The Good Enough Parent by Bruno Bettelheim
Published 1987 · 512 pages · 70,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Good Enough Parent to read?
The Good Enough Parent scores 45 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Psychoanalytic vocabulary made accessible for a general reader.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Psychoanalytic concepts grounded in parenting scenarios.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Sustained argument illustrated with clinical and developmental examples.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Argument is direct, with clinical cases as illustration.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Analytical rather than symbolic register.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Dry skepticism toward the parenting advice industry.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Prescriptions are clear, if deliberately modest.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Eighteen chapters organized by aspect of parent-child relationship.
How The Good Enough Parent is regarded
The Good Enough Parent holds a literary regard score of 67 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.