Small Animals Quotes

“Feminists frequently debate which elements of systemic and internalized sexism most need to change in order for more women to run for political office or rise to the top of their companies or colonize professions from which they’ve been historically excluded. Undoubtedly, there are many. But maybe not expecting and encouraging women to worry about every fucking thing that happens in their household might be a solid place to start.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“Yes. Let’s be honest. I’m a privileged white woman who left her kids in a $30,000 minivan watching Dora the Explorer to go in for a Starbucks. Is there any clearer picture of privilege than that? But no matter what color you are, no matter how much money you have, you don’t deserve to be harassed for making a rational parenting choice.”

It’s funny, but in all the time that had passed, I had never thought about what was happening in quite those terms—as harassment. When a person intimidates, insults, verbally abuses, or demeans a woman on the street, in the bedroom, at the office, in the classroom, it’s harassment. When a woman is intimidated or insulted or abused because of the way she dresses or her sexual habits or her outspokenness on social media, she is experiencing harassment. But when a mother is intimidated, insulted, abused, or demeaned because of the way she is mothering, we call it concern or, at worst, nosiness. A mother, apparently, cannot be harassed. A mother can only be corrected.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“Are you afraid someone will hurt them?” I asked.

She lifted her fork, paused for a moment, seemed to be considering. “No,” she said. “Well … I don’t know. I guess it’s other people. I worry that if I let them out of my sight, other people will see us and think I’m doing something wrong. I feel like it doesn’t matter what I think; that if other people think I’m doing something dangerous, then it’s dangerous. I suppose I can’t quite tell where my own anxieties end and other people’s begin. I don’t know if I’m afraid for my kids, or if I’m afraid other people will be afraid and will judge me for my lack of fear.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“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.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“And one doesn’t have to look hard or long to see that parental fears do not always correspond to the most apparent and pressing dangers children face.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“All the way home, I told myself how wonderful and selfless it was that I had decided to stay home full-time with my baby, that I didn't have to dump him in some soulless center or hire a stranger to raise him. Whenever friends or family members or people I met would ask me how I'd come to this decision, I didn't say, "I'd never get a job that would pay me enough to afford decent childcare." And I didn't say, "I have no family nearby who are willing to help with regular childcare." And I didn't say, "I live in a society whose policies reflect the fact that it is still deeply ambivalent about mothers working." Instead, I'd say, "I just know it is the best thing for us.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“How did you get through it?” I asked her. I was hoping she was going to recommend a book, a pill, some quick fix to make this feeling of inadequacy go away.

Instead, she looked at me kindly, quite earnestly, and said, “You know, I think after years and years, I learned to stop giving a fuck. If people I knew, friends or relatives or strangers or whoever, had an opinion about what kind of mother I was or wasn’t, if they thought I was making mistakes, or doing things the wrong way, being too this or too that, being selfish by not giving all of myself to my kids, I eventually decided, fuck ’em. I’m doing the best I can in a culture that offers parents little material or emotional support. If people have a problem with the way I’m doing it, fuck every last one of them. And it’s funny—that anger—that was what got me to a place where I could finally stop caring and enjoy the little monsters. That’s when I started feeling better.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“As Redleaf sees it, the biggest problem is that individuals, the people who called the police on Debra Harrell, are trusting a system that is inherently biased (as most systems are in this country) against poor people and people of color.

