Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

by Kim Brooks

People don’t think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They think it is immoral and therefore dangerous. “It’s clearer and clearer that it’s not about safety,”

the part of our brain that deals with assessing threats did not evolve to see threats like diabetes and heart disease, things that kill you slowly over a long period of time.”

We might accept that mothers occasionally want to do other things besides mothering, that they might want to have a career, a social life, a full human existence. But we don’t like it. We hate it, in fact. A father who is distracted for a few minutes by his myriad interests and obligations in the world of adult interactions is being, well, a father. A mother who does the same is failing her children.

“No,” she said. “I don’t worry about the man in the white van, and I’ll tell you why. I’m a Cook County public defender. I have been for twenty years. And never in my twenty years of working there have I ever seen a single child abduction case. Not one. I’ve seen parents who abused their children. I’ve seen parents who killed their children or whose relatives or spouses killed their children. But I work in the building where any case in Cook County would come if someone abducted a stranger’s child, and there just aren’t any. In twenty years, I have never seen a child abduction case.”

But if we’re constantly sending kids the signal that their needs are the most important, that they are the center of our emotional universe, that their needs are more important than the needs of the family as a whole—that’s not a great message to send, right?”

this is the struggle