Quotes from Kim Brooks

Lke so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class.

Having a kid who begged for 'just a few more minutes' of television was the antithesis of what I had hoped parenthood would be. It was resigning ourselves to a universe of want and consumption.

I don't want to believe it - that parenting itself makes art hard, that you must always sacrifice one for the other, that there is something inherently selfish and greedy and darkly obsessive in the desire to care as much about the thing you are writing or making as you do about the other humans in your life. What parent would want to believe this?

Serious relationships draw us away from the circle of friends that seemed so adequate, so fulfilling. Marriage cements these inward movements. Children draw partners closer, but they can also draw you further away from the friends and lives you once knew.

We need to challenge this assumption that any child who's alone, who isn't being directly supervised and observed, is a child in in peril.

I don't know that I want to live in a world without cheese.

We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.

My husband and I both attended public schools. We believe in the benefits, both individual and communal, of supporting public schools.

I don't know exactly when I started watching television, but I know that Muppets and Smurfs hold privileged places in my memory. Without television, I surely could have mastered several classical languages or learned to play the violin, right?

I always knew my mother loved me, but I also knew just as surely that there were moments, hours, days, when she could hardly cope with her own life, much less motherhood. Often, these episodes came without warning, like a change in weather, and so I became a meteorologist of her dysphoria.

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.

Children are pretty darn smart and capable if we give them space and structure to grow.

A slice of perfectly buttered, warm-from-the-oven bread has been known to bring tears to my eyes.

As a teenager, I'd longed to get my driver's license so I could get away from my parents. Then I'd longed to go to college to get away from the people I'd called my friends.

The desire to keep television out of our son's life was one of the few parenting priorities my husband and I agreed on from the beginning. We debated the pros and cons of co-sleeping, of pacifiers, of chemical-free crib mattresses and baby sign language. The television question, on the other hand, was a no-brainer.

Every time we watch a little story play out inside our head, we're fantasizing, whether we realize it or not, and it seems to me that, though succumbing to fantasies about other people can be dangerous or self-defeating, the act of fantasizing itself is also an essential part of being human, of being capable of both abstraction and empathy.

I think part of the way in which kids develop emotional and psychological resiliency is by having some independence.

This is what shame does to women: It isolates us and makes us feel our stories aren't really stories at all but idiosyncratic flaws.

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.

I love food, but I can't bear to read about it, to talk about it, to discuss the consequences and context of how we consume it. And this is more or less how I feel about raising children, too.

I'm sure all of us can find fault in our own education, and I certainly wished at times that I'd had other options. My own K-12 education may have been free and easy, but it wasn't necessarily very good.

I've harassed pediatricians and nurses, demanded extra conferences with preschool teachers, contacted speech therapists and occupational therapists over delays other mothers probably wouldn't have noticed, stressed over magnet school applications three years before they're due.

'Did our parents really let us do that?' is a game my friends and I sometimes play. We remember taking off on bikes alone, playing in the woods for hours, crawling through storm drains to follow creek beds.

In a country that provides no subsidized child care and no mandatory family leave, no assurance of flexibility in the workplace for parents, no universal preschool and minimal safety nets for vulnerable families, making it a crime to offer children independence in effect makes it a crime to be poor.