Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear
By: Kim Brooks
Book Report by: Bryn Clark
On a mild March day in a suburb of Virginia, Kim Brooks was running late. She was preparing for a long flight and had to pick up some last-minute travel items. Kim swung by a neighborhood Target where, for the first time in her life, she cracked the windows, locked the doors, and dashed into the store, leaving her son playing happily in the car. She was gone for ten minutes. But during that period of time, a stranger recorded a video of her son alone in the car, recorded her license plate number, and called the police. Kim didn’t learn any of this until she was notified, several weeks later, that there was a warrant out for her arrest. Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear is a chronicle of Kim’s journey and an exploration into the complexities of parenting today. It’s a pertinent and timely read for any parent, educator, or mentor.
It should be said, off-the-bat, that Small Animals is not a self-vindication or justification for a gross oversight. If it’s read through that lens, then it has little value. But when viewed as a sincere exploration into how parenthood is perceived in today’s world, Small Animals has much to say.
Brooks addresses how much of the way we parent today is fueled by, what one psychologist diagnoses as, an “irrational fear.” Thanks to social media and 24-hour news reels, if a child is abducted in one state, parents on the other side of the country will hear of it and hold their children a little bit closer. The fear of child abduction ranks as one of the highest among parents. This is despite the fact that, as Brooks notes, the chances of your child being abducted are way more than one in a million. By startling comparison, the dietary trends among today’s children has led scientists to predict that by 2050, one in three U.S. adults will have diabetes, a disease that drastically and irrefutably decreases one’s lifespan. To take things one step further, statistically speaking, on that March morning, Kim Brooks’ son had a greater chance of being killed by a mass shooter inside Target than being abducted from the family minivan outside.
Fear also drives today’s parenting in terms of how children spend their time: fear of boredom or falling behind. Brooks notes that “…the idea of entertaining children and preventing child boredom became a new parental responsibility.” Success is a driving force for any realm of life. But success in parenting has taken on a new precedence. There’s a constant fear that one’s child may “fall behind.” They’re not smart enough, athletic enough, involved enough, entertained enough, etc. Boredom, like abduction, is an imagined evil from which children must be protected. Because of this, children are not only constantly supervised, but they’re over-managed. As such they have been denied, as Mona Simpson puts it, “the luxury of being unnoticed, of being left alone.”
I’m not a parent and if Small Animals accomplished anything, it exposed me to the many pressures of parenthood. Any parent is going to mess up. Just like kids are suffering from the reality of constant supervision, so parents (mothers particularly) face the incessant possibility of judgement from the wider world. Leave your kid alone in a Target parking lot and you might find yourself being labelled “an irresponsible b****” by a stranger in Tulsa. Heaven help us, particularly the mothers.
On another level, Small Animals is an illuminating and advocating case for experiential education. At La Vida, we frequently talk about creating an environment in which kids can ‘fail safely.’ Whether it’s balancing on a high-ropes element, bushwhacking in the Adirondacks, or mountain-biking through Chebacco woods, we seek to provide children and students with the ability to learn from their mistakes and realize that the object of their fear is easily overcome. They might scrape a knee or have a late night on trail, but if we remove risk it’s like telling a sports team they can no longer lift weights with actual weights.
Kim Brooks doesn’t spend time ruminating over whether her decision on that March morning was right or wrong. Ultimately, she doesn’t advocate for a particular mode of parenting one way or the other. But Small Animals provides us with evidence which, if viewed rationally, outlines the need for experiences like La Vida. Because if children never have the ability to do the right thing or the wrong thing, to risk or to fail, then “nothing ever happens.” Kids in such an environment are “being raised like veal, never allowed to take any risks or to be responsible or independent in any way…we never even let them go to the store to get a loaf of bread because it’s too dangerous … (they can’t) develop a feeling of worth, of resiliency, of efficacy. Of self-confidence or self-worth or of the excitement of life.”
Which risk are we willing to take?