How to protect children

How to protect children is a question the novel returns to across generations and settings, from a puppet show about Rapunzel to the daily care of a newborn and the dangers of an online world. It is not presented as a problem with a single solution: neglect leaves children exposed, but control cannot keep every danger out, and the language of protection can even be used to justify harm. The novel instead measures care by what adults notice, what they take responsibility for, and whether their efforts leave children room to live.

A fairy tale as a way of asking

Cal gives the question its clearest formulation while making a sock puppet for a children’s show. She reads Rapunzel as a story about the limits of protection. The old couple has the child but does not safeguard her, and she is taken; the enchantress then hides the girl in a tower and restricts her freedom. Yet the prince finds a way in. One form of care fails through inattention, another through confinement, and neither can keep the wider world outside.

For Cal, the tale gives shape to a fear that otherwise has no easy answer. She links its old question to German peasants who told stories about protecting children and to the present day: new fears repeat ancient ones. The puppet is visibly handmade, but Cal expects the children watching the performance to treat it as real, perhaps even more real than the adult performing with it. The scene suggests how stories can make a danger imaginable and discussable without resolving it. The question persists because parents cannot know in advance which threats will reach a child, or what kind of protection will prove sufficient.

Care in ordinary family life

The novel also makes protection concrete in the domestic details surrounding Apollo Kagwa, Emma Valentine, and their newborn son, Brian Kagwa. Before the birth, their back room was a lounge lined with bookshelves; it now holds the Moses basket in which Brian sleeps near his parents. They have bought only the immediate necessities, including newborn diapers, sleepers, and baby wash. Emma’s job has gone to half time, with the possibility of losing it altogether, so the couple has had to delay purchases and plan carefully. Apollo nevertheless stands in the doorway imagining the things he wants to provide. His wish to give Brian more arises alongside the practical limits shaping what the parents can afford.

Care is not left to Apollo and Emma alone. When Emma is struggling to get Brian to latch, Kim Valentine takes the baby so the midwife can check him, while Lillian Kagwa comforts Emma and shares that she had faced the same difficulty as a new mother. Their food and practical help turn family support into an immediate response to need. The scene does not make care effortless: Emma is frustrated and in tears, and the assistance matters precisely because she is having difficulty on her own.

Apollo’s early-morning routine with Brian gives a name to a newer model of fatherhood. He carries and dresses the baby, changes diapers, does housework, cooks, researches infant development, and shares the work of feeding and tending the child. The novel presents these New Dads as trying to correct the omissions of older generations, while admitting that they are making up parts of the role as they go and are frightened. That uncertainty is not treated as proof of failure. Attention, shared labor, and a willingness to learn are part of what protection looks like.

Work, separation, and the limits of reassurance

Emma’s return to work shows that care is shaped by competing responsibilities. She loves being a librarian and hopes to serve children as Ms. Rook once served her, as a safeguard and a source of relief. At the same time, she misses Brian intensely during the day, and the physical demands of feeding him make the separation difficult. Her colleagues welcome her back, but their kindness does not remove the strain of returning while she is exhausted and still wants to be with her child.

That strain becomes entangled with Emma’s fear that the baby she holds may not be the same child she gave birth to. She notices differences in his eyes and the way he puckers his lips, and tells Kim that she can sense a difference when she holds him with her eyes closed. Kim answers by placing the fear in context: Emma has returned to work too soon, is exhausted, and lost her parents as an infant. Kim does not confirm Emma’s suspicion; she recognizes how fear of losing the person she loves most might grow from exhaustion and earlier loss.

Emma’s wish to secure Brian’s room with chains around the gate to its fire escape is another effort to make protection tangible. She worries Apollo will argue against it, so Kim offers to help and suggests they tell him it was the doctor’s orders. The plan offers Emma reassurance, but the scene also shows the uneven way a threat can be felt: what calms one parent may be disputed by another. Elsewhere, Emma and Kim recall that after their parents’ deaths they spent five days in the hospital for smoke inhalation and then lived in foster care until Kim turned eighteen. The sisters remember their foster parents, Nathan and Pauleen, with gratitude. Their history underscores that children may depend on care from people and institutions beyond their parents.

Fatherhood, provision, and inherited ideas

William Wheeler’s reflections distinguish material provision from emotional presence. He tells Apollo that he once believed working constantly and providing for his family were enough to make a good father. Looking back, he fears that after twenty or twenty-five years his wife and children did not know him closely, even if they respected him. He also describes the changed economic conditions that leave many couples needing two incomes. His account complicates any simple judgment of parental choices: care takes place within financial constraints, but earning money cannot substitute for closeness or for saying what a family needs to hear.

William has come to recognize that he never told his daughters he loved them, assuming his efforts made his feelings obvious. He hopes a book that mattered to his wife might help show that he is serious about winning her back, and remembers the affectionate nickname he once used before the demands of family life displaced it. His regret is not a claim that material support was worthless; it is recognition that provision alone did not create the intimacy he wanted. In contrast with Apollo’s active, shared caregiving, William sees the cost of learning too late that children need more than a father’s work.

Protection that becomes a threat

The novel’s darker counterexample comes from Jorgen Knudsen’s account of how a predator can exploit modern technology. In the past, he says, he searched for vulnerable children in person; now, an internet connection can make a child who is not being watched easier to find. He compares phones and computers to homes, but points out that a physical home has doors and windows that can be closed, while technology has no equivalent locked entrance. His comparison makes protection a question of access and attention, not just walls and gates.

Apollo encounters one trace of this online danger while reading the Tribute to Baby Brian Facebook page. A regular poster using the name Kinder Garten leaves a cruel comment about a meal inspired by Brian. The post gives Apollo a concrete reason to stop merely reading and respond to what he has found. The online space that connects people can also carry hostility into the family’s life, beyond the limits of a physical home.

Jorgen’s own account further warns that parents can turn the language of protection into an excuse for sacrifice and violence. He describes his son’s belief that the family should revive an old pact with the troll, and frames that belief through grievance about lost privilege and economic insecurity. Kinder Garten, however, says that being raised by his father was worse than abandonment and blames his father’s lack of planning for the sacrifices he made. The contrast exposes the gap between claiming to protect a family and actually caring for a child: a father’s sense of duty does not make every action benevolent, and inheritance can carry destructive ideas as well as responsibility.

The novel’s final image of Apollo with Brian refuses the promise that good parenting can prevent every future hardship. Apollo imagines years of ordinary difficulty: teaching Brian to use the potty, waking at night, coaxing him to eat vegetables, helping with homework, cleaning him up after a fight, and eventually being seen by his son as a failure. He gives thanks for all of it because those years mean Brian has a future in which he can grow, struggle, and form his own judgments. Protection, in this closing vision, is not perfect control or a life without danger. It is the work of remaining present for a child’s life as it unfolds.