The "good-enough mother" is a mother whose conscious and unconscious physical and emotional attunement to her baby adapts to her baby appropriately at differing stages of infancy, thus allowing an optimal environment for the healthy establishment of a separate being, eventually capable of mature object-relations.

Evolving slowly, and underpinning Donald Winnicott's theory of early integration, personalization and object-relating, this concept includes the "ordinary devoted mother" (1949), and "the good-enough environment". It first appears clearly in Winnicott's "Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-Soma" (1949).

Winnicott's emphasis on the particular need for maternal sensitivity begins in his paper "The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation" (1941), and is referred to repeatedly in his work. His statement, "There is no such thing as a baby" implies that without a mother, an infant cannot exist. He describes "primary...