Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

by Kim Brooks

The way we parent today is molded by our particular class affiliation, political orientation, aesthetic preferences, and personal convictions and beliefs. Attachment parenting, helicopter parenting, free-range parenting, permissive parenting: There are as many brands of parenting as there are of breakfast cereal, and every decision we make about raising our children enhances or detracts from our chosen brand. In a country and culture where so much of our life is commodified and monetized, this shouldn’t be surprising—and yet surprising or no, it creates a particular and peculiar tension, a space between us and our fellow parents that can be difficult to bridge.

Until that day, beginning with the moment that nurse gave me all those brochures about pregnancy, I’d been an uncritical consumer of anxiety. I’d been dangerously incurious about the cultural forces informing my thoughts and deeds. Or

Where did parental fear come from, and what were the forces that sustained it? How had a biological imperative become a labyrinth of societal anxieties? How had we managed to take this thing—raising a child—that’s already next to impossible, and make it even fucking harder?