Watch a parent and a baby closely and something surprising shows up: they are out of sync most of the time. Roughly 70% of the interaction is a small miss.
The baby looks away and the parent misreads it. The baby fusses and the parent offers the wrong thing. Over and over, all day.
Ed Tronick's research found that none of this damages anything. What builds a secure child is a parent who keeps coming back. Miss, notice, repair — and then miss again.
The repair carries the whole lesson. Each time it happens, the baby learns that closeness can break and be mended, and that someone will return. A child who has lived through a thousand small ruptures and a thousand returns grows up expecting the return.
Which takes the pressure off an impossible standard and puts it somewhere a tired human can actually reach.
We were never meant to be a parent who never gets it wrong. Only one who always comes back.