A review by rick2
Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear by Kim Brooks
2.0
So here’s what happened. Kim Brooks wrote a blog post about how fed up she was about being prosecuted for leaving her kids in the car outside a target. And because that blog post got some 10M views, and Kim has an advanced degree in English, there is now yet another blog post that has been inflated into a book.
I don’t have kids, full disclaimer. So disregard my opinion if you’re the type of person who does that. And as such I don’t know how I’d actually react to having kids. It’s possible that all my thoughts about this book get completely reversed as soon as I see a positive pregnancy test. I am sure that when you are raising a child, your world becomes myopically focused on that child to an extent, but this book read like a frustrating how not to manuel.
Untreated neuroticism and anxiety bleeds through and ruins what would otherwise would be a mildly interesting examination of middle class child rearing. My dentist liked this book because I ground my teeth through reading most of it. it’s basically what happens when a privileged middle class mom with a MFA in English feels wronged. It’s the Karen-ist of the Karen diatribes. This book is the textual opposite of Xanax and conveys two strong messages.
1. There’s a lot of bullishit out there about raising kids. I think this was the intended message of the book and the author is a good writer so I got the message. thanks.
2. What you don’t examine it in yourself is passed unconsciously to your children. Depictions of backstabbing mommy groups and gossip seemed more of a testament to tolerating shitty friends than I thought it spoke to the universality of modern child rearing. The consistent whine about “I can’t believe I’m being persecuted for this” bled through many of the more interesting examinations of larger context around child rearing and I couldn’t help but think “those poor kids.”
Now I recently (yesterday) finished Empire of the Summer Moon, which depicts the Comanche way of life and it’s decline across the 1800s. And a few days before that a memoir from the women who started BLM which is has a focus on the minority experience growing up in Van Nuys. After hearing about how the settlers and their children existed and the Comanches and their children existed, I found it hard for me to really buy into the modern American myth that “childhood is dangerous” when the vast majority of white middle class kids now survive into adulthood. That thinking is in line with this book, but combine that with the polar opposite experience that minority and lower class populations currently have, and I was way less empathetic than I might have been in regards to this book. It’s seemed like the author spent way too much time rationalizing her experience instead of working on or examining it.
I don’t have kids, full disclaimer. So disregard my opinion if you’re the type of person who does that. And as such I don’t know how I’d actually react to having kids. It’s possible that all my thoughts about this book get completely reversed as soon as I see a positive pregnancy test. I am sure that when you are raising a child, your world becomes myopically focused on that child to an extent, but this book read like a frustrating how not to manuel.
Untreated neuroticism and anxiety bleeds through and ruins what would otherwise would be a mildly interesting examination of middle class child rearing. My dentist liked this book because I ground my teeth through reading most of it. it’s basically what happens when a privileged middle class mom with a MFA in English feels wronged. It’s the Karen-ist of the Karen diatribes. This book is the textual opposite of Xanax and conveys two strong messages.
1. There’s a lot of bullishit out there about raising kids. I think this was the intended message of the book and the author is a good writer so I got the message. thanks.
2. What you don’t examine it in yourself is passed unconsciously to your children. Depictions of backstabbing mommy groups and gossip seemed more of a testament to tolerating shitty friends than I thought it spoke to the universality of modern child rearing. The consistent whine about “I can’t believe I’m being persecuted for this” bled through many of the more interesting examinations of larger context around child rearing and I couldn’t help but think “those poor kids.”
Now I recently (yesterday) finished Empire of the Summer Moon, which depicts the Comanche way of life and it’s decline across the 1800s. And a few days before that a memoir from the women who started BLM which is has a focus on the minority experience growing up in Van Nuys. After hearing about how the settlers and their children existed and the Comanches and their children existed, I found it hard for me to really buy into the modern American myth that “childhood is dangerous” when the vast majority of white middle class kids now survive into adulthood. That thinking is in line with this book, but combine that with the polar opposite experience that minority and lower class populations currently have, and I was way less empathetic than I might have been in regards to this book. It’s seemed like the author spent way too much time rationalizing her experience instead of working on or examining it.