Good Enough: What a Dystopian Novel Reveals About Modern Parenting Culture

I just happen to be writing this the day after Mother’s Day, which feels like exactly the right moment to talk about what we actually ask of mothers.

Jessamine Chan's novel The School for Good Mothers offers an unflinching take on the state of parenting. The protagonist, Frida, has been deemed an unfit mother by the state and sent to an institution for rehabilitation. Her progress is tracked through brain scans, heart rate monitors, facial expression analysis, and a word counter embedded in her practice doll. At one point, the school reviews her neural pathways, looking for flickering in the regions associated with empathy and care. They find muted signals. Combined with data on her pulse, temperature, blinking patterns, and touch, they conclude that her capacity for maternal feeling is limited.

She is, by their measure, not good enough.

The novel is dystopian fiction. But the logic it's satirizing — that parenting can be measured, evaluated, and optimized; that the right data will reveal whether you're doing it correctly — isn't invented. It's an exaggerated version of something already present in how we talk about raising children.

When science becomes a checklist

Take language development. Research has long documented that adults naturally adjust their speech around small children — higher pitch, slower pace, simpler vocabulary, exaggerated expression — and that this instinctive shift supports language acquisition. They even gave it a name: motherese, later updated to the more egalitarian "parentese." Other research found that children exposed to larger vocabularies through conversation and reading develop stronger language skills and better school performance. Descriptive findings, both: here is something that happens, and here is what we observe about its effects.

Somewhere along the way, description became prescription. Understanding how children learn language turned into a performance checklist: use a higher pitch, vary your intonation, shorten your sentences, narrate your day. Track your ratio of questions to statements. Reward curiosity with "developmentally appropriate" responses. In Chan's novel, the absurdity is made literal — mothers are coached on vocal register, reminded to "relax your jaw," evaluated on whether their motherese sounds authentic enough. A word counter tallies their daily output.

What so often occurs is that, with the best of intentions, we take research out of context and convert observation into prescription. Science notices or correlates or describes and we turn that knowledge into a checklist. The instinct, the relationship, the natural responsiveness that the research was documenting in the first place — all of it gets replaced by a performance. And then we wonder why it feels hollow, or why parents feel perpetually behind.

The language development example is not an isolated one. We've done this with attachment, with screen time, with nutrition, with sleep. A research finding — nuanced, qualified, population-level — gets flattened into a rule. Follow the rule and your child thrives. Deviate and you've failed. And with that approach, (at least) two things happen. One, the prescriptions land hardest on mothers. And two, the complexity that makes the finding meaningful disappears entirely.

The burden falls unevenly

The School for Good Mothers is also, pointedly, about mothers. Not parents — mothers. Other than the security guards, the institution Frida enters is populated entirely by women. The surveillance, the judgment, the optimization protocols — they land on her specifically, as they tend to in real life.

Chan literalizes this divide by contrasting the mothers’ experience with that of a group of fathers. There are clear differences in the way they are treated, judged, and ultimately, forgiven (or not). Fathers are largely exempt from the same level of scrutiny — celebrated for basic involvement, held to a different standard entirely. The impossible parenting performance is, disproportionately, a maternal performance.

The difference between knowing and doing

The checklist culture has another effect beyond making parents feel perpetually behind: it has turned parenting into an intellectual exercise. We've absorbed so much information about child development — optimal practices, research findings, expert guidance — that we've started to conflate knowing about parenting with actually doing it.

One of the novel's sharpest passages involves a counselor telling Frida that she possesses the intelligence to parent — but perhaps not the temperament. Frida's response cuts to the heart of it: "But I am a parent. I am Harriet's parent."

There's something important here about how we've intellectualized parenting. We can discuss attachment styles and executive function and the importance of unstructured play. And yet knowing about parenting is not the same as real parents raising their real children. 

Temperament matters. Personality matters. The particular texture of a relationship between a specific parent and a specific child matters. None of that reduces to a score. A parent's capacity to show up for their child is not meaningfully captured by their neural pathways or their word count or their blinking patterns.

Straight lines that don't exist

Near the end of the novel, Frida reflects: "Life would have been different if her parents had held her, but she won't blame them. It wasn't a straight line from there to here."

This is perhaps the quietest and most important line in the book. Because so much of contemporary parenting culture is built on the implicit premise that there are straight lines — that what you do or don't do as a parent maps directly onto who your child becomes. The research doesn't actually support this. Development is shaped by a constellation of factors: temperament, peer relationships, community, circumstance, chance. Parents matter enormously — but not in the deterministic, every-move-has-consequences way that modern parenting culture suggests.

The straight line premise is what makes the surveillance in Chan's novel feel logical within its own world. If every interaction is consequential, then every interaction must be monitored and optimized. If a parent's temperament directly determines a child's outcomes, then temperament must be assessed and corrected.

What actually matters

Without revealing everything, given the dystopian nature of the novel, it isn’t surprising that it ends without easy resolution. What Chan leaves us with is the persistent, human fact of Frida's love for her daughter — imperfect, complicated, real.

That's not a checklist item. It doesn't show up in the brain scan data. It can't be tallied or scored or optimized.

But you can't optimize your way to perfect parenting, nor should we want to. That’s just the thing about “good enough” parenting. What kids actually need from us isn’t a formula but our presence, connection – and our imperfect realness.