69 Quotes by Kim Brooks

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I consider myself a B-minus mom. I think I would be considered an A-plus dad.

In college, I'd gone abroad to get away from a campus where I felt I didn't fit in. And I started writing fiction, at least in part, because it was a way to feel like I was around people, to feel the energy and hum of others' inner lives, without the real-time frustrations and difficulties of actual relationships.

A lot of my friends aren't parents. I find this culture of all-consuming motherhood so oppressive. Not that I don't like to talk about my kids, but if I'm socializing, I don't want to talk about Montessori versus Waldorf.