Sense by Meg Faure | Season 8, Episode 213
You’re Not Failing: The Truth About Parenting Mistakes and Resilience
Host: Meg Faure | Guest Co-Host: Tove de Chazal Gant
00:00:00.000 –> 00:02:30.000
MEG FAURE: Every mum I know is carrying something. A moment that she wishes she could take back. A time when she lost it. The voice that she used in that moment. The words that came out. And then the look on her child’s face afterwards. And then the guilt.
In this episode, I hand the mic over to Tove as our host and we are chatting about something that every parent needs to hear, and that most parenting content never quite gives you permission to believe. The magic of parenting is not in the perfect moments. It’s in what happens after you get it wrong.
These are the three things that will change how you see yourself as a parent.
The first thing is, the science shows that attuned parents only get it right a certain percentage of the time, and that that’s actually good enough. So in this episode, we talk about what is that percentage? How often do you actually have to get it right? How often do you have to be the good enough parent?
The second thing we talk about is the Still Face Experiment. It’s one of the most powerful pieces of research in child development, and it shows that it is not rupture that shapes your child. It is repair. We talk about how to come back, and how when you come back, you actually write a neurological story for your child that they are safe and that disconnection is not forever.
And then finally, we talk about perfect parenting. Could perfect parenting actually be harmful to your child? We talk about the mess and the frustration and how coming back is the magic.
If you are walking around with moments of guilt right now, then this episode is for you. Please hit play and share this with a parent who needs to hear it today.
Welcome to Sense by Meg Faure, where we make sense of the science and art of parenting. Parenting is grey, gritty, and beautiful all at once. My life’s work as a healthcare professional is helping parents feel more confident in a season that can feel really overwhelming. In each episode, we share honest conversations with real mums, dive into the science with experts, and simply make sense of it all in practical ways. This is your space. You’re not alone. You’re held.
00:02:32.000 –> 00:04:12.000
TOVE DE CHAZAL GANT: Hi everyone, and welcome back to Sense by Meg Faure, Real Life Parenting. I’m Tove, a mum of three, and honestly, today’s conversation feels deeply personal to me. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learnt in motherhood, it’s that parenting is not made up of the perfect moments. It’s made up of ruptures and repairs.
As a mum of three, I’ve lost my patience. I’ve snapped when I’m overwhelmed. I’ve said things I wish I could take back. I’ve had moments where I feel completely depleted, distracted, touched out, and deeply unsure of myself. And I know I’m not alone in that.
So many parents carry this around in the quiet belief that if they get it wrong, if we lose it, if we disconnect for a moment, we’re somehow damaging our children. That good parents stay calm all the time, endlessly patient, emotionally available, and never reactive. But that’s just not real life.
Today, I’m sitting down with Meg to talk about something I think every parent needs permission to understand: the magic of rupture and repair. The magic is in the repair. What actually happens after those moments of disconnect? What does science tell us about repair and resilience and attachment? And how can we stop seeing ourselves as failing parents every time we get it wrong?
This is one of the most freeing conversations I’ve had as a parent, and I hope it gives you the same sense of relief as it gave me.
So Meg, so many mums feel like they’re failing because they just can’t stay calm. I’m definitely one of them, particularly after a long day of work. I’m not consistent. I can’t be the parent I wish I could be. Where does this pressure come from?
00:04:12.000 –> 00:08:18.000
MEG FAURE: Tove, I’m fully in your camp as well. I look back on my life as a mum and I can pick up moments where I wish I had just not reacted like that. But the reality is that we are human, and so we can’t be perfect. And actually, there’s a lot of magic in the fact that we’re not perfect.
**The Myth of the Perfect Parent**
To answer your question about where this myth of the perfect parent comes from, I think there are a couple of things that drive it.
The first is that we’re not growing up in villages anymore. One hundred and fifty, two hundred years ago, you would have grown up in a very real world where your mother lost her cool with your sibling and then had to repair it. Where your father was completely absent for three days. Where real life just happened to children. And so you would see that and think: that’s my model for parenting.
The problem now is that our models for parenting are built largely on parenting advisors and social media. Parenting advisors, and the irony is not lost on me that I sit in that camp, put out a gold standard, fully understanding that the gold standard is not where people will land. That’s the first thing.
Then add social media, where people only show you what they want you to see. They don’t show you themselves losing their cool at five o’clock in the afternoon after a long day. We see tiny snapshots of perfectly curated moments, and we build our model on that.
And what makes it worse is that misinformed people put content on social media that creates enormous guilt. Things like: if you let your baby cry for more than one minute, they’ll be damaged for life. No scientist would ever say that. Controlled crying will not damage your child forever. But these statements exist, and they pile guilt onto parents who are already doing their best.
