“It might be the most important book about being a parent that you will ever read.” –Emily Rapp Black, New York Times bestselling author of The Still Point of the Turning World “Brooks’s own personal experience provides the narrative thrust for the book — she writes unflinchingly about her own experience…. Readers who want to know what happened to Brooks will keep reading to learn how the … keep reading to learn how the case against her proceeds, but it’s Brooks’s questions about why mothers are so judgmental and competitive that give the book its heft.” —NPR
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 Times Book 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.
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Small Animals by Kim Brooks, came at me like a giant exhalation, a release of so much of the stress I’ve carried around since become a mother. I forced my advance copy on someone within an hour of finishing it, telling her it would change her life. It’s already changed mine.
Why have we become so fearful as parents? When did parenthood become a minefield of insecurity and shame? With humor, heart, and intelligence, Kim Brooks explores these issues using her own deeply personal story.
This book was a breath of fresh air and a wake up call all wrapped into one. Kim was very brave to share her experience and viewpoint with a world that needs to hear it. The book really touched my heart and provided support.
Everyone tells you parenthood will change you for the better. But few parents describe how the current, high-strung culture of parenting can erode your confidence, feed your worst impulses, and force you back into some regressive, second-guessing state you haven’t experienced since you were a preteen. Kim Brooks offers an engrossing, insightful examination of the countless absurdities, identity crises, and obnoxious obstacles that come with raising children at a time when wisdom and perspective are the rarest qualities around. Small Animals is a beautifully told, harrowing story with a clear moral that all parents should take to heart: This job is very hard. Forgive yourself.
Small Animals is a funny, empathetic, and eloquent report from deep inside the bunker of our national anxiety disorder. Profoundly thoughtful and richly detailed, it shows us how we got here and offers moms and dads some guidance, as well as some moral support, as to how it might be possible to find a way out of our self-inflicted reign of terror.
One otherwise ordinary day, Kim Brooks found herself accused, by virtue of a parking-lot stranger’s cell-phone surveillance, of being a criminally negligent parent. The story of what followed, smoothly interspersed with cultural reflections, anecdotes, and bracingly honest, often droll, introspection, is both a can’t-put-it-down narrative and a sharp diagnosis of the fears, guilt, and costs to both parents and children of the contemporary fixation on keeping kids safe. Written in a voice that is crisp and unpretentious but dives deep, Small Animals is a pleasure both to read as a memoir and to mull over for its cultural insights.
Kim Brooks is a great storyteller. She has seamlessly woven together journalism and personal narrative to form a book that is the perfect antidote to our culture of over-parenting ― a book that is calming but also alarming, because it shows how far we’ve gone off the tracks. Any mother or father who is currently sipping and self-medicating and endlessly Googling their way through the fear factory of early parenthood must read Small Animals. It will give them something those other fixes cannot offer: necessary perspective.
This thoughtful, thought-provoking book is part memoir, part examination about our modern American parenting culture, which is often fueled by anxiety and judgment. While I am not a particularly anxious parent, I did find Kim’s personal story moving, and her research enlightening. I want to talk about it with every parent I know.