Review by New York Times Review
IN MARCH OF 2011, Kim Brooks intentionally left her 4-year-old son, Felix, alone in a car. For some readers, this sentence will provoke outrage. Others will read the opening pages of Brooks's book "Small Animals," which recount that experience in a parking lot in Virginia, with a rising sense of dread, even though it's clear early on that Felix was unharmed. Parents who've allowed their kids to play outside without checking on them every few minutes, let them walk alone to the store or permitted them any of the countless small freedoms that used to be part of an ordinary American childhood, will sense what's coming: the police. Every year, Brooks writes, about 37 American children die in hot cars. It's a harrowing death, often due to oversight - babies left napping and forgotten, parents interrupted from their usual routines. But on the day that Brooks left her son, it was cool enough for jackets, the windows were open and the car was locked and alarmed. Brooks was rushing to catch a flight with her two young kids; she let Felix stay in the car playing on his iPad while she ran into Target on an errand. She was gone for a few minutes, and in that time Felix was observed by a bystander, who recorded a video of him alone in the back seat and gave it to the authorities. What, exactly, was the crime? Or, more precisely, what kind of danger was little Felix in? "Small Animals" interrogates how we weigh risk as parents, how we judge one another's parenting and what the costs might be - not just to parents, but to children, too - of a culture of constant surveillance. Brooks's book attempts to understand what is so scary about leaving a child alone in a car, when the act of driving that child in that same car is, she contends, far riskier. As she puts it, "a child's chances of being abducted and murdered are way less than one in a million." She interviews a cognitive scientist, a sociologist and an occupational therapist, along with other mothers who've faced arrest for infractions similar to hers - and makes the case that our fears are based on little more than superstition. Why are American parents so fearful? Is leaving a child in a car considered riskier than driving him because the boogeyman you can't see is scarier than dangers you face every day? Is it possible, as Lenore Skenazy, an activist who runs a website called Free-Range Kids, suggests to Brooks, that we are more interested in policing mothers than in protecting children - that our idea of a good parent is someone " 'who watches and manages and meddles and observes ceaselessly," even when the outcome this yields is no safer? Brooks didn't know that a bystander had contacted the police until after her flight landed in Chicago. She found a lawyer, and agreed to go along with his description of her behavior as a temporary "lapse in judgment." When, nearly a year later, she learned that there was a warrant out in Virginia for her arrest, she flew from Chicago to Virginia to turn herself in. To go to trial, her lawyer implied, could mean risking custody of her kids. In exchange for agreeing to perform community service and take parenting classes, the prosecutor dropped the charge - "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" - against her. The bystander's instinct - to err on the side of caution, to call the police when in doubt about a child's safety - may at first blush seem laudable. But, as Brooks points out, the police are a blunt instrument for enforcing parenting mores. There's an idea that the authorities, given the opportunity to investigate, will be able to make the proper determination about guilt and innocence, but in practice all sorts of factors, including racial and gender bias, play into who calls the police on whom, and how the police react. (Sometimes these factors become obvious, as in the incident at a Philadelphia Starbucks in April, when an employee called the police to report two black men who were subsequently arrested on suspicion of trespassing.) Brooks interviews Debra Harrell, a single African-American woman who let her 9-year-old daughter play alone at a park a mile from the McDonald's where she was working. After someone called the police, her daughter was sent to a foster care facility for 14 days. What kind of mom did the police officer see when he interrogated a tearful Harrell? What did viewers see when her local news station aired video of her interrogation? Brooks, who is married, white and a writer by profession, ruefully recalls something her lawyer told her during their initial conversation: "You're not the kind of mom they'll throw the book at." AT TIMES, Brooks's summaries of academic thought can seem dutiful and rushed; she's best when she takes the time to digest the material and present her own insights. One of the more interesting lines of study she explores involves research by a cognitive scientist at the University of California at Irvine who found that people confuse moral evaluations with risk assessments. A child left unattended so that his mother could meet her lover was determined by participants in one study to be in greater danger than a child left unattended because his mother was rendered unconscious after being hit by a car. "People don't think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral," Brooks writes. "They think it is immoral and therefore dangerous." If you don't think it's any great loss that most children no longer walk to school alone or play outside without supervision - these are among the former freedoms of childhood that Brooks invokes - then no amount of vigilance seems like too much. But Brooks argues that if we weighed risk rationally, we might worry about the relationship between restrictions on kids' play and rising rates of obesity. We might think about the benefits to children of independence and self-reliance and problem solving, and the cost of taking that independence away. It's good that we're attuned to risk. Compared with older generations, we know more about the dangers of airbags to kids, and we're more likely to make our kids wear bike helmets and to teach them about "good and bad touch" - when it is and isn't appropriate for another person to touch them and how. But, reading Brooks's book, I realized that my own daughter, now 8, is the same age I was when I became a latchkey kid. It has never occurred to me to leave her at home alone, even for a few minutes, yet surely she is as capable as I was then. We live in the same small town where I grew up; if anything, it's safer now. Fear itself has a cost. Brooks recounts that one day, as her case was winding through the law-enforcement system, she gave her son permission to sell cookies in front of their home. She was inside washing dishes, watching him from the window, when two police officers walked up. In an instant, she imagined what this looked like: the little boy on his own, his mother having abandoned him yet again. She ran outside, yelling to the officers that she'd seen him from the kitchen the whole time. But it turned out they just wanted to buy a cookie. LIBBY Copeland is a journalist at work on a book about at-home DNA testing and the American family. 