The Vanishing American Adult is written as a reflection on the purpose and nature of education, which, Sasses argues, should extend beyond schooling and classrooms. “Everywhere I go across the country, I hear from people who share an ominous sense that something is very wrong with our kids,” he writes. “We’ve lost something from our older ways of coming of age.” Instead of relying on “institutionalized school-centric childhood[s],” Sasse says, families should develop practices that will prepare their kids to become “fully formed, vivacious, appealing, resilient, self-reliant, problem-solving souls who see themselves … called to love and serve their neighbors.” This is the future he wants for his kids.

Sasse’s proposed cultivation program is a cross between boot camp and a great-books seminar. In a chapter called “Embrace Work Pain,” Sasse encourages families to set their alarms early, maintain a rigorous chore system, and send their kids out to do hard labor; in his case, it was detasseling corn, while his daughter Corrie learned how to care for pregnant cows. Sasse holds up multi-generational relationships, world travel, and voracious reading as ways of building greater empathy and self-knowledge. He spends pages fretting about which 60 volumes he should include in his family “canon,” which he and his wife built to “model … a life saturated by a stack of truly life-changing books” for their kids.

The Republican senator also shows his countercultural streaks. A large portion of the book is dedicated to forms of stoicism, discipline, and self-denial: “There is almost nothing more important we can do for our young than convince them that production is more satisfying than consumption,” he writes. “Anyone who swims so completely in a sea of material surplus as to be unaware of the virtues of the simple life is flirting with great moral risk.” His tips are concrete—cut down on spending, screen time, and for the tired parents, drinking—but the purpose is lofty: “It is very difficult for a rich republic to remain virtuous.”

In fact, everything in the book is ultimately pitched for the good of the republic. Citizens who take little interest in books threaten the idea of democracy, which “assume[s] the ability to read—and a desire to read.” Americans have long held the “ideal that work is a necessary component of becoming a fully formed adult, that a life well-lived entails a forward-leaning embrace of responsibility.” The country’s great challenge is “to create lifelong learners and lifelong producers,” he writes. “The vast majority of the challenge is about nurturing more resilient souls. And governments cannot nurture.”

Even though Sasse is an elected official, or perhaps because of what he’s seen in politics, he believes culture—and the acculturation of the young—is more important than policy. “The heart of the problem we are tackling in this book is well upstream from politics,” he writes, explaining “why this wasn’t a policy book.” Americans “are a drifting and aimless people—awash in material goods and yet spiritually aching for meaning.” His proposals are about recovering this sense of meaning and establishing a shared language for talking about it, thickening the civic culture that serves as the foundation of political deliberation.