Parenting Right From the Start. Vanessa Lapointe

on our child’s growth, we can absolutely right ourselves in the face of challenges that might otherwise thwart our well-intentioned journey.

       Nature Does Not Demand Perfection

      Knowing how essential connection is for a child’s development, I can understand how new parents might feel overwhelmed or uneasy. This kind of commitment is not to be taken lightly. But guess what? Nature does not demand perfection. Parents do not have to keep up the connection dance constantly and flawlessly. Nature is far savvier. Child development experts coined the term “the good enough parent”⁵ to describe a parent who has engaged in the dance of connection well enough that the child has received what is needed, even if it wasn’t perfectly delivered all the time.

      In his work, Dr. Tronick showed that parents are perfectly in sync emotionally with their children only about 30 percent of the time. The rest of the time, parents are either falling out of sync or finding their way back to being in sync. He calls this falling in and out “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” The good is when a parent is on top of the reciprocity of the serve-and-return dance. The bad is when a parent has dropped the ball but is working their way back to being in sync. Tronick believes that this falling out of sync is not the worst thing that can happen because the child does learn that reparation and resolution are possible and real. The ugly is when the parent connection is entirely absent and there is no move toward repair. In this scenario, the child is stuck in a horrible place of disconnectedness.

      Bear in mind that when a child has a relationship connection with more than one key caregiver—a mom and a dad, for example—the flavour of each connection is specific to the individual relationship. This means that a child will have a specific connection relationship with mom, a different one with dad, and additional connection relationships with any other caregivers. No one relationship will be quite like the other. However, though the other relationships certainly matter, the one that is most intense and most frequent will be the front-row influencer in terms of the child’s development.

      And here’s another thing to keep in mind: it really does only take one! Many parents come to me full of angst about an absent, uninvolved, or perhaps incapable co-parent, concerned about how this might affect their children. Yes, there will be an emotional impact of some kind. But if a child has at least one adult who is full of invitation for that child to exist, who is delighted to see them when they walk into a room, who has a twinkle in their eye and love in their heart for them, who will absolutely have their back through thick and thin, this is a child who will be okay. Resilience will abound and that child will thrive exactly as they were intended to.

      Eventually other caregivers will be invited into your child’s inner circle—here is the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel for all exhausted parents out there! Sometime around the age of two years, your child will start to develop meaningful relationships with others with whom she has ongoing connection experiences. As these other caregivers are invited into your child’s inner circle, parents continue to be the most important influence in terms of the child’s sense of self and her brain’s networks to facilitate self-regulation.