Two New Books to Help You Accept That No Parent Is Perfect
"My Life has many Misfortunes," wrote French philosopher Michel de Montaigne in the 16th century, "most of which never happened." Not coincidentally, Montaigne is also considered the father of the personal essay, which has these 500 years later begotten a populous line of literature the parenting memoir in which nothing terribly bad happens. The newest arrival in this family is Kim Brooks' Small Animals Parenting in the Age of Fear. The misfortune that befell Brooks was that when she left her 4-year-old son in a perfectly safe and cool car to run into Target for less than 10 minutes, someone reported it to the police, and a warrant was put out for her arrest. Nasty, but not life-threatening. She wrote an essay in 2014 that went viral about how impossibly judgy parenting has become, and received, for her troubles, a whole lot more judgment.