In March 2011, Kim Brooks did something that many parents have either done or thought about doing — and it led to a warrant being issued for her arrest. Brooks was rushing to get herself and her two kids to the airport to catch a flight. As she pulled into the Target parking lot to run one last errand, her 4-year-old asked if he could wait in the car. It was a cool day, and so she cracked the windows, child-locked the doors, and ran inside.

“It wasn’t something I had done before,” Brooks says, but “I had all these memories from my own childhood of waiting in the car for a couple minutes while my parents ran errands.”

She returned promptly to her son — still happily playing on an iPad — but Brooks later learned that a bystander had filmed her leaving the car, and sent that recording to the police. She was charged with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

The ordeal prompted Brooks to write Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear, in which she grapples with the expectation that children must be under adult supervision at all times.

“There’s now the expectation that to be a good parent in this country you have to have your eyes on your children every second — or you have to pay another adult to have eyes on your children every second,” Brooks says. “The consequences are that either one of the parents gives up their work … or you pay someone else … which is harder and harder.”

Brooks says that in a country where the cost of childcare can be prohibitive, parents are faced with impossible choices.

“I was trying to understand how it was possible that something I had grown up doing so often — waiting in a car in a safe parking lot — how this had become a crime,” she says. To read more from MARY LOUISE KELLY, click here.