What is a good parent?

“Is it a good school?” If you’re a parent, I trust you’ve heard this question — or asked it yourself — more times than you can count. It rolls off our tongues with ease, belying its problematic premise.  Even during the so-called racial reckoning of 2020, we did not publicly rethink how we talk about schools or what we mean by a good one.

In 2021, the writer and researcher Conor Williams published an op-ed on the education news website The 74 with a headline that puts it bluntly: “White Parents Horrified by George Floyd Video Still Go to Great Lengths to Keep Their Children in Segregated Schools.” In my own conversations with parents, I’ve noticed that “good” schools almost always share one unspoken trait: they concentrate racial and economic privilege. We conflate proximity to whiteness with goodness. Once you see that, it’s hard to unsee.

When my son was very young, I decided he would attend the Title 1 school in our Brooklyn neighborhood that serves mostly Black and brown children from public housing — a “4 out of 10” according to GreatSchools.org. It felt like one small thing I could do to not further a very big problem. New York magazine’s Kathryn Jezer-Morton explains the reasoning behind such a choice:

“If we want more equality, we have to accept that anxiously hoarding opportunities for our children is not the way to get there. We have to be willing to cede control, to loosen our grip on our sense of entitlement, and to trust that justice means sometimes sacrificing resources for the greater good—even when it comes to our own families.” 

When deciding to “sacrifice” some resources, I understood it as a choice that might reduce harm to society. The ‘greater good’ narrative focuses on what my son might miss out on. It’s true that his school doesn’t have all the extras that wealthier schools provide: consistent art and music classes, abundant extracurricular activities, updated facilities, or a state-of-the-art playground. But it misses everything my child would gain as a member of his school community. Over time, it’s become clear that sending him to our so-called “failing” neighborhood school — the one many privileged parents around here avoid — has been really good for him. 

It turns out that a childhood defined by control, hoarding, and entitlement is not only corrosive to the collective — it’s harmful to individual kids. As Jezer-Morton also writes:

 “When we raise our kids with too much control — of their moods, their consumption, their safety — we are making it harder for them to transform and change. We get too good at defining what it means to be safe and happy for them — definitions of which are in fact thrilling and mysterious in their expansiveness. The walls close in.” 

Children aren’t meant to be raised in a bubble. We shouldn’t need research to prove that, but we have it. One recent study found that students with overprotective parents were more likely to develop anxiety during the transition to college. In other words, the more we shield our kids from discomfort, the less equipped they are to handle it later.

Children are, quite incredibly, born with everything they need to meet the world as it is. Babies are naturally curious explorers, built to gather information and slowly make sense of the unfamiliar planet they’ve just arrived on. When we smooth every edge, we hold them back and diminish their innate durability. Children are meant to encounter difference, surprise, and the unfamiliar. Resilience grows from working through new and sometimes challenging experiences. Allowing for that asks something of us, as parents: to trust more and control less.

I doubt the future will look kindly on this era of intensive parenting. Inequality is staggering, and the stakes feel impossibly high, and it’s no wonder so many of us are scrambling to give our kids an edge. But snagging a spot in the “best” program — the progressive, child-led, well-resourced public Montessori 3-K — only offers a false sense of security.  If anything, the scarcity and competition surrounding those programs only deepen the very real threats that massive inequality poses to all of our children’s safety.

Sending my child to our Title 1 neighborhood school has helped me reflect on what is in my control and what isn’t — and, hopefully, to find a healthier relationship to both. I believe I’m a better parent to my son because of this. 

I love my son’s school. The teachers and administrators do excellent work, often with far too few resources, to make every student feel seen. The school serves children across different cultures, languages, abilities, and immigration statuses, and it consistently affirms each child’s humanity. But, like all schools, it’s not perfect. Sometimes a child or a class loses play time as punishment for specific behavior, which is often “not listening,” in my son’s telling. While I don’t agree with this — it’s not how we handle discipline at home — I don’t see it as an existential threat.

