You’ll go to the gym and lift heavy stuff. You’ll jump in a cold plunge because you heard there are health benefits. You’ll sit through the most boring meeting of your life if it means you’ll get a client out of it.

Yet here you are complaining about carrying all your kids’ stuff. Here you are telling them not to splash you, that you don’t feel like getting in the pool. Here you are picking up your phone instead of paying attention to the story they are trying to tell you.

In other contexts, we’ll do it no problem. For someone else, we’ll do it because they ask, because it’s a social obligation, because, because, because. But then when it’s our kids, we roll our eyes. We make excuses. We pull the “parent-card,” saying “No,” “Because I said so,” and “Stop it.”

How crazy is that? How mean is that, when you think about it? If it’s anyone we should be doing it for, it’s them.

So do it.