Introducing the “Good Enough Summer”

Summer in Westport is spectacular. The beaches are beautiful. The children are tan and busy. The hydrangeas are practically 3D popping out of the Instagram grids. And somewhere between sailing lessons at Longshore, club lunches, and backyard parties, a quiet but corrosive question takes up residence in the back of your mind: Am I doing enough? Are we enough?

Westport is a town of high achievers, high standards, and extraordinarily high visibility. It is also, in my clinical experience, a town quietly exhausted by its own expectations.

Comparison is not new. Psychologist Leon Festinger first described our hardwired tendency to evaluate ourselves against others in his landmark 1954 Social Comparison Theory, arguing that self-evaluation through comparison is a fundamental feature of human psychology, not a flaw. But social media has transformed what was once an occasional discomfort into a constant, curated assault. We are no longer comparing ourselves to the handful of neighbors we happen to see; we are comparing ourselves to hundreds of carefully filtered highlight reels, updated in real time, on a device that never leaves our hands.

The research is unambiguous. Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media are twice as likely to experience poor mental health outcomes, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory, and young women are disproportionately affected. But adults are not exempt. Upward social comparison consistently triggers feelings of inadequacy, lower self-esteem, and emotional distress. Research applying Social Self Preservation Theory has found that perceived threats to our social standing trigger measurable increases in cortisol alongside feelings of shame and diminished self-worth. The sideline conversation at weekend sports, the parking lot exchange about summer programs, the silent comparison of bodies at the beach: these are not trivial social discomforts; they’re biological stress events.

And our children are watching. Kids as young as eight are making social comparisons based on what they see peers posting, internalizing silent verdicts about whose summer is more exciting, whose family travels further. The mother who skips the beach because she is not ready to be seen in a swimsuit. The father ashamed that his child’s summer looks modest compared to the sports clinics filling his feed. The child who comes home from a perfectly lovely week at day camp and announces, unprompted, that everyone else went somewhere better. These costs run through entire families.

Pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott introduced the concept of the “good enough mother” in the 1950s, arguing that children don’t need perfect parenting; they need present, attuned, good enough parenting. I want to borrow that concept for this summer. A good enough summer does not require sleepaway camp or a European itinerary or a body you feel proud of at the beach. It requires presence. Connection. The kind of ordinary, unoptimized time together that children actually remember. Research on childhood wellbeing consistently shows that kids recall how they felt, not where they went.

This summer, instead of asking how do we compare, ask: what is actually enough for us? The answer requires something comparison makes nearly impossible: genuine contact with your own values, your own rhythms, your own version of a life well-lived. Not the one that generates the most likes. The one that generates the most meaning.

At LiftWell Health, we work with adolescents and adults navigating anxiety, perfectionism, and the exhaustion of high-functioning lives that look fine from the outside and feel depleted from the inside. If this summer is feeling heavier than it should, you are not alone, and you are not broken. The good enough summer is not a consolation prize. It might just be the most satisfying one you’ve ever had.

Mary Dobson, LMFT, CEDS is the founder and CEO of LiftWell Health, a behavioral health practice treating all ages and genders in Westport, CT specializing in eating disorders, anxiety, OCD, and depression. Learn more at liftwellhealth.com.