Instead, I see it as healthy for my son to encounter adults who do things differently from me. I don’t need to control it or fix it. It’s an excellent check on how much influence my way of doing things has over him. 

The Atlantic’s Stephanie H. Murray writes in The Isolation of Intensive Parenting: 

“Inevitably, building a village means developing trust. A village can provide one of the greatest gifts that anyone can offer parents: the reassurance that the path to raising healthy, well-adjusted kids isn’t as narrow as you think.”

Trust broadens the path. Control narrows it.

Letting go of what I don’t and shouldn’t control clarifies what I do control: how I show up for my child. Instead of chasing ‘the best’ or trying to reshape the spaces he’s in, I save my energy to offer him something more important: emotional safety at home.

In child development, emotional safety refers to the felt sense of security children experience when they know their primary caregiver will respond to their needs with consistency, empathy, and acceptance. It means children can express a full range of feelings without fear of judgment or rejection, and it provides the foundation for secure attachment, healthy self-esteem, and resilience. Research in developmental psychology shows that when children feel emotionally safe, their nervous systems are better able to regulate, which supports exploration, learning, and social connection.

Children don’t need a perfect school. I’m not sure such a thing exists — and even if it did, I’m not convinced we should want frictionless, perfectly tailored environments. What children do need is a primary caregiver who is a secure base from which they can safely explore the world. Our children need us to be their steady container for the wide range of emotions that come with being human in an imperfect world, because that’s the reality we’re all tasked with.

When my son comes home from school complaining about too many worksheets or not enough time for choice activities, I’m not above the urge to write a persuasive email full of research on how kids his age learn best through self-initiated play. But instead of letting that impulse take over and exhaust my energy, I refocus toward simply being with him in his feelings. That means trying to stay present with his experience without trying to fix or change it. It’s sitting with what is — the simple reality that he is upset — and recognizing that feeling upset is a normal part of life. I might say, “That sounds hard. Tell me more.” I might wonder aloud with him about why things happened the way they did, and how it affected him and those around him.

What I don’t want is for my response to inadvertently teach him that discomfort is dangerous or that disappointment must always be avoided. I want him to know — deep in his body — that struggle and upset are temporary and survivable, when given the time and space to be fully felt.

Other adults and teachers can (and should) nurture children in this way. But it’s the steady emotional safety of a primary caregiver that gives kids the deep trust they need to venture into the world. If we want them to trust, we have to trust.

This work isn’t easy. It asks us to calm our own nervous system, notice when we’re projecting our fears onto our kids, and let curiosity replace the impulse to control. From that more grounded place, we can better discern whether something is truly a problem for our child that requires intervention, or simply uncomfortable for us.

It helps to remember that our children are whole, separate people. They don’t think, feel, or experience the world exactly as we do. Standardized testing might trigger existential dread in me, but for my child, it seems like a mildly unpleasant event that comes and goes. He accepts where I fret. Moments like this remind me how much we can learn from our kids if we slow down, stay present, and observe rather than react. 

Perhaps testing will be a real problem for your child and require action. I’m not advocating for a hands-off approach — I’m suggesting there’s self-reflection to be done before we start trying to manage what happens at school.

At a time when children’s mental health is faltering and inequality is rising, we need to rethink our priorities as parents.  Overcontrolling, optimization-focused parenting undermines young people’s mental health and contributes to widening social inequality, as privileged families concentrate resources on their own children at the expense of the collective.

I believe there are paths that honor both our child’s well-being and the well-being of the collective. I reject the idea that family decisions rooted in collective good amount to “sacrificing my child on the altar of social justice.” In my experience, the things that support the collective are not in conflict with supporting my child. But it does require letting go of control and, instead, trusting that the world can hold my child — and that my child can hold the world.

I’m betting on the long-term benefits of foregoing the bubble and joining the struggle.