Ben Sasse impresses me. He seems pretty intelligent and articulate.

He's got a book, "The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis — and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance."

From the "Face the Nation" transcript, about the book:

Yes, so this book is 100 percent not about politics, and it's 99 percent not about policy. It's about this new category of perpetual adolescence. And, first, let's just say that, over the last two millennia or so, the emergence of a category called adolescence is a pretty special gift. We believe that, when our kids become biological adults, when they hit puberty, they don't have to be fully formed, morally, emotionally, economically, educationally, in terms of household structure. They don't have to go out and be fully adult immediately. They don't have to go off to war, and they don't have to become economically self-sufficient. That's glorious, to have that protected space between childhood and adulthood. But it's only glorious if you understand that it's a transitional state, it's a means to an end. Peter Pan's Neverland is a hell. It's a dystopia. And we don't want to be -- have our kids caught at a place where they're not learning how to be adults. And, right now, we're not tending to the habit formation aspects of a republic.

I boldfaced the sentence that jumped out at me. It's funny, I was just listening to a 2011 "Fresh Air" interview with the children's book author, Maurice Sendak, and he said that when he was a boy, he couldn't imagine growing up, but...

I mean, being a child was being a child - was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn't want to be a child. I remember how much - when I was a small boy I was taken to see a version of "Peter Pan." I detested it. I mean the sentimental idea that anybody would want to remain a boy, I don't - I couldn't have thought it out then, but I did later, certainly, that this was a conceit that could only occur in the mind of a very sentimental writer, that any child would want to remain in childhood. It's not possible. The wish is to get out.