So you’ve got the gold standard from experts, the curated snapshots from social media, and the misinformation. And that’s the foundation on which we build our model of what parenting should look like.
And for you and I, both of whom hold ourselves and everybody around us to very high standards, we don’t hit those standards. And so we have this incredible guilt and this sense of failure. But what’s very important in our conversation today is to understand: if we were able to parent perfectly, would that actually be good for our kids? We’re going to get to that.
00:08:18.000 –> 00:08:37.000
TOVE DE CHAZAL GANT: Absolutely. And this term “rupture and repair” is used all the time. Can you explain what rupture means? Because I think some parents hear that word and immediately assume it’s something very dramatic. So what is it, and what do we do with that?
00:08:37.000 –> 00:13:55.000
MEG FAURE: **Understanding Rupture**
Rupture, if we look it up in the dictionary, means a break. It’s a break in a relationship. And I want to say upfront: I understand that this might incite some guilt in parents, but we do need to understand that rupture can be very impactful.
So what happens when we have rupture? When we don’t parent the way we want to. When we scream, when we lose our cool, when we neglect them for five minutes because we’ve got a toddler who needs us. Life happens. And when life happens, there will be breaks in connection.
In an ideal world, good parenting looks like consistent responses, human engagement, eye contact, beautiful moments of serve-and-return, reading our baby’s signals. When we don’t do that, we have ruptured. We’ve created a break in that connection.
What happens for the baby in that rupture is important to understand. It elicits a stress response. A little cortisol rises, and they don’t feel good. In those moments, the child’s nervous system registers that there is a break. Because they are so tuned to the emotional state of their caregiver, they read micro-expressions, they understand that the tone is not right, that the bodily cues are not what they need. The attunement breaks. And when that happens, a baby’s stress response activates. Cortisol rises. Tolerance for the world disintegrates. They can’t self-regulate. They become dysregulated.
You might see them lose muscle tone and fall on the floor, kick their feet, cry, or go silent and turn away. These babies and toddlers are really feeling it.
**The Still Face Experiment**
One of the best illustrations of this ever recorded on video is Ed Tronick’s Still Face Experiment. Tronick, an incredible scientist, brings a beautifully attuned mother and baby into a research room with cameras on both faces. The instruction to the mother: interact with your baby as you normally would.
And you see this beautiful engagement. Baby makes a noise, mum makes it back. Eye contact. Laughter. Reciprocation. Serve-and-return. It’s perfect attunement.
Then the scientist says: look away, and when you come back, your face must be deadpan. No emotion. Do not respond to your baby.
In a split second, the baby registers this. Within seconds, the baby tries to elicit a response from the mum, makes noises, expects a reaction. Nothing. The mum stares with a still face. Within fifteen seconds, the baby starts to cry and arch their back. Within thirty seconds, the baby is fully dysregulated. Screaming. In full distress.
That illustrates what’s happening in a moment of rupture. The baby’s expectation was not met. Inconsistency triggered a full disintegration of their ability to self-regulate. That’s what rupture looks like. And it happens in everyday moments, all the time.
00:13:55.000 –> 00:14:24.000
TOVE DE CHAZAL GANT: Is there a difference between how rupture presents across babies and toddlers? And do we handle repair differently across those ages?
00:14:25.000 –> 00:16:08.000
MEG FAURE: **Rupture Across Age Groups**
Yes, it does look different across every age group, from newborn through to adulthood, which actually extends to age twenty-five when the brain is fully developed.
For a newborn, the expectation is instantaneous. They need you to read their body language, their signals, in real time. That’s a lot of work. Just looking back at them when they look at you. Making a sound when they make a sound. Doing all the work of calming when they’re fussy.
You don’t have to do the same for your fifteen-year-old. Rupture for a very little one can be simply not getting there within a few minutes when they needed you sooner. Rupture for a toddler might be ignoring them when they’re trying to speak, or not meeting a physical need in that moment.
But across the board, from newborn through to my age, everybody experiences rupture when someone’s attention disappears into a cell phone. Because you were there with me. Your brain was in my brain. And the minute your head goes into a screen, there is a rupture. You have disappeared for that moment.
The attunement needed looks slightly different at each stage, but the experience of disconnection is universal.
00:16:09.000 –> 00:16:23.000
TOVE DE CHAZAL GANT: So what does the research actually say about repair? Because I think this is where a lot of parents have never really been given permission to understand that repair is something that happens, and actually has real value in our children’s development.
00:16:24.000 –> 00:19:23.000
MEG FAURE: **The Magic of Repair**
That’s where the magic lies.
