THE SUNDAY REVIEW | SMALL ANIMALS – KIM BROOKS

I feel like I’m taking my very life in my hands writing a review of this book, fraught as the topic is with judgement, opinions and our certainty that our own viewpoint is the correct one (if you want to see what I’m talking about, check out the comments on reviews of this book on Goodreads). Which is, in essence, the whole point of the book.

As most of you know, I’m a relatively recent addition to the ranks of anxiety-ridden motherhood. I never really had much to do with kids before I had one. I don’t have siblings, so no nieces or nephews. Almost all my friends who have kids either already lived in smaller towns or quickly moved out of my city. So I haven’t spent much time with kids as an adult. Which means that not only did I not have any clue how to do the tasks involved in childcare, but I had no concept of the culture of motherhood. Which is just as well, because fuck man, it’s intense. There is so much pressure and judgment from everyone around you, and suddenly every decision you make is up for public scrutiny and debate. It’s exhausting, and it’s demoralizing. It heightens anxiety and uncertainty and creates a constant sense of imminent – and usually current – failure.

So I get where this book is coming from. I empathize with a lot of what is discussed. I also found issues with some of it, and objectively thought some of it didn’t quite work. But overall, I got it.

The book centers around and was inspired by the author’s experience with being investigated by the police for leaving her child alone in a car while she ran into a store to buy headphones for their plane journey. It was a cool day, the windows were cracked, her kid was strapped in and watching a show on his tablet, the parking lot was empty and in a safe neighbourhood, and she could see the car from the store and hear if the alarm went off. She wasn’t gone long, and when she got back to the car, her kid was fine. She drove back to her parents’ house, continued packing, got her kids loaded up and boarded their plane back home to Chicago. When she arrived, her husband greeted her with the news that the police called and were looking for her. Things snowballed from there.

The first part of the book is all about this incident. She goes into details, shares her feelings about it, her feelings about parenting more generally, the aspects she struggles with and how this event impacted her and her family. Then she expands her focus. She discusses current attitudes towards parenting, the expectation that kids will be supervised at all times, that they need to be in structured activities, that it’s no longer okay for them to go out and explore their neighbourhoods or walk to the store alone. She talks to experts in the field about their take on it, looks at the potential impact this parenting ethos has on kids’ development, health and stress, and how much pressure it puts on parents – particularly mothers. She looks at the double standard between mothers and fathers and research that proves it. She also explores how situations like this are more severe in consequence for those with less financial resources and those who are not privileged and white. She interviews a couple of mothers on both ends of the spectrum (one a poor black single mother, the other a white attorney) and examines how different their treatment and outcomes were.

I found the obviously thorough research she had done compelling and interesting. I can see both sides of the debate, and it’s an issue I struggle with on a daily basis. The need to both protect your kids and encourage them to explore and experience the world feels like walking a tight-rope in a tornado. She’s a good writer, and presents information so it can be easily absorbed. It did sometimes feel that she was looking for the answers she needed to find, and I wondered a bit about whether she represented all available research evenly. But it was well written, and what she did choose to share, she did a good job of.

The part of the book I had a hard time with was the personal part where she discusses her experience after leaving her son in the car. I understand that it was a springboard, and I usually think a personal “in” helps a non-fiction book not become too dry. And to a certain extent it did that – it helped me understand why this issue was so important to her and what prompted her to delve into it. But by the time she wrote the book she had already published an article about it that had received some pretty unpleasant responses, she’d had to deal with lots of strong opinions from people in her life, and she’d spent countless hours agonizing over her decisions and what the whole situation meant about her as a mother. I have a lot of sympathy for her, but I don’t know her. I don’t have a personal stake in her working through it, and I don’t need her to explain or justify her decisions to me. A certain amount of that is necessary to explore the situation, but there was an element of defensiveness and over-explanation that felt like she was trying too hard to argue her side when I already got it, and it started to alienate me. I don’t want to sound harsh or overly critical – again, I get it – but I think it could have been edited down, and perhaps could have used a bit of distance, either in terms of more time passing or an impartial editor who was willing to be a bit more brutal with cuts. Because this was the entry into the book, it undermined her credibility going into the research part of the book, and it made her come across as someone looking to strangers for approval where it wasn’t appropriate or needed.

