The case for “good enough” parenting: Why doing less might be the smartest move you make
I have a confession. For the vast majority of my twenty-ish years of parenting, I’ve been pretty lazy.
I room shared because flopping my boob out to a hungry mouth that was just inches away bought me more sleep than having to get up to a screaming baby down the hall. I threw peas into pasta more than I care to admit because at least it counted for something green and allowed me to eat my own meal in peace. I can count on my hands how many times I’ve sat at the table overseeing or helping with homework. (All that said, I was fortunate enough to have cruised through the early years before screens were completely ubiquitous.)
I’m not saying this because I think I’m a perfect or even exceptional parent. I’m saying it because my kids are now 14 and 20—one in high school who naturally wants to work hard and actually enjoys spending time with me, and one in college who, as far as I know, feeds himself, gets to class, and washes his sheets every Sunday. Without making myself absolutely mad with structure, control, and involvement, I’ve arrived at a chapter in my life where some days I don’t feel needed at all. And frankly, it’s glorious.
I do not feel guilty at all for taking a rather minimalist approach to parenting. It’s seemed to pay off pretty solidly. But for a long time, I did wonder if I was doing it wrong—if the other parents with their organized snack schedules and enrichment-stacked weekends were better at this parenting thing than I was.
But as it turns out, a growing number of families are loosening their grip in the name of sanity, realizing that maybe the point was never to do more. Maybe the point was to do enough.
Parents are done performing
New survey data from Angelcare Group suggests parents are actively pulling back from the culture of optimization. They’re buying less, simplifying routines, and questioning whether all the extras actually serve their families—or just add to the pile. And after living through a pandemic only to land in some of the most deeply unstable and stressful times in history, it’s really no surprise.
Board-certified pediatrician Dr. Mona Amin sees this shift playing out in her practice every day. “Parents are tired. Deeply tired,” she says. “Five years ago, there was still a little more buy-in around the idea that if you just worked harder, researched more, optimized more, you could somehow outsmart the messiness of parenting. Now I think a lot of parents have hit the wall.”
That wall looks familiar to anyone who’s been in the thick of it. It’s decision fatigue, shorter patience, and the creeping sense that you’re doing everything and none of it is working. Dr. Amin describes families who have “lost their rhythm”—where meals feel chaotic, bedtime is a nightly battle, and parents are spending so much energy managing logistics that there’s nothing left for connection.
One survey finding in particular captures the state of things. Fifty-four percent of parents admit to multitasking during diaper changes. For Dr. Amin, that number is less surprising than it is telling. “It reflects how stretched parents are,” she says. “Parents are answering texts, thinking about work, ordering groceries, mentally managing the whole household—all while changing a diaper. That’s not because parents don’t care. It’s because many of them feel like they have seventeen tabs open in their brain at all times.”
“Good enough” is not settling
The concept of “good enough” parenting has been around since the 1950s, when pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott introduced the idea that children don’t need perfect caregivers. What they really need are present, responsive ones. Nearly seventy years later, it’s resonating in a way it hasn’t before.
Dr. Amin thinks the reason is simple. In her opinion, exhaustion has finally outpaced aspiration. “‘Good enough parenting’ is landing differently now because it feels less like settling and more like survival with perspective,” she explains. “It’s parents saying, ‘Wait, maybe the win is not perfection. Maybe the win is a child who feels safe, loved, and guided by a caregiver who is not unraveling over every little thing.’”
From a clinical standpoint, Dr. Amin says the evidence supports the instinct to simplify—with one important distinction. “Kids do well with responsive relationships, predictable routines, sleep, movement, nutrition, play, and emotional safety. None of that requires an overflowing cart, a hyper-optimized schedule, or ten experts on your phone telling you how to cut a strawberry.” The goal, she says, isn’t minimalism for its own sake. It’s clearing out the noise so there’s more room for what actually matters: “attunement, rhythm, and calm.”
The backlash is real—and it’s healthy (mostly)
Social media has turned every parenting decision into an identity test and it’s not just “What works for your child?” but a more existential demand of “What does this choice say about who you are?” Dr. Amin sees the simplicity movement as a direct correction to that pressure, and she thinks it’s largely healthy, as long as it doesn’t become its own rigid standard.
“Any parenting message can become unhelpful when it loses context,” she cautions. “‘Less is more’ can be freeing for one family and totally alienating for another, especially if they have a child with medical needs, neurodivergence, feeding struggles, or just a season of life that is genuinely intense. Sometimes less is not more. Sometimes, more support is more.”
The healthiest version of this shift, according to Dr. Amin, isn’t “simplify because good parents keep it simple.” It’s “remove what is unnecessary so you can better support what is necessary.”
We didn’t used to parent like this
Of course the truly hands-off parenting of generations past had its own issues. Nobody is arguing for a return to the era of “go outside and don’t come back until the streetlights come on” as a complete childcare philosophy. But somewhere between that and where we are now, the needle swung so far in the other direction that we barely noticed how absurd it got.
Think about it. Do you remember drinking a single glass of water as a kid? I don’t. I drank from the hose and lived. Now we have organizational systems for our children’s water bottle collections. Did any of your parents—or your friends’ parents—set an alarm to be sure they were logged in, armed with a spreadsheet, ready to register for summer camp in January like it was as competitive as getting Taylor Swift tickets? No. None of that. Our parents sent in a check in May and hoped for the best.
And somehow, we’re still out here crushing it. We have jobs. We have relationships. We hydrate voluntarily now. The generation raised on benign neglect and unstructured afternoons turned out, for the most part, fine. Which raises a fair question: if the bar for raising functional humans is actually lower than Instagram would have us believe, what exactly are we all killing ourselves over?
The magic is in the mundane
If there’s one clinical takeaway that tracks with my own two-decade experiment in doing less, it’s this: connection doesn’t require a production. It lives in the ordinary. The bath. The bedtime song. The goofy goodnight dance you do before turning out the light.
“Kids do not need grand gestures,” Dr. Amin says. “They respond to repetition, warmth, and presence. A routine starts to feel like just another box to check when the parent is so focused on getting through it ‘correctly’ that there is no room left for the child in it.”
Dr. Amin notes that this is where the right gear can quietly make a difference—something like a bath support that lets you actually be present with your baby instead of white-knuckling the whole experience. Angelcare’s survey found that parents who felt more confident during routines like bath time were more likely to describe those moments as bonding rather than a chore. It’s not about having more stuff. It’s about having the right stuff so you can stop managing and start connecting.
As someone who spent years quietly convinced that the peas-in-pasta approach might come back to haunt me, I find this deeply reassuring. Not because it validates laziness, but because it reframes what I was actually doing during all those imperfect moments. I was being there. Being steady. Being present enough, even when “present” looked a lot like tired.
The assignment was never perfection
When I ask Dr. Amin what she’d tell every burned-out parent if she could get them to believe just one thing, her answer is immediate: “Your child does not need a perfect parent. They need a steady one.”
Steady, she clarifies, doesn’t mean calm all the time, or fully present every minute, or homemade everything, or no missed moments. “It means your child can count on your love, your repair, your guidance, and your presence over time. Doing everything was never the assignment.”
I think about my 20-year-old washing his sheets on Sundays, and my 14-year-old choosing to hang out with me when she doesn’t have to. I think about all the things I didn’t do. The homework I didn’t supervise, the routines I didn’t optimize, the guilt I mostly refused to carry. And I think maybe the smartest parenting decision I ever made was the one I didn’t even realize I was making: trusting that enough was enough.
source https://www.mother.ly/parenting/good-enough-parenting-doing-less/
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