The power in being good enough

The Good Enough Teacher: What Winnicott Can Teach Us About the Classroom

I loved teaching but it took me a while to embrace the concept of being good enough. Not good enough but good enough. What I mean is to have boundaries, to maintain a work-life balance, to work smarter rather than harder and to have a personal wellbeing target on your annual appraisal which was more meaningful than ‘go for a ten minute lunchtime walk once a week’. (This was a real target!)

A lifetime ago, when I was a young Mum at home with her three very small children I stumbled across a copy of D W Winnicott’s book The Good Enough Mother and it changed my life. Some time before I had been gifted Gina Ford’s The Contented Little Baby (AKA Infant Boot Camp) I love a routine but this one read like a survival manual written by a drill sergeant and so I had successfully ignored other parenting manuals until I came across Winnicott in a charity book shop.

Winnicott offered relief. Guess what? You don't have to be a perfect parent. In fact, he argued, you shouldn't try to be. What children need is "good enough”; someone who meets their needs closely at first, then gradually, tolerably, fails to meet them, giving children room to discover their own resources.

Like all good ideas it's simple but with large implications. And it turns out that it translates remarkably well from home to school.

What Winnicott Actually Meant

Winnicott's insight was that a baby needs near-total attunement at first. A responsive parent who anticipates hunger, discomfort, and distress almost before the baby feels them. But if this perfect responsiveness continued indefinitely, something would go wrong. The child would never learn that the world contains gaps, delays, and limits and would never develop the inner resources to handle them. In an age of helicopter parenting, children fail to grow into fully-functioning independent members of society.

The "good enough" parent does something crucial: (s)he lets small frustrations occur, at a pace the child can bear. The comfort isn't instant. In these tolerable failures, the child begins to develop what Winnicott called a sense of "me" and "not-me", an independent self, capable of managing disappointment, imagining solutions, and eventually standing on its own.

Too much failure is neglect; too little is smothering. "Good enough" is the productive middle.

From Home to School

Teachers, like parents, are susceptible to two opposite temptations. One is the fantasy of being the perfect teacher, endlessly patient, infinitely resourceful, able to prevent every student from ever struggling or failing. The other is burnout-driven withdrawal, where a teacher gives up on meeting students' needs at all. They are in survival-mode.

Winnicott's framework suggests a third way, and it has genuine benefits for both sides of the classroom.

For teachers it gives permission to be imperfect

It reduces burnout. Teaching is one of the most emotionally demanding professions precisely because it invites the fantasy of total responsiveness for every student, every day. A "good enough teacher" model gives permission to say I cannot anticipate and solve every struggle, and I shouldn't try to. This isn't lowering standards; it's recognizing that a sustainable, present teacher serves students better than an exhausted, ever-available one.

It reframes mistakes as pedagogically useful. A teacher who fumbles an explanation, admits uncertainty, or doesn't immediately swoop in to fix a struggling student isn't failing at their job. They may be doing it well. Small, survivable frustrations are where learning actually happens.

It clarifies the real goal. The good enough teacher isn't aiming for flawless delivery. They're aiming to provide a reliable "holding environment", Winnicott's term for a space safe and stable enough that a person can tolerate difficulty within it. That's a different, more attainable, and more valuable target than perfection.

For students it brings room to grow

It builds genuine resilience. Students who are rescued from every difficulty, don't get the chance to discover that they can survive not knowing, not immediately succeeding, or being a bit stuck. Productive struggle, held within a safe relationship, is where self-efficacy is built.

It fosters authentic independence. Just as Winnicott's infant develops a sense of self partly because the parent isn't perfectly attuned, students develop as thinkers partly because the teacher doesn't hand them every answer. The gap between a question and its answer is where reasoning happens.

It models a healthy relationship with failure. A classroom where the teacher is visibly, comfortably good-enough, rather than performing infallibility teaches students something valuable by example. Competence doesn't require perfection, and that mistakes are recoverable, not catastrophic.

It prevents learned helplessness. My particular bugbear. Over-scaffolding, like over-parenting, can quietly communicate to a child that they are not capable of managing on their own. Calibrated, tolerable challenge communicates the opposite.

The Practical Middle Ground

None of this is an argument for neglect or under-preparation. The good enough teacher still plans carefully, still notices when a student is struggling in ways that aren't productive, and still steps in when frustration becomes overwhelming. The skill is calibration, not withdrawal.

In practice, this might look like:

• Resisting the urge to immediately correct or rescue a student who is momentarily stuck,and instead waiting a beat to see what they do with the discomfort.

• Being honest when you don't know something, rather than performing certainty.

• Letting a lesson go slightly imperfectly rather than over-engineering every minute for control.

• Trusting that a stable, warm, mostly reliable presence matters more than flawless execution.

Why This Matters Now

In an era of hyper-optimized lesson plans, constant feedback loops, and pressure on teachers to be all things to all students, Winnicott's idea feels countercultural. It suggests that the answer to educational anxiety isn't more perfection. It's a better kind of good-enoughness: present, warm, reliable, and comfortable with the productive gaps that make growth possible.

The best teachers, like the best parents, aren't the ones who never let their students struggle. They're the ones who make struggling safe.