What is "good parenting" anyway? Part One - Mothers

For most of us, our role as parent is the most pivotal, important and defining of our lives. Since having children, I have never experienced such overwhelming feelings of joy, accomplishment, purpose, pride, love and stunned wonderment. These life-affirming feelings are tempered daily by incapacitating feelings of guilt and self-doubt. But I know I am doing my best. How do I know this? Because I know my children feel deeply loved and secure. They are happy. Their happiness equals my success as a mother.

In "Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting", Laurence Steinberg maintains that good parenting "helps foster empathy, honesty, self-reliance, self-control, kindness, cooperation, and cheerfulness. It also promotes intellectual curiosity, motivation, and desire to achieve." He furthermore maintains that it helps "protect children from developing anxiety, depression, eating disorders, anti-social behavior, and alcohol and drug abuse."

So far so uncontroversial. (Although as someone who has encountered such a glaring lack of empathy in my own mother, I do find it interesting that the fostering of empathy is mentioned first).

I actually think it could be stated in even simpler terms. When we become parents, we can simply no longer be selfish. As a parent - not even necessarily an especially 'good' one, just an ordinary, 'only just coping' one (like most of us!) - your child takes priority, always. Your needs are relegated - indeed they become almost inconsequential because your child is your all-consuming focus. Any normal parent adores, protects and cherishes their child without reservation or condition. If you cannot even get this most basic obligation right (indeed not so much an obligation as an instinct, a biological imperative), you do not deserve the title of 'parent' at all.

Some pertinent questions are: What is a mother? What is a mum? What does a mother do? What does a mum do? What SHOULD they do? How should they feel? How should they make their children feel? 

A mother is, quite simply, a woman who has a child - regardless of her 'mothering' abilities, that is just what we understand the word to mean. The word ‘mum’, however, has particular connotations – wholly positive, nurturing ones. Connotations I do not, and have never, associated with my own mother. This is a woman who, having quite deliberately established an insidious pattern of secret, subtle, systematic abuse and tyrannical control from when my sister and I were just five and nine years old, never assimilated, understood, learned (or cared to learn) HOW to be a mother, much less a ‘mum’. (Given that she herself had been blessed with a beautiful, lovely and loving mother with whom she shared a close bond, the reason/s for my own mother's appalling shortcomings and destructive failures might forever remain a mystery.)

So what does (and should) a mother do in order to demonstrate her 'mothering abilities' and thus define herself as a 'mum'? All these questions are difficult to answer with clarity and certainty, of course: there is no ‘right’ answer. 

What is perhaps a more black-and-white question is: what doesn’t a mum do? (Or rather, what shouldn't she do?)

And I think I can answer that one with a certain degree of confidence:

A mum does not shamelessly disrespect her daughter by repeatedly violating her boundaries, invading her privacy and betraying her trust. For example, a mum does not read her teenage daughter's diary and then beat her up and call her a slut. 

A mum does not – EVER – put her own needs before those of her child. A mum does not judge, scorn and belittle her child.

A mum does not hit her child regularly, frenziedly, and call the violence “discipline”. (My earliest childhood memory is being slapped repeatedly, and hard, across the back of my legs because I had wet myself, after having asked, several times, for my mother to take me to the toilet. I was barely four years old.) 

A mum does not – EVER – tell her children that she wishes they’d never been born or do or say ANYTHING that might give them that impression. 

However much she might feel justified in doing so, a mum does not disparage and emasculate her children’s father, over and over and over again, in front of those children, challenging them to disagree with her furious diatribes, daring them to take sides.

A mum does not encourage hostility between her children by gossiping to one sibling about the other (triangulation) under the hypocritical pretence of being 'concerned peacekeeper', nor does a mum ensure that the precious sibling bond and solidarity her children once shared becomes irredeemably broken by giving one child a huge sum of money and the other... nothing.

A mum does not EVER use any of the following words to describe her daughter: useless, hopeless, pathetic, repulsive, stupid, lazy, fat, 'a disappointment'... 'a slut'

A mum does not EVER slam her daughters to other people, but particularly not to her daughter's friends and boyfriends.

A mum does not make herself emotionally unavailable and physically absent (or worse, become more spiteful) during the most important or traumatic times of her daughter's life: parental divorce, heartbreak, choosing a university, leaving home, crucial exams, health scares, pregnancies, miscarriages, the breakdown of a long-term relationship, the births of her babies.

A mum does not insult and lie about her daughter to others in order to gain support for her tenuous claims of victimhood.

Finally, and I really wish I didn't have to state this one at all, but a mum does not ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, derive any sort of pleasure or satisfaction from her daughter's misery, pain and misfortunes.

See my blog post: What is "good parenting" anyway? Part Two: Fathers

Recommended reading: 

"Why Love Matters: how affection shapes a baby's brain" by Sue Gerhardt

"How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk" by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlich