In spring 2011, I was arrested for allowing my son, then 4, to wait in a car with the windows open for a few minutes. Since then, I've become unfortunately all too well-versed in the debates around the over-policing of parenting, so a few weeks ago, when I was asked to participate in a radio panel alongside Danielle Meitiv, the Maryland mother who was found guilty of unsubstantiated child neglect for allowing her children to play alone in a park, I readily agreed. The subject of the program was free-range parenting, a movement committed to the notion that children deserve a chance to grow up without constant adult supervision. I’ve never self-identified as a free-range parent, but Danielle and I had something in common other than our parenting philosophies: We’d both been through the surreal, frightening, and humiliating experience of having a stranger, fearful for our children’s well-being, report us to the police.

Then, two weeks ago, the Meitiv children were picked up and detained by police for the second time and held for hours without anyone notifying their parents. The event led me to reflect on a few seemingly simple but surprisingly slippery questions: What kind of parents are the Meitivs really? What kind of parent am I? What do I want out of parenthood and what does it want out of me? What does it mean to be a Free-Range Parent...or an Attachment Parent or a Helicopter Parent or any other kind of parent that can be compressed into a proper noun? Is it possible that with this packaging and name-branding and self-congratulatory exhibitionism that now seems as much a part of parenting as parenting itself, something vital is being lost? What might that something be...and how do we get it back?

When I first learned I was pregnant with my son, I had only two firm convictions about parenting: I knew it was important, and I knew that I wanted to get it right. I was 29 at the time. It seemed to me I’d done a lot since leaving my parents’ home a decade earlier, and yet somehow the accumulation of my experiences felt light and insubstantial. Only as the fetus inside me grew into a human did it seem that fate was taking corrective action. I’d never fought for my country or contributed to the life of a village. I’d never worked on a farm, taught for America, or joined the Peace Corps as I’d hoped I would at 18. Motherhood was the first instance in my life where I was asked to sacrifice anything for anyone. And like most people who find themselves experiencing this variety of late-onset maturation, I absolutely did not want to fuck it up.

I had my baby and proceeded with caution. The best way to ensure against failure, every parent, person, and cultural message told me, was to do my homework, to read up on everything babies and children needed from an emotional, social, physical, psychological, nutritional standpoint — then to simply choose a parenting philosophy that corresponded to my most deeply held beliefs.

At first it seemed daunting, like the process of choosing a college major but with actual human lives at stake. But there were approximately 7 million books to guide me in this journey. There were online communities, message boards, an army of (usually French) psychologists, and my mother. I read a lot of books that are no longer on my bookshelves. I inwardly smirked at friends or family members who were less well-informed. I developed opinions about breast-feeding, breast pumps, midwifery, baby-wearing, tummy time, screen time, infant massage, playgroups, hand sanitizer, private versus public school, self-weaning, sleep training, day care, toddler enrichment, and child safety. I began to write about my opinions. In my minimal spare time I was working on a novel about American Jews during World War II. This writing was hard and painful. But writing about parenting, my ideas about parenting, questions and concerns and rumination — that came easy. For the first time in my life, I felt like a natural at something. There were only two tiny problems chirping away beneath the noise.

The first problem was one of conviction. “All of your essays on parenting have a question for a title,” my husband observed one evening.

“Is that bad?” I asked.

“No. Just unusual, maybe.”

But I knew he was on to something, not a stylistic quirk but something deeper, a lurking skepticism beneath a veneer of confidence. And while skepticism wasn’t necessarily a problem for a writer, its cousin, ambivalence, could be. I knew that for me, writing was a vehicle for thought, and thought needed to contain clarity and conviction in addition to interrogation.

“Whatever,” I said to Pete, and tried to put it out of mind.

The second problem was trickier, harder to dismiss. The problem was this: I was a modern middle-class parent doing my best to protect and do right by my children in every regard, and this trying, this quest for parenting perfection, this earnestness and well-meaning, was making me profoundly depressed. It seemed like the more I learned about “parenting,” the less I understood about my children or myself. I assumed that the problem had to stem from me, from some unacknowledged deficit or flaw. Don’t quit your day job, I said to myself more than once when I felt both over- and underwhelmed by it all, confused by so much conflicting advice, self-conscious and uncertain about every decision. It had to be me, I thought, my problem. Then one day I got arrested for something that seemed so benign, so harmless. That was when I began to wonder if my problem wasn’t mine alone.

In the months of legal action that followed, I reached out to free-range parenting's most prominent spokesperson, Lenore Skenazy, for support, and was surprised to learn that what was happening to me was not a freak occurrence or punishment for a bad choice, but part of a national trend of parents being reported, arrested, and charged with crimes for making decisions that, only a generation ago, defined the norm. After my legal troubles resolved, I wrote about the particulars of the experience and, more broadly, about the atmosphere of fear and anxiety in which so many parents (including myself) now live. I wrote about what seems to be the almost universal desire parents experience to protect their children from all harm, the pain and helplessness we endure when we fail to do so, and, ultimately, the arrogance we display when we begin to see ourselves as our children see us — as omnipotent beings.