well after a lot of tying this and trying that I found the answer.
The install instructions say that you can upload the zip file using the built in wordpress uploader. What it doesn’t tell you is that inside the zip folder that you upload there is a folder called “puresimple-main” and if you try and install the child theme it will not find the parent because its looking for puresimple and because the parent folder that was uploaded was called “puresimple-main”.
rename the folder to “puresimple” in the zip folder before upload and all is OK.