“There’s an assumption,” Redleaf told me, “among the general public, that it’s always better to make a call, even if you’re not sure what you’re seeing, because these people are professionals and if there was no real neglect, then the system will sort it out. Well, what we find is, they often get it wrong when they try to sort it out. The caseworkers at protection agencies aren’t licensed social workers. They often have minimal training. Police certainly aren’t experts on parenting or childcare. So basically we as a society have entrusted people who have no real training or serious knowledge about children and families with critical issues involving children. And they are making decisions about who gets to be a parent and who gets to raise their children and whether you’ll be labeled a child-abuser and unable to work.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“Sarnecka summarizes the findings this way: People don’t think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They think it is immoral and therefore dangerous.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“In trying to promote a spirit of acceptance, it has become common to say things like, “Every mom makes the best choice for her family.” Maybe. Another way to look at it is that we each get to choose from a handful of lousy options, then we try to make the choice go down easier by telling ourselves that what we chose makes us unique and special, better than those who chose a different way.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“For six years, I’d assumed this was an inevitable transformation, an inherent part of parenthood. It seemed to be what most parents (but especially women) did, moving their children to the absolute center of their lives and pushing everything else—marriage, friendship, civic engagement, creative work—out to the distant edges where maybe, possibly, it could be revisited in fifteen or twenty years. Or at least, I thought it was parenthood we were moving to the center, but what if that was only part of it? What if the thing taking up so much space was not the fact of parenthood itself, the actual relationship with our children, but the feeling surrounding that relationship, the fearful feeling that we could never quite do enough?”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“One of the findings of Barbara Sarnecka’s study on risk assessment and moral judgment, the study in which people were asked to evaluate the danger children were in when left alone under different circumstances—and the moral “wrongness” of the parent who had left them—was that when participants were told a father had left his child for a few minutes to run into work, the level of risk to his child was equal to the risk when he left the child because of circumstances beyond his control (when he was struck unconscious by a car). When a woman was running into work, the moral judgment was closer to the level expressed at her going shopping or having an affair. I’ll admit it—I love this finding. I relish the way it makes plain and undeniable something we all sort of know but aren’t supposed to say: 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.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“When you make it a crime to let your child play in a park or wait in a car,” Pimentel says, “you’re saying that good parenting is the kind of parenting practiced by affluent white people in suburban America at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“When it comes to our current fears regarding unsupervised children, we see both versions of folk wisdom at work. In the sixties or seventies, a child could walk to school or wait in a car because people were better, the world less violent, we say. But also, parents were dumber. They simply didn’t know. Sure, parents used to leave kids on their own, but they also let them drink Kool-Aid by the vat and play with toy weapons the NRA might find a touch aggro. They let them build forts in the trunks of station wagons careening down the freeway or swim without sunscreen until their skin blistered. Parents let kids wait in cars because they were idiots. But also, on average, because it was safer, because people were better then, gentler, less monstrous. It sounds so nice and pleasant, this safer, simpler past. It sounds almost too good to be true.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“As Furedi explains it, in the modern American family, parents dissect almost every parenting act, even the most routine, analyzing it in minute detail, correlating it with a negative or a positive outcome, and endowing it with far-reaching implications for child development. “It is not surprising,” he writes, “that parents who are told that they possess this enormous power to do good and to do harm feel anxious and overwhelmed.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“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?”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“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?”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“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,”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“Technology has vastly increased our ease and access to judgment. Our opportunities to disapprove of each other, to feel outrage at what others have done or are doing has become unlimited. At any moment I can plug myself into a community and try to manipulate my place in the hierarchy by expressing judgment. We don’t have to go out and kill a buffalo and bring it back for the tribe anymore to move up the hierarchy. We just open our browser.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“Fear is a feeling, but it takes up space. We invent it, and it becomes an artifact of our penchant for telling stories about the future, stories that help us order a chaotic and unpredictable world. Because we inhabit the world with other people, fears do not exist in a bubble. Often, they are communal, passed along airwaves and the internet and overheard in bits of conversation. But do we choose our fears, or are we as individuals less implicated than that; are we mere particles of dust, moved this way and that way by currents of anxiety?”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“The world is supposed to make sense. We want and need the things that happen to us and to those around us to adhere to laws of order and justice and reason. We want to believe that if we live wisely and follow the rules, things will work out, more or less, for us and for those we love. Psychologists refer to this as the Just World Hypothesis, a theory first developed by the social psychologist Melvin Lerner. Lerner postulated that people have a powerful intuition that individuals get what they deserve. This intuition influences how we judge those who suffer. When a person is harmed, we instinctually look for a reason or a justification. Unfortunately, this instinct leads to victim-blaming. As Oliver Burkeman writes in The Guardian, “Faced with evidence of injustice, we’ll certainly try to alleviate it if we can—but, if we feel powerless to make things right, we’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: we’ll convince ourselves that the world isn’t so unjust after all.” Burkeman cites as evidence a 2009 study finding that Holocaust memorials can increase anti-Semitism: “Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves.” So what happens when the victim is a child, a little boy walking to school, a little girl riding her bike, a baby in a car, victims impossible to blame? Whom can we hold accountable when a child is killed or injured or abused or forgotten? How can one take in this information, the horror of it, and keep on believing the world is just? In his history of childhood in America, the historian Steven Mintz defines a “moral panic” as the term used by sociologists to describe “the highly exaggerated and misplaced public fears that periodically arise within a society.” Mintz suggests that “eras of ethical conflict and confusion are especially prone to outbreaks of moral panic as particular incidents crystallize generalized anxieties and provoke moral crusades.” The late 1970s through the early 1990s was a period in American history rife with sources of ethical conflict and confusion.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“Her name is Lenore Skenazy, and she founded a blog, a book, and a movement called Free-Range Kids.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“I wanted to say something hurtful like, "I might leave my kid in a car for a few minutes, but at least I don't leave him to stare at a wall at some sh*tty day care five days a week.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“And yet, she wasn't in the group very long before she started to notice something else, a strain of competitiveness that seemed to emerge whenever the women were together.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“Rather than questioning the system and the culture and the lack of support that makes it so hard for all of us, we turn against one another, take pride in our differences, flaunting and justifying whatever path we've chosen, as though any mother would "choose" to leave her child forty hours per week, fifty weeks per year, if there were more flexible options-- as though any new mother would "choose" to give up her work entirely, her financial independence, her career, her education, a chance at stimulating and productive life among other adults if there were better possibilities or compromises.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“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”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“Middle- and upper-middle-class mothers can be excoriated for failing to appreciate the support that so many others lack. Working-class and poor mothers can be pilloried for their ignorance and inattentiveness and inability to provide the kind of care middle-class children receive. And those who criticize them can rest assured it’s not women they hate, or even mothers; it’s just that kind of mother, the one who, because of affluence or poverty, education or ignorance, ambition or unemployment, allows her own needs to compromise (or appear to compromise) the needs of her child. We hate poor, lazy mothers. We hate rich, selfish mothers. We hate mothers who have no choice but to work, but also mothers who don’t need to work and want to do so.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“I was beginning to understand that it didn’t matter if what I’d done was dangerous or wrong; it only mattered if other parents felt it was dangerous and wrong. When it comes to kids’ safety, feelings were facts, and such “facts” often led to disapproval and judgment.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“I saw what was happening, the way my privilege was shielding me from the more unpleasant elements of the process, and a part of me recognized that it was wrong to quietly and gratefully accept this protection. Another, stronger part of me was fine with this. I was too scared to choose fairness over my being able to avoid being fingerprinted or having to wait for hours alone in a cell while my case was processed.”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear

“At some point very early in my life, it was impressed upon me that the worst thing a human being could endure was the loss of a child, that there is no cost too high to pay if it protects one’s child from harm. I never questioned or doubted this assertion. But what happens when this same way of thinking is used to shape policy and law?”
― Kim Brooks, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear