Small Animals summary

After the incident, the author felt a mixture of emotions: shock, surprise and bewilderment about facing charges. But most of all, and not really understanding why, she felt shame.

Talking the situation through with her family, she couldn’t fully understand what the supposed threat to her son had been. Eventually, she figured that the police had felt that her son had been at risk of a potential kidnapping, a threat which seemed ridiculous to her.

Talk to your grandparent about their childhood memories, and they’ll likely recount tales that would seem completely unrealistic today.

The author’s father recalled his childhood in Utica, New York, in the fifties. His mother used to send him off to the store when he was just eight or nine. He fondly recalled picking up some bread, a pint of milk and a pack of smokes, remembering his sense of pride in returning home with the correct change and the required items.

Statistically, it would take around 750,000 years for a child left alone in a public space to be kidnapped by a stranger. The abduction of a child from a locked car is fantastically rare.

The author started to get a better sense of this and other parenting risks after she talked to Lenore Skenazy, a well-known blogger, mom and founder of a movement called Free Range Kids.

A friend of the author’s once commented that he wouldn’t let his children out of his sight, not because he worried something would happen to them, but because he worried that someone would see him and judge his actions. Could it be, the author pondered, that fears about children’s safety are really moral judgments in disguise?

A 2016 study by Barbara W. Sarnecka of the University of California, Irvine, suggests the answer is yes.

As she heard stories of other parents arrested for similar reasons to her, the author came to realize that the cost of society’s fear and judgment toward mothers is borne disproportionately by the poor.

Consider Debra Harrell from North Augusta, Georgia. One day in the summer of 2014, a stranger noticed Harrell’s nine-year-old daughter alone and playing happily in a park and called the police, while Harrell was working at McDonald’s. Unable to pay for childcare during the long summer holidays, Harrell allowed her daughter to go to the park. It was in a safe neighborhood in a quiet, family-friendly town.

If it’s a tough time to be a parent in America, it’s a terrible time to be a kid.

Talk to people older than 40 about their fondest childhood memories, and they’ll very likely tell tales of freedom. One of the author’s friends told her that when he was a child in 1970s California, he adored playing baseball after school. He’d grab his glove, meet friends in the park and play until dinner. Today, he reflected, kids would be more likely to be found working on their hitting technique in a supervised training session.