"There is no such thing as a bad parent. The fact that you're questioning it tells me you're a really good parent."
Dr Martha Deiros Collado, Clinical Psychologist and Author of How to Be the Grown Up
Somewhere in the middle of lockdown, Dr Martha Deiros Collado started sharing what she knew on Instagram. She was not trying to build a following. Parents were stuck at home with babies and toddlers and nowhere to turn, and she thought: I know things that could help. Within months, hundreds of thousands of people were following her. She was not surprised by the hunger for it.
Martha is a clinical psychologist who trained at UCL and the Tavistock and spent 18 years in the NHS working with children and families. She is the Sunday Times number one bestselling author of How to Be the Grown Up and over 290,000 people follow her on Instagram as she tells parents what the science actually says, without the judgment and without the jargon. On this episode of Best Beginnings, she sat down with us and covered a lot of ground. What we kept coming back to, across all of it, was the same idea: most parents are doing far better than they think. The science says so.
What the crying is actually telling you
When a baby cries, the parent's first instinct is to ask what they are doing wrong. Martha wants to interrupt that thought before it takes hold. A crying baby is not a verdict on the parent holding them. It is a form of communication and it is the only one a baby has.
All your child needs most of the time, she says, is a cuddle. Someone to hold them, rock them, tell them it is okay. The presence of a safe, calm adult is doing exactly what it needs to do, even if the crying does not immediately stop. The parents sitting alone at 3am, convinced they are failing, are not failing. They were just never given the information that would let them know they are getting it right.
This is Martha's central argument and it runs through everything she does. Most of what psychology knows about early childhood has been established science for over 50 years. Most parents have never heard any of it. She describes this gap as a kind of scandal. We teach children about plant reproduction, she says, pointing out that her own daughter came home from school having learned exactly that. We do not teach them how attachment works, what emotions are, how relationships form and repair. These are not specialist topics. They are the operating system of being human and we have decided they do not need to be taught.
Getting it right 30 to 50 percent of the time
One of the most useful things Martha shares in this conversation is also one of the least known. Parents do not need to be perfectly attuned to their children. Research suggests that being genuinely responsive 30 to 50% of the time is not only sufficient but is, in developmental terms, exactly what children need.
The other half is not wasted. It is, in a real sense, the point.
When a parent misreads what a child needs and then corrects course, the child learns something essential: that disconnection is temporary, that the relationship repairs itself, that the world is fundamentally safe. Resilience is built not in the moments of perfect attunement but in the rupture and repair cycle that follows the moments you got it wrong. The child who is never misread, never asked to tolerate even brief discomfort, is not being protected from difficulty. They are being deprived of the experience that makes difficulty manageable.
Don't expect yourself to be perfect, Martha tells us. You're not supposed to be. That's actually not what children need.
Looking up in the supermarket
Every parent has been there. Your child is on the floor. They are screaming. You can feel the eyes of every person in the vicinity and you want to disappear. You are looking at the floor, willing this to end, already composing an apology to no one in particular.
Martha's advice for this moment is short. Look up.
Stop imagining the judgment of the people around you, she says. Look at your child and say to yourself: this behaviour is about them struggling. It is not a measure of my parenting. Then look around the room. There will almost always be another parent nearby whose expression says exactly: I know. I was there yesterday.
The people who will judge you regardless, she says, are going to judge you no matter what you do. You are not in relationship with them. You are in relationship with your child. That is where your attention belongs.
The candle
One of the most persistent anxieties when a second child arrives is the arithmetic of love. You love your first child completely. What happens to that love when a new baby comes? Does it split? Does the first child receive less?
Martha uses an image that has stayed with the parents she has shared it with. A candle. When you light a second candle from the first, the first does not go out. The light does not get divided. It doubles. Parental love works the same way. Your first child does not receive less because there is now a second. The love expands to meet what is needed.
She is honest about the practical reality. Time shifts. The shape of the day shifts. But the love itself does not have a ceiling and children who are quietly worried they have been displaced need to hear that clearly and often.
It is never too late
The most important thing Martha says in this conversation is not about what to do with a crying baby, or a toddler on a supermarket floor, or the arrival of a sibling. It is for a different kind of parent. The parent who was not there the way they wanted to be. Who went through postnatal depression, or illness, or years of circumstances that made being fully present impossible. Who is now looking back at a period of their child's life and wondering whether the damage is permanent.
It is not.
Relationships can be repaired and deepened at any stage between parents and young children, between parents and teenagers, between parents and adults who are now parents themselves. Martha has seen this across her clinical career in families who had stopped believing closeness was possible and found it anyway. It is never, she says, too late to build the kind of parent-child relationship that you want. That possibility does not close.
What would change everything
We asked Martha what she would do with a magic wand. She did not hesitate. She would pay parents for their work.
Not as a gesture. As a proper recognition of what the evidence has long shown. What happens in the first five years of a child's life shapes everything that follows and that the adults doing that work are contributing something of real and measurable value to society. A society that asks families to do it without financial support, without education, without community infrastructure, is making a choice. Martha thinks it should make a different one.
She would also put psychology in schools. Not as an optional extra but as foundational knowledge, taught to every child as a matter of course. Understanding attachment, emotions, how relationships form and why they matter are not specialist interests. They are what it means to be in relationship with other people and they can be taught.
What this is not
Nothing Martha says in this conversation is designed to add to what parents are already carrying. She is not handing you a checklist. She is not suggesting you are one piece of information away from getting it right.
Her argument is almost the opposite. A lot of what parents are told to do, the enriching activities, the investment in stimulation, the pressure to be perfectly present at every moment, is an adult interpretation of what children need. What children actually need is far more ordinary and far more available than that. A parent who comes when they cry. A parent who gets it wrong sometimes and comes back. A parent who is there.
Martha is a clinical psychologist with 20 years of experience and a Sunday Times number one bestselling book. She also loses her patience. She does not always get it right. She says this not to be modest but because the gap between knowing the science and living inside a normal human day is real and because the parents sitting with this at the end of a hard week deserve to know that the person who wrote the book on how to be the grown-up is right there with them.
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