You don't have to be a perfect parent. You have to be one who comes back.

In healthy families, parents are perfectly "in tune" with their children only about a third of the time. The rest is mismatch, missing each other — and then repair, the coming-back-into-connection.

Here's the part that changes everything: the repair is where security gets built. Which means the thing we fear most — that we rupture, that we lose our patience, that we get it wrong — is not what harms children. Unrepaired rupture harms children. Repaired rupture builds them.

So you don't have to be a calm, organised, never-overwhelmed parent. No such parent exists. You have to be a parent who comes back — warm, sorry, and loving — again and again.

That, you can be. Starting today.