Most parents love their children, and it would seem terrible to admit that you would be better off if someone you loved didn’t exist. More than that, you genuinely prefer a world with your kids in it. This can put parents in the interesting predicament of desiring a state that doesn’t make them as happy as the alternative.

Winnicott’s crucial insight was that the parents’ agony was coming from a particular place: excessive hope. Their despair was a consequence of a cruel and counterproductive perfectionism. To help them reduce this, Winnicott developed a charming phrase: ‘the good enough parent’. No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pre

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

Having a child, a son, Felix M——had thought would settle him and end his wandering habits: his endless circuitous perambulations penetrating certain dives and dens of depravity which are all but unknown and invisible to the general culture.