'Small Animals' examines the costs of constant surveillance for parents as well as their children.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Parents will flock to read the first nonfiction book from Brooks, a novelist (The Houseguest, 2016) and frequent essay contributor to popular media outlets. Her engaging account of life as a modern-day parent blends memoir and her research from interviews with other parents, psychiatrists, and parenting experts to provide a deeper understanding of the ways fear and judgment affect the limits and freedoms we give ourselves and our children. And last, but possibly most crucial, is her exploration of how a lack of freedom affects children in the long run. Parents will see themselves in Brooks' personal account of parenting and may relate to the dramatic experience from her own life that frames the book. Of the questions she poses, this one stands out: Why have we bought into this assumption that the parent who is the most cautious, the most irrationally afraid, the most risk-averse, is the best or most loving parent? Parents who are seeking advice, rather than reflection, will appreciate the vast number of other titles Brooks cites throughout the book. Small Animals belongs on the shelves of every public library.--Joyce McIntosh Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Repercussions pummel essayist and fiction writer Brooks after she leaves her toddler in her minivan to run an errand and is reported to the police, in this disturbing, ultimately affirming look at why parenting in the contemporary United States is defined by fear. With her personal journey-which included facing charges of "contributing to the delinquency of a minor"-providing the book's narrative spine, she asks why mothers are competitive and judgmental with one another when they should be supportive of each other through such a "fundamentally anxious endeavor" as parenting. Consulting social psychology research, she discovers Lerner's Just World Hypothesis, the cognitive bias toward assuming that advantageous consequences will follow from one's own moral actions. She also reaches out to Lenore Skenazy, famous for her "free-range" parenting philosophy, who emphasizes the irrationality of parents' fears, and to other mothers arrested for leaving their children unattended. What is clear, she says, is that "motherhood has become a battleground on which prejudice and class resentment can be waged without ever admitting that's what we're doing." After casting outward for reasons, the author faces her own anxiety, knowing change comes from within. Throughout this book, readers will be eager to reach the conclusion and discover the ultimate outcome of the author's misstep, and along the way, will learn much about U.S. culture today. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Novelist and essayist Brooks had no idea she was about to become a "Bad Mom," to be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and to take a deep investigative dive into the state of American parenting. When her son was four years old, Brooks made a last-minute decision to let him stay in the car for a few minutes while she ran an errand. Observed by a bystander who alerted the police, Brooks found herself in a sudden and persistent nightmare of recrimination and self-doubt which she's parlayed into this trenchant investigation of the contemporary fear-based approach to parenthood. She surveys the history of American childhood (kids have never been safer, nor parents as worried), the assumptions of privilege (poor parents lack the resources to keep children under constant watch; does this render them inherently negligent?), the misogyny of judgmental attitudes toward mothers, and the profound implications of our cultural and legal elevation of the risks of childhood independence over its benefits. VERDICT Compassionate and empathetic, appalled and angry, this fierce, intimate blend of memoir, reportage, and critique is essential reading for parents, policymakers, and all others concerned about our children and their future.-Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An incisive investigation of the many complex "points of intersection" between "parenthood and fear."Making a quick trip into a store, Brooks (The Houseguest, 2016) was only gone for five minutes, leaving her 4-year-old son in his car seat inside the locked car, with the windows ajar. Yet those moments transformed her life in more ways than she could have imagined. With nonapologetic honesty, the author shares her story of that day and the aftermath as her case of "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" worked its way through Virginia's court system. The author skillfully interlinks her personal story with interviews of other mothers who have done similar thingse.g., letting their children play at a local park alone or going to get coffee while leaving a child in a car. She also provides a well-researched look at the American parenting system; she discovered that not only are Americans highly competitive in the parenting realm, they are extremely judgmental as well. More often than not, her experience brought her shame and made her question the extreme role that parents, particularly mothers, play in child-rearing. The intense scrutiny by others and the pervasive fear that surrounds American parenting are contributing to a generation of children lacking independence and autonomy. Brooks also shares insights into European methods of parenting, which are far more permissive for the children and more relaxed for the parents. This is a surprisingly moving account of what is a fairly common experience, delivering readers much food for thought on the multilayered issues of how much control parents should have over their children's lives and how much input parents should offer other parents. "Fear is neither wrong nor right. It is what it is," writes Brooks. "But in the end, it can't give us the thing we most desirecontrol."An engaging, enlightening story that reveals the potential harm parents and society can do to children when they don't allow them any freedoms at all. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
