Parenting in late-stage capitalism

My kid fell out of a tree while he was at a camp this summer. He wasn’t injured but the camp called us about it. Am I a bad parent for sending him to a camp where he could fall out of a tree? We left him with a nanny when he was six months old because to pay the bills required two working parents. Does that make us bad parents? How should the state determine if we should keep our child? These are the questions Jessamine Chan asks in The School for Good Mothers, an astonishing debut novel that gave me nightmares, and yet I couldn’t put it down. Frida Liu, tho book’s protagonist, is like so many of us middle-aged working millennials: Overworked and overburdened by the endless little things that must be taken care of in order to do the basic job of parenting. Liu makes one (very big) mistake that transforms her from a flawed person to a danger to her child — at least in the eyes of the state. Chan is among a few artists over the last few years to ponder how modern life expects perfection…