I only told you half of Tronick’s Still Face Experiment. After the baby is fully dysregulated, the mother looks away once more. When she comes back, she connects with her baby completely. She touches the baby. She makes eye contact. She speaks warmly. And instantaneously, the baby re-regulates.
What Tronick’s Still Face Experiment taught us is that it is not the rupture itself that determines the outcome. It’s what happens next.
The developing brain does not look for perfection. In fact, it’s interested in imperfection. There is overwhelming evidence that all of the beautiful learnings that happen in life happen in the next stage: the repair. The restoration.
When the mum comes back and re-attunes and repairs, she writes a neurological story for her baby. That story says: relationships are safe. Disconnection happens and is temporary. The person who loves you will always find their way back to you. That is profound. It tells your child: this is my model for life.
Because remember, as much as you want your little ones to stay little forever, you are building them every day for full independence. You are building a human who has to stand outside of you. And the world you’re preparing them for is not perfect. A world that will let them down. Relationships that will fracture. A boss who will be unfair.
If you keep things perfect, you are not creating the conditions for learning. The magic happens in the repair. When you make a mistake, when you rupture, and then you come back and say: it doesn’t matter, I still love you, I’m still here, I’m human, and I stuff up. And when you stuff up at fifteen years old and completely lose it with me, I’ll still love you afterwards. Because you’ve seen me do it with you. You’ve seen me make a mistake, come back, and repair.
In fact, the word “repair” might be wrong. Because repair means returning to where we were before. But we’re actually going somewhere better. Our children have had an opportunity to learn from that experience and to know they are still loved afterwards.
00:19:23.000 –> 00:19:29.000
TOVE DE CHAZAL GANT: So what we’re basically saying is that we’re not just fixing what went wrong. We’re actually developing our children.
00:19:29.000 –> 00:19:33.000
MEG FAURE: Yes. We’re building. We are building, not just going back.
00:19:33.000 –> 00:19:55.000
TOVE DE CHAZAL GANT: That’s a massive weight off for parents. Because we can’t control the fact that rupture is going to happen. It just will. But if we can see the repair as actually building our children, that really changes the message. Practically, what does a good repair look like?
00:19:55.000 –> 00:20:14.000
MEG FAURE: Today’s Dose of Sense is brought to you by Parent Sense, the expert-based parenting app that gives you daily support from pregnancy to sleep, feeding, and daily routines. Take the guesswork out of parenting, download Parent Sense today, and use the code SENSE50 for 50% off.
00:20:14.000 –> 00:20:17.000
TOVE DE CHAZAL GANT: Practically, what does a good repair look like?
00:20:17.000 –> 00:25:25.000
MEG FAURE: **The Four Steps of Effective Repair**
First, I want to be clear about what repair is not. It is not a licence for any parent to harm a child and then simply say sorry. That is not what we’re talking about. This is not about being a repeat offender. Parents must hold the gold standard for themselves, understand they’ll fail because they are human, forgive themselves, and move into repair.
So what does repair look like?
Step one: come back. Return to the child. That can be as simple as making eye contact again. Touching them again. Reconnecting emotionally. There is science behind this too. When a mother and child are attuned and connected, mirror neurones light up the same pathway in both brains simultaneously. When we say “come back,” it’s not just re-entering the room. It’s re-entering the human mind. Becoming mindful of your child and their state.
So they’ve thrown themselves on the floor, there’s been a temper tantrum, both of you lost it. Coming back is: holding them, making eye contact, returning to them. You don’t have to say a word. Go and watch the Tronick video. When you’re back, they know.
Step two: name it. Say sorry. This is one of the greatest gifts you can give your child. There’s an old-fashioned style of parenting, an authoritarian approach, where the parent is always the boss, always right, and never acknowledges failure.
I remember once, when my son was very little, just verbal, I had lost my cool and I’d smacked him. I felt terrible. And he looked at me and said: “Mummy is naughty.” He called me back. He made me accountable. And he was spot on. Immediately I returned to him and said: you are one hundred percent right. Mummy should not have done that.
When you name it, you also frame for your child that when they fail, they too can come back and say sorry and be forgiven. That becomes their model.
Step three: reconnect. A touch. A look. A moment of warmth. Let’s read a book together. I’m tired and I can’t play right now, but I can sit with you. Find something you have the capacity for in that moment and give it to them.
Step four: do not over-apologise and do not over-explain. A single, sincere apology is enough. “I stuffed up. I’m really sorry. Let’s go and read a book together.” That’s it. You don’t need to explain the context of your whole parenting history. Keep it simple. Reconnect. Spend a little time together. I love Gary Chapman’s work on love languages and for many parents, time is everything. Put down the phone, sit on the couch, and come back to your child.