Because of the overly personal introduction, it took me a bit more effort to get into the second part of the book, but once I did I was impressed with her work, and I thought she presented some important points. I didn’t fully agree with every opinion she put forth, but I understood where she was coming from, and the issues and points she raised are very important ones that are deserving of a lot of thought and consideration. I definitely put the book down several times to process what I was reading and talk about it with friends. I’ve read some criticism that she doesn’t adequately address her privilege or how much harder these situations are for non-white mothers in similar circumstances. I thought she did address this to the best of her ability – there was a chapter about that very issue and she does mention it in passing in other relevant parts of the book. Could she have discussed it more? Yes. But it wasn’t the main topic of the book, and she already had a lot of ground to cover. She comes from the background she comes from, and while she can acknowledge that background and do her best to say how that impacts her own experiences, she can’t change it or share experiences she hasn’t had. She interviews a single black mother who had ended up in similar circumstances and had been treated much worse by the police and had to endure a much more invasive and devastating legal intervention, and that allows someone from a less privileged background some space to share her own experience. It was enough for me given the nature of the book, but I come from a similarly privileged background, so it’s possible that it just felt okay to me because of that. I definitely think an entire book could be written just on that issue (and should be, several times over) – but this isn’t that book.

It’s hard to draw any final conclusion on a book like this because the subject is such an emotionally charged one, and it’s so nuanced. I may not have agreed with every perspective she shared in this book, but I do think the very fact of discussing issues of parenting in the modern age and what it means for kids, parents and society as a whole is vitally important. Our current defensiveness and judgment is creating a toxic environment and making parents worry more about how others will judge them than what is best for them and their kids. I’m not sure there is an answer. More permissive parenting comes with increased risk to kids’ welfare. A more cautious approach safeguards the physical safety of children, but it also costs in the emotional welfare of parents who have less time and mental space for their own lives and needs, and in a loss of freedom and experiential learning for kids. I’m not sure there’s a perfect balance, but I think talking about the problems is a first step to trying to find something close to one. And so for that, I would recommend reading this book. Even if you disagree with it, the process of doing so will help to synthesize your own opinions and give you an opportunity to engage with a different viewpoint in a way you might not otherwise have done. If you find yourself in a similar situation to that experienced by Brooks, you will feel like it’s not just you, and that might help you work through it. If you don’t have any experience with modern parenting, this will give you an idea of some of the complex issues it raises. Whatever your stance, there’s something to learn or consider here. And that is valuable.

One morning, Kim Brooks made a split-second decision to leave her four-year old son in the car while she ran into a store. What happened would consume the next several years of her life and spur her to investigate the broader role America’s culture of fear plays in parenthood. In Small Animals, Brooks asks, Of all the emotions inherent in parenting, is there any more universal or profound than fear? Why have our notions of what it means to be a good parent changed so radically? In what ways do these changes impact the lives of parents, children, and the structure of society at large? And what, in the end, does the rise of fearful parenting tell us about ourselves?

Fueled by urgency and the emotional intensity of Brooks’s own story, Small Animals is a riveting examination of the ways our culture of competitive, anxious, and judgmental parenting has profoundly altered the experiences of parents and children. In her signature style–by turns funny, penetrating, and always illuminating–which has dazzled millions of fans and been called “striking” by New York TimesBook Review and “beautiful” by the National Book Critics Circle, Brooks offers a provocative, compelling portrait of parenthood in America and calls us to examine what we most value in our relationships with our children and one another. – Goodreads

Book Title: Small Animals
Author: Kim Brooks
Series: No
Edition: Paperback
Published By: Doubleday
Released: August 21, 2018
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Parenting, Feminism
Pages: 256
Date Read: February 22-March 15, 2019
Rating: 7/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.90/5 (1,380 ratings)