Every child needs at least one adult who serves as a “secure base.” Usually it is the mother, but it can just as well be the father, grandparent, or nanny, or any adult who is reliably available for comfort and protection. If safety was the child’s only goal, he’d stay “on base” for all of childhood. There’d be no need for a complicated regulatory system. But as soon as children can crawl, they want to crawl over to things they can touch, suck on, or otherwise explore. They need to spend a lot of time in discover mode, because that’s where the learning and neural fine-tuning take place. But
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