THE VANISHING AMERICAN ADULT

Our Coming-of-Age Crisis — and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

By Ben Sasse

306 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $27.99.

Ben Sasse is a lucky man. That, at least, is the impression one gets from reading his new book, “The Vanishing American Adult,” even if the junior Republican senator from Nebraska — a 45-year-old conservative whose political ascent has been remarkably swift — is at pains to deny that luck has had anything to do with it. He might hail from an ancestral line that includes a Lutheran church officer on one side and a manufacturing executive on the other, but he spent his childhood learning the value of “real work,” weeding soybean fields as a 7-year-old and waking before dawn to detassel corn. Any privilege in his upbringing was a temptation to be resisted rather than a boon to be enjoyed. The same now goes for his three children. Last year the Sasses sent their 14-year-old daughter to work on a cattle ranch so that she could experience the “unrelenting encounter with daily necessity,” like learning how to drive a manual tractor and, he proudly recounts, donning shoulder-length gloves to perform rectal exams on pregnant cows.

“At our house we have come to conclude that building and strengthening character will require extreme measures and the intentional pursuit of gritty work experiences,” Sasse writes, and he presents his book as a guide for parents determined not to raise the kind of soft, entitled kids he encountered when he was president of Midland University. He says that the idea for “The Vanishing American Adult” first came to him several years ago, when a group of Midland students were asked to decorate a 20-foot Christmas tree on campus, and they dressed only “the bottom seven or eight feet … the branches the kids could easily reach.” Sasse was “startled” — “shattered,” even. Seeing this Christmas tree “worried me for the kids.” So began his growing awareness of “a collective coming-of-age crisis without parallel in our history.” He noticed that the affliction he observed at Midland could be found in the households of his closest friends and even his own home. His daughters once complained of being unable to sleep because the air-conditioning was broken. Sasse was aghast. “When I was a kid, we had airconditioning in the house … but we never used it.” The fact that his daughters claimed a “need” for air-conditioning left him and his wife with “a heavy sense of failure.”

The nagging anxieties, the feelings of defeat, the inflation of picayune examples to Defcon 1 threats — all signs point to yet another book intended for panicky upper-middle-class parents. What distinguishes “The Vanishing American Adult,” however, is Sasse’s suggestion that it isn’t merely the well-being of a younger generation that’s at stake, but the very future of the Republic. He warns that his anecdotes add up to something far larger, and far more troubling, than poorly dressed Christmas trees and broken A.C.s would initially suggest: American youth have been so coddled that “we lack an educated, resilient citizenry capable of navigating the increasing complexities of daily life.” “Economic disruption” has made “a culture of self-reliance … more urgent than ever before.” Parents need to steer their children away from the dangers of “idleness and passive drift” — of, as he puts it, “affluenza.”