A baby cannot calm its own alarm system, so the baby borrows yours. Your calm, borrowed a thousand times, becomes their own. What a child needs to feel, again and again, is four things: safe (protected and not alone in big feelings), seen (understood from the inside), soothed (accompanied through distress, not just distracted from it), and secure (sure that the relationship holds). No parent delivers all four every day, and the misses are part of the lesson: every time you miss each other and find each other again, your child learns that relationships survive rupture. The repair is the teaching. You do not have to be perfect. You have to keep coming back.