SMALL ANIMALS

Parenthood in the Age of Fear

By Kim Brooks

242 pp. Flatiron Books. $26.99.

In March of 2011, Kim Brooks intentionally left her 4-year-old son, Felix, alone in a car. For some readers, this sentence will provoke outrage. Others will read the opening pages of Brooks’s book “Small Animals,” which recount that experience in a parking lot in Virginia, with a rising sense of dread, even though it’s clear early on that Felix was unharmed. Parents who’ve allowed their kids to play outside without checking on them every few minutes, let them walk alone to the store or permitted them any of the countless small freedoms that used to be part of an ordinary American childhood, will sense what’s coming: the police.

Every year, Brooks writes, about 37 American children die in hot cars. It’s a harrowing death, often due to oversight — babies left napping and forgotten, parents interrupted from their usual routines. But on the day that Brooks left her son, it was cool enough for jackets, the windows were open and the car was locked and alarmed. Brooks was rushing to catch a flight with her two young kids; she let Felix stay in the car playing on his iPad while she ran into Target on an errand. She was gone for a few minutes, and in that time Felix was observed by a bystander, who recorded a video of him alone in the back seat and gave it to the authorities.

What, exactly, was the crime? Or, more precisely, what kind of danger was little Felix in? “Small Animals” interrogates how we weigh risk as parents, how we judge one another’s parenting and what the costs might be — not just to parents, but to children, too — of a culture of constant surveillance. Brooks’s book attempts to understand what is so scary about leaving a child alone in a car, when the act of driving that child in that same car is, she contends, far riskier. As she puts it, “a child’s chances of being abducted and murdered are way less than one in a million.” She interviews a cognitive scientist, a sociologist and an occupational therapist, along with other mothers who’ve faced arrest for infractions similar to hers — and makes the case that our fears are based on little more than superstition.

Why are American parents so fearful? Is leaving a child in a car considered riskier than driving him because the boogeyman you can’t see is scarier than dangers you face every day? Is it possible, as Lenore Skenazy, an activist who runs a website called Free-Range Kids, suggests to Brooks, that we are more interested in policing mothers than in protecting children — that our idea of a good parent is someone “‘who watches and manages and meddles and observes ceaselessly,” even when the outcome this yields is no safer?