Book Review: Small Animals by Kim Brooks

When Kim Brooks’ son was 4-years-old, she took him along for a last minute errand at a Target while she was visiting her parents in the state of Virginia. Once there, young Felix wanted to stay in the car and so Brooks allowed it. She locked the doors, left the windows cracked and, according to her, left him for only a few minutes. She flew home to Chicago later that day without incident. What she didn’t realize was that a bystander, deeming Felix to be in potential danger, had filmed her son alone in the car, and called the police.

This incident launched Brooks both into a legal situation and into an exploration of what it means to be a parent in the modern day. Why was she punished (legally and socially) for something that seemed so innocuous to her? The book’s subtitle is “Parenthood in the Age of Fear”. It is not infrequent today to hear people complain about or disparage the ways that children are being raised. How different it is than the free-range parenting of the 70s and 80s when children were cast outside and told to “come home when the street lights go on”. Children today in the western world seem to have less freedom, more structure to their schedules. Is this case? And, if so, why?

Shortly before I started reading Small Animals, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a warning about the high levels of stress in parenting and its toll on mental health. My friends and I laughed when this came up between us later. What are we going to do? we joked, Stop parenting? The unspoken implication being that parenting is stressful and there’s no way around it. And we laughed because sure, parenting is stressful but is it detrimental to our health? Surely it doesn’t need a warning the same way that cigarette packages do. But in this book Brooks examines the concept of whether or not modern parenting in North America needs to be this stressful. How did we get here and how do we change? She interviews a variety of parenting experts as well as other parents who got into trouble for similar reasons as she did. The way we parent is flawed, says Brooks, but by the time I got the end of the book, I felt like the issue Brooks was sharing was more specific to her than she understood.

While Brooks acknowledges that this is largely a uniquely American problem and she writes from her own middle class, privileged white experience, she also seems to write as if this is the norm across the nation. Here’s where I can’t help but get personal because I am also a middle class, educated, privileged white mother of two. And I didn’t find much to identify with in this book. Brooks comes across as an incredibly anxious person and I don’t think that it’s simply motherhood that made her that way. When a woman without children asks Brooks about her quality of life as a mother, Brooks responds that there is no quality of life when you become a mother. I felt compassion for Brooks that she seemed to believe this was the reality for every woman who choose motherhood and yet frustration that she never did anything to alter her life and parenting style.

Brooks also doesn’t seem to understand that the way she lives is the result of the community in which she’s surrounded herself. She writes, “When all of the parents you encounter have rearranged their lives to make room for a style of parenting that demands total control, micromanagement, endless monitoring and measurement and observation and intervention, when you’ve never known a different way, you accept that this is what parenthood is.” Throughout the book she speaks as if this is what parenting is in North America and there’s no real way to avoid it. But very little of the style and type of parenting that Brooks takes for granted seemed familiar to me and my own experience.

Brooks describes herself as a parent who does all the research, who wants to be the most informed on all matters. The problem with research in the modern era of parenting is that there is an almost endless amount of “research” one can do and, with the internet, very little vetting of what is valid or not. As someone who doesn’t enjoy research, I decided soon after becoming a parent that I would tailor my research and consider the source. I started doing this when I had an infant who struggled to sleep anywhere but in my arms. Knowing that I did not want to co-sleep with my baby, I didn’t ask certain friends for their advice. They may be and are great moms but if they co-slept with their children, I already knew what they would tell me. I wanted advice from the moms whose babies were successfully sleeping in their own cribs. I wanted to breastfeed so I sought feeding advice from nursing moms and lactation experts. I look to our family doctor for medical advice and I look to teachers for education advice. I don’t need to solicit research endlessly because I’m not looking to be a parenting expert. I only need to be an expert on what works for my kids and our family.

But Brooks seems to be forever in competition with every parent around her. This is nowhere more evident than when she talks about other mothers. She talks about the blonde mothers who congregate in the shared outdoor space of their neighbourhood and Brooks and her husband (who, frankly, seems awful and very unsupportive throughout the book) judge them for all standing around watching their children play. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that perhaps these mothers genuinely enjoy each others company. When Brooks talks about discussing extracurricular activities with other parents she assumes that the only reason to ask another parent what kinds of activities their kids are in is to brag on your own or to judge them for not doing enough. I was genuinely aghast that this was her opinion because this is a conversation I have often had. Particularly at the beginning of the school year, I’ve asked other parents what they’ve signed their kids up for. I do this with real interest and because sometimes I learn about activities I didn’t know were available to my children. I don’t care if other families do five activities a week or zero. And I don’t feel judged when they ask me what my kids are doing. Frankly, I hate the stereotype that moms at PTA meetings or in school pick-up lines are a bunch of mean girls and that doesn’t fit with my own experience.

I think what frustrated me about Small Animals was that I wanted to be able to agree with Brooks. I do think we lay too heavy an expectation on children and parents, particularly mothers today! I do think we could stand to let our kids experience more independence, more boredom! My kids don’t have activities after school every day because I think letting them them have free time at home is important! I do let them ride their bikes around the neighbourhood with their friends!

Years ago, I read Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods and I had the chance to hear Louv lecture shortly after. When asked what the greatest factor was that keeps children out of nature, Louv’s answer was simple. “The parents.” Kids don’t play freely outside because their parents don’t let them. Cultural change begins at an individual family level. Brooks’ problem might be that she is parenting in a culture that doesn’t encourage much freedom for children but the solution is still up to her.

I have the immense privilege of raising my kids in a small town with a lot of natural space around us. I let my kids have freedom here that I might not in a large city. My kids have more freedom at a younger age than I did growing up. We have a decently sized backyard where I’ve let them roam with minimum supervision from a pretty young age. I encourage them to create their own games and play and when they tell me their bored, I’m more likely to offer them a chore to do than come up with an activity.

In the end, though I felt like I should have been able to agree with Brooks’ main theme, I was left alienated by her attitude toward her situation and parenting in general.