00:25:25.000 –> 00:25:49.000
TOVE DE CHAZAL GANT: You mentioned earlier the impact of the perfect parent. That’s a really interesting piece, because it is the gold standard we’re working towards. But if there were a perfect parent, considering we’ve now explored the value of repair for our children, what does perfect parenting actually yield in a child?
00:25:50.000 –> 00:29:59.000
MEG FAURE: **Why Perfect Parenting Can Harm Children**
We do actually see shades of this in the real world. Three scenarios.
The first is the only child with a fully attentive parent. Fully on tap, fully focused, following every guideline, making life as perfect as possible for that child. No siblings.
The second is the lawnmower parent. A style of parenting where the parent mows everything smooth ahead of the child. No frustrations. No disruptions. Never saying no. Everything perfectly catered to the child. Whether it’s called attachment parenting or gentle parenting, taken to the extreme, the result is a world without friction.
And the third scenario is the perfect AI parent. The soft, teddy-bear robot that has no bad days. That never makes a mistake. That always parents according to the science. Always gives the right response. Never loses its cool. This is probably a reality that’s coming.
Now you might look at each of these and think: that child is so lucky. But the reality is that the lessons not learned in those moments can be very damaging.
We see it with firstborn or only children who move from a perfect home environment into playschool, where other children pull hair and take toys and frustrate them. They literally don’t know what to do with that because they’ve never experienced anything else.
Or the lawnmower child, who gets to age ten and faces the frustration of not making the A team in football. That’s devastating. Because they’ve never had to cope with not being the most perfect human in the world. And they don’t have the resilience or the coping strategies to handle it.
And the third scenario, the child of the perfect AI parent, will struggle to hold down real adult relationships. Because real relationships are messy. They’re untidy. They’re never perfect. If you get to twenty-five and you cannot tolerate tiny imperfections in another person, you’re going to struggle.
Looking at all three scenarios, I think it’s quite clear that a perfect parenting environment is very, very damaging. It is the ruptures and the repairs that actually constitute good parenting.
Donald Winnicott, a researcher and theorist, speaks about the “good enough parent.” A good enough parent stuffs up enough times that the child learns the world is going to fail them, and repairs sufficiently that the child knows they can trust the next interaction.
00:29:59.000 –> 00:32:26.000
MEG FAURE: And where things do go wrong, which it does happen, and in attachment theory we definitely see this, is where things are so consistently inconsistent and so terribly damaging. It usually comes, nine out of ten times, from a parent who has some type of personality disorder or psychological problem themselves. And those children cannot attach later. They develop insecure or avoidant attachment. In those cases, the norm is that there will never be repair, and the child never knows what’s coming next. That’s a whole other level I won’t go into deeply here.
But good enough parenting? That’s stuffing up seventy percent of the time, repairing it every time you can, and only getting it right thirty percent of the time. And that’s okay.
So with that being said, is guilt ever useful for parents? I think guilt is the most wasted emotion. I don’t think it’s ever useful in any scenario, parenting or marriage or anything. Guilt doesn’t change behaviour. It just makes you feel terrible.
What is constructive is what changes behaviour. Yes, hold the gold standard for yourself. Accept you won’t always hit it. And be kind to yourself. Guilt is an unkind emotion and it is not constructive.
You will feel remorse, and that’s normal and healthy. If you didn’t feel remorse after a rupture, that would be worrying. So feeling remorse, feeling unsettled, having a real drive to repair, that’s healthy. Sitting with guilt for the next fifteen years over a single moment? That is not constructive. And I say that knowing you’ll still do it. Because so do I.
00:32:26.000 –> 00:33:20.000
TOVE DE CHAZAL GANT: So we’re parents. I feel like that’s the nugget of wisdom to leave everyone with. Thank you so much for your time, Meg. I honestly think this is a conversation every parent needs to hear. Because so many of us are walking around carrying guilt from the moments we wish we’d handled differently. And for me, I know these moments well. There’s been a lot of repair in my house. Lots of coming back and lots of trying again.
What matters most is not perfection. It’s the connection. It’s showing our children that our relationship can survive these ruptures, that mistakes are human, and that love doesn’t disappear when things get messy.
Thank you so much, mums and dads, for joining us. Thank you for listening to Sense by Meg Faure, and please download the app. We look forward to seeing you soon.
00:33:20.000 –> 00:33:48.000
MEG FAURE: Thank you for joining me today. I hope today’s conversation brought you a little more clarity, calm, and confidence on your parenting journey. If you enjoyed the episode, please do share it with a friend who needs to hear it today. And go and subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll be back next week, same time, same place, and always here to support you. In the meantime, download the Parent Sense app to take the guesswork out of feeding, sleep, weaning, routines, and everything in between.
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