Edward Tronick

Okay, so then that was Donald Winnicott's idea.

Then Ed Tronick, an infant, a researcher of infants, came onto the scene and he decided to figure out, well, how much of our time do we have to be attuned like that for it to be good enough? It's a fascinating thing to research.

And he came up with about 30%, meaning that of all the sort of time or interactions that are going on between, I think he did his with mothers, but other experiments have been done with fathers as well.

but that the parent only had to be sensitive, attuned, locked in on that child about 30% of their interactions.

For those of you who haven't, go ahead and look it up.

It's the still-faced experiment, Dr. Edward Tronick.

And it's not recent, but there's a mom and a daughter who have a baby who has a – they have a very strong bond.

Mm-hmm.

I come back to again and again.

So developmental psychologist Ed Tronick spent decades studying how babies and their caregivers interact.

He became famous for the still face experiment, where a parent stops responding to their baby for a short time, and we watch the baby's distress grow.

But here's the part people often miss.

What face-to-face interaction provides that nothing else does.

When developmental psychologist Edward Tronick conducted the still face experiment in the 1970s, he discovered something striking about how early human connection works.

A mother and infant would engage in their normal warm exchange, mirroring each other's expressions, responding to each other's cues, building the dance of attunement that characterizes healthy early relationship.

Then on a signal, the mother would go expressionless, completely neutral, unresponsive, the same face regardless of what the infant did.

And then somebody...

Ed Tronick came up with an experiment to test that.

Okay.

So if you only have to be good enough, how much of your interaction has to be good with your child for it to be good enough? Okay.

But the cool thing too is that when the baby had had enough of being alone or unattended to, the baby let the mother know by fussing or crying or squirming that, And that also taught the baby that, hey, I can do something to bring relief and comfort to myself.

So this was a different researcher.

I'm sorry, no, it was a different experiment that he got this from, but it was Ed Tronick again.

He realized that when the child had that efficacy, that sense of agency.

It's nowhere near perfect, right? It's something like 66% of the time, secure attachment in parenting.

This is a study by Ed Tronick and his colleagues that essentially it was like one third of the time parents were getting it right.

They were like accurately like attuning.

One third of the time they were repairing when they didn't get it right.

Let's play a couple of seconds from it.

It's called the Still Face Experiment by Edward Tronick.

Famous, famous experiment, take a look.

In the still face experiment, what the mother did was she sits down and she's playing with her baby who's about a year of age.

And she gives a greeting to the baby, the baby gives a greeting back to her.

This baby starts pointing at different places in the world and the mother's trying to engage her and play with her.