Get small, muchachos
My friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge for the month of April, 2026! Each week, one of us chooses a prompt and we all write posts.
For week 4, I chose the prompt: “You have been given one month away from your obligations to use your talents to enact societal good. What do you go do?”
The best charity is local. My reason is unclear–it just clicks better for me. Maybe it is selfishness; if I can’t see it or change it, I can’t affect it and it can’t affect me. Or maybe the sleeper agent Boy Scout training encouraging me to leave a place better than I found it. A family member needs something? My dollars and I are there in an instant. Someone at church needs something? Blank check. The local food bank is doing a drive? Not a blank check, but they still get something. A dollar goes furthest when you can deploy it yourself. Parenting is the most local charity I have: the daily work of becoming safer, kinder, and more useful to the people closest to me.
That’s why I think that the best thing a person can do to enact societal good is be a good parent. Of course, this is not a panacea–everyone has a parent, everyone thinks they are good (even if they believe that good people believe they are bad people and self-flagellate accordingly), and every parent already thinks they are the good parent. Therefore, I will step right into the no true Scotsman fallacy, avoid discovering the secret third thing that sets Good Parents™ apart, and discuss my experience.
Noticing my faults while parenting is what really motivated me to get into some therapy. Being in a loving and committed relationship already made me want to be better, but parenting really adds the nitrous oxide. Children are so malleable and sensitive–only with age do we learn to adapt and ignore the rough edges of people around us. They have little of that armor (or callus), so the evidence of your faults and flaws is right in front of you, kicking and screaming and flailing.
I want to be better for my partner. I want to be better for my children. Not only because they are all human beings who deserve as much love and care as I can give them, but because raising children who will be good human beings is the highest-impact thing I can think of. Being a better “me” makes the life of everyone I interact with better. Setting them up to be good “them” improves the lives of everyone they may interact with. It becomes a compounding effect–me to my environment to my kids and their environments to their kids and their environments. So if my obligations were all taken care of (looking at you, corporate job and car and home maintenance), I want to enact societal good by being the best parent to my kids I can be.
I recognize that, at some subconscious level, this is calculated to make me feel good in what I am already doing. But I want to be able to rediscover this blogpost in the future at random points to ensure my priority remains where I, an average middle-class white guy, can make the most impact. It is extremely unlikely that I will ever direct the actions of hundreds or thousands of people. Real change is built in small, repeated pieces, and with my children I have the chance to create and help them create the highest number of small pieces in many lives.