There’s so much we are responsible for as parents—their welfare, their grades, getting them to and from where they need to go. We have to feed them. We have to love them. We have to protect them.

It’s a lot. It’s expensive. It’s exhausting.

​All these demands​ on us can make us kind of self-centered. We have this little bubble—our family—that we’re tasked with, and our overwhelmed-ness can make it hard to be that interested in how other people are doing, especially people who are different or far away from us. But as we talk about in ​The Daily Dad book​, part of being a great parent is understanding that “our kids” shouldn’t just refer to the ones in our care. The Stoics remind us that we have an obligation to the kids in the neighborhood, in the county, in the state, in the country, in the world.

“I need my neighbor’s children to be okay so that my children will be okay,” Senator Raphael Warnock said recently. “I need all of my neighbors’ children to be okay, poor inner city children in Atlanta and poor children of Appalachia. I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza, I need Israelis and Palestinians, I need those in the Congo, those in Haiti, those in Ukraine, I need American children on both sides of the track to be okay.”

A world where needless suffering happens to any kid is a world where it can happen to your kid. A world where people are indifferent to the fates of people different from them is a dangerous world to send your kid out into. Our fate—our kids—are all tied up with each other.

“Society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul,” Frances Watkins Harper said. “We are all bound together in one great bundle of humanity.”

Don’t let parenting make you insular. Don’t let it close you off. Your kids opened you up emotionally, let them also open you up culturally, socially, politically. You need others and others need you. We all need to be ok. We’re in this together.