Parenting is enlivening but it is also exhausting; for parents it can be difficult to disentangle exhilaration from enervation.

Seeking reassurance during that first year of parenting two, I turned to the work of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. He is perhaps best known for his concept of the “good-enough mother,” the caregiver who, through sometimes failing and frustrating their child, ultimately facilitates the development of the child’s ability to co

Kids are no longer allowed to drop out of school in order to work, and the world now requires more and more schooling to succeed. What’s more, parents feel a great need to protect their children. Many, especially in the middle class, have waited forever to have them. They fear for their physical safety and economic security.

A problem can be fixed, but a true limitation requires adjustment of expectations and acceptance of an imperfect son or daughter. Parents feel hope if their restless child is actually hyperactive, their dreamy child has ADD, their poor math student has a learning disorder, their shy child has a social phobia, their wrongdoing son has “intermittent