Parenting worries
19 March 2026
Why attachment theory can make parents worry — and why it needn't.
Attachment theory has given us an invaluable clinical lens. But its popular translation — the language of "attachment wounds," anxious and avoidant types — can leave parents feeling that their child's psychological fate rests entirely on their shoulders.
There's another way to look at it.
A significant part of what happens between parent and child isn't a product of parenting style at all. It's structural — an inevitable feature of the parent-child relationship itself.
Here's the dilemma every child faces: the source of all goodness, their primary caregiver, is sometimes absent. Early on, the child begins to sense that something else — a partner, work, other passions — draws that person away. If this anxiety is metabolised successfully, something quietly important happens: the child is spared the narcissistic trap of believing it is the only thing worthy of love.
But some anxiety around absence always remains. And as the child adapts — developing a degree of psychic independence — a new anxiety emerges to take its place. Perhaps closeness itself is threatening? Perhaps the caregiver's proximity and demands encroach on that hard-won autonomy?
It becomes a permanent oscillation: are they too close, or too far away?
This is not primarily a story about what parents do wrong. It's a structural condition of the parent-child dyad — the unavoidable tension between need and separateness that every child must, in their own way, navigate.
Which is where Winnicott's liberating concept of good-enough parenting becomes so important. The goal was never perfection — and not only because perfection is impossible. A perfectly attuned caregiver, one who anticipated every need and was never absent, would actually deprive the child of the very frustrations through which psychic independence is built. It is precisely the gap — manageable, tolerable — that does the developmental work.
Parents don't need to get it exactly right. They need to be good enough. And good enough, it turns out, is exactly what's called for.