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Chapter 6 93 Noddings and Stadlen, whose (feminist) work focuses on mothers and maternal caring. 17 I am particularly impressed by the language of British child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. The theme of his 1964 book The child, the family and the outside world can be summarised in his own words as ‘it is when a mother trusts her own judgment that she is at her best’, 18 and ‘in the long run, what we need is mothers, as well as fathers, who have found out how to believe in themselves’. Both the content of what Winnicott argues for (his emphasis on trust) and the way in which he puts that forward as his most important claim (the language he chooses) are in line with what is argued for in chapter 4 and in this discussion, which makes it a good example of what I mean by using a different language. Another example is how Winnicott opens his book by giving a description of the ‘ordinary mother’: I am certainly not putting forward the view that it is essential for the young mother to read books about child care. This would imply that she is more self-conscious about her state than she is. She needs protection and information, and she needs the best that medical science can offer in the way of bodily care. She needs a doctor and a nurse whom she knows, and in whom she has confidence. She also needs the devotion of a husband, and satisfying sexual experiences. But she does not necessarily need to be told in advance what being a mother feels like. One of my main ideas is this, that the best mothering comes out of natural self-reliance and there is a distinction to be made between the things that may come naturally and the things that have to be learnt, and I try to distinguish between these so that what comes naturally may not be spoiled. 19 The vocabulary Winnicott uses here, by for example writing about what a mother needs as opposed to what a mother ought to do , and the emphasis he puts on not telling the mother what she has to do, has a ‘soothing’ rather than a ‘worrying’ effect on the reader (particularly when the reader is a parent). This is similar to how I described that the difference between ‘hope’ and ‘having expectations’ has both substantive and discursive consequences/implications. Winnicott does not refrain from arguing what is best (ideal) for mothers, and he aims high, but somehow he is able to leave space for parents to have their own ideas, without becoming a relativist in the sense that 17 Winnicott 1964, Ruddick 1989; Noddings 1984; Stadlen 2004, all cited in Ramaekers and Suissa 2012. Aspects of these accounts are also vulnerable to criticism, for example the idea of ‘natural’ knowledge of parenting, which both Noddings and Stadlen defend (albeit in different ways). Ramaekers and Suissa argue that what is ‘natural’ cannot be separated from what is cultural and from what is moral. 18 Ibid., p. 25. 19 Winnicott 1964, p. 9.