What is not “good-enough” parenting?

Good-enough parenting is NOT severe abuse. That is the type of parenting that would rise to the level that warrants a child protection response and removal from the parent’s care by the state. It indicates a strong inability to look after a child’s physical and emotional needs.

In the UK, a child is defined as a person under the age of 18¹. The policies and procedures guiding professionals in Family Court and Local Authorities in their work of child protection, are based on several laws but the one with the biggest impact is the Children Act 1989².

Section 47(1) of the Children Act 1989, gave local authorities the power to make enquiries to decide if any action is required to safeguard or promote the child’s welfare where there was reasonable cause to suspect a child is “suffering or likely to suffer significant harm”³. Therefore the threshold for removal of a child from a parent in family courts or by the local authority is significant harm that has already happened, or at risk of happening in future.

Section 31(9) of the Children Act 1989 describes harm as “ill-treatment or the impairment of health or development”. So any behaviour that significantly impacts a child’s mental or physical health or their future physical, intellectual, emotional social or behavioural development, is likely to require removal of a child from a parent. This includes any harm suffered by the child from “seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another”⁴.

Government guidelines on child safeguarding explain that abuse arises from causing harm.

A form of maltreatment of a child. Somebody may abuse or neglect a child by inflicting harm, or by failing to act to prevent harm. Harm can include ill treatment that is not physical as well as the impact of witnessing ill treatment of others.^{5 p. 154}

Parenting that rises to the levels of significant harm, would be classed as abuse. There are 4 main categories of abuse and these align to categories in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) under section QE82 Personal history of maltreatment⁶:

Physical (code QE82.0 in ICD)
Sexual (code QE82.1 in ICD)
Neglect (code QE82.4 in ICD) and
Emotional (code QE82.3 in ICD as psychological abuse).

This last category, emotional abuse, is sometimes referred to or used interchangeably with psychological abuse. There is an element of emotional abuse in all other forms of abuse e.g. a child who is beaten, is not likely to feel loved.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has listed examples of different behaviours that they describe as abuse⁷. Government guidance uses the following definitions:

Physical Abuse – A form of abuse which may involve hitting, shaking, throwing, poisoning, burning, or scalding, drowning, suffocating, or otherwise causing physical harm to a child. Physical harm may also be caused when a parent or carer fabricates the symptoms of, or deliberately induces, illness in a child.⁵

Sexual abuse – Involves forcing or enticing a child or young person to take part in sexual activities, not necessarily involving a high level of violence, whether or not the child is aware of what is happening. The activities may involve physical contact, including assault by penetration (for example, rape or oral sex) or non-penetrative acts, such as masturbation, kissing, rubbing, and touching outside of clothing. They may also include non-contact activities, such as involving children in looking at, or in the production of, sexual images, watching sexual activities, encouraging children to behave in sexually inappropriate ways, or grooming a child in preparation for abuse. Sexual abuse can take place online, and technology can be used to facilitate offline abuse. Sexual abuse is not solely perpetrated by adult males. Women can also commit acts of sexual abuse, as can other children.⁵

Neglect – The persistent failure to meet a child’s basic physical and/or psychological needs, likely to result in the serious impairment of the child’s health or development. Neglect may occur during pregnancy as a result of maternal substance abuse. Once a child is born, neglect may involve a parent or carer failing to:

provide adequate food, clothing, and shelter (including exclusion from home or abandonment)

protect a child from physical and emotional harm or danger

ensure adequate supervision (including the use of inadequate caregivers)

ensure access to appropriate medical care or treatment

provide suitable education It may also include neglect of, or unresponsiveness to, a child’s basic emotional needs.⁵

Emotional abuse – The persistent emotional maltreatment of a child so as to cause severe and persistent adverse effects on the child’s emotional development. It may involve conveying to a child that they are worthless or unloved, inadequate, or valued only insofar as they meet the needs of another person. It may include not giving the child opportunities to express their views, deliberately silencing them, or making fun of what they say or how they communicate. It may feature age or developmentally inappropriate expectations being imposed on children. These may include interactions that are beyond a child’s developmental capability, as well as overprotection and limitation of exploration and learning, or preventing the child participating in normal social interaction. It may involve seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another. It may involve serious bullying (including cyber bullying), causing children frequently to feel frightened or in danger, or the exploitation or corruption of children. Some level of emotional abuse is involved in all types of maltreatment of a child, though it may occur alone.⁵

It is clear from the list and definitions that some parenting behaviour has a greater capacity for creating significant harm than others and that some require more context in the child’s wider experience of being parented. In addition, despite these lists and definitions, there is no documented, agreed standard for how to calculate significant harm. That being said, many would agree that the following causes significant harm:

sexual abuse of any kind.
any physical abuse that causes injury to the body, including but not limited to, beatings by hands, fists, objects, smacking that leaves bruises or marks, suffocating a child, poisoning a child, shaking a child, burning a child with a cigarette and even causing the child to go through invasive treatments they don’t really need.
neglect examples of which include but are not limited to, where a child is underfed, unclean to the point where they are at risk of disease, tied to a chair or caged, not allowed to develop the skills they need to survive, left alone for long periods of time or in dangerous situations.

Fewer, are likely to express examples of psychological abuse that they believe cause significant harm, despite the fact that child psychological abuse is as harmful as sexual or physical abuse⁸.

A single severe incident can lead to significant harm, as can a combination of less severe but more frequent incidents of harm. When parenting is not good-enough i.e. when it causes significant harm, it can lead to developmental problems for a child which will lead to difficulty in relationships outside the family unit.

As we explained in the article on Attachment Strategies⁹, different levels of harm create different levels of real/perceived danger and the child will do their best to adapt a strategy to alter their parent’s behaviour. For children who experience consistent harm, this may start off with the child inhibiting their emotions, leading to creation of a “false self” that puts on a show of perfection for others in line with what people expect, to developing full blown delusions. It might cause children who experience unpredictable parenting to act out in angry and harmful ways. In worse cases harm can lead to a child’s death, either through exposure to abusive caregivers or through seeking escape/rescue through the child’s own risky behaviour e.g. cutting, drugs, sexual experiences etc.

So the concept of “good-enough” doesn’t mean condoning significantly harmful behaviour which rises to the level of abuse. As explained in Does “Perfect Parenting” Exist?¹⁰, good-enough parenting doesn’t mean perfect parenting either. This is because it doesn’t exist in reality and it is not required to achieve successful child development. In addition, as suggested in the definition of emotional abuse above, parents striving for perfection, expecting too much from their child when they are not developmentally ready or when the child doesn’t share the same desires, may also be at risk of causing significant harm.

Many parents reading the lists provided by the NSPCC and the definitions used by government will be worried that a single incident or rare incidents of behaviours that cause lower levels of harm would class them as an “abuser”. Not all harm is equal, some parenting mistakes do not reach levels of significant harm. We will look at these areas of grey in future articles.

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