounting ultimately into the fact that we are all mortal and we are all going to have to die.

Alain then suggests that this ‘good enough’ attitude can be applied to other domains such as friendship and learning. There’s no use trying to be a perfect friend, for screwing up occasionally is how a friendship grows. There’s no use striving to be a perfect student, for not knowing things is how you develop a sense of wonder. Being good enough to do the job, but allowing some gaps for maturity and growth, is what we should strive for.

In other words, our imperfections expose the inadequacies of life. And it is through these inadequacies that one understands the world clearer.

What a liberating message: that really, we don’t want to be perfect, for perfect is boring, unnatural and ultimately, unattainable. That being good enough is, in fact, perfect.