Back in 2015, my best friend Cam Edwards and I co-wrote Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice. Regnery had asked whether I had any ideas for a nonfiction book. The idea I liked best was a sales pitch for being a responsible adult and a discussion of how the most intimidating responsibilities in life — a “real job,” marriage, and fatherhood — are the path that leads to true happiness, or as close as we can get to it. By contrast, the cultural trend of men experiencing an “extended adolescence” well into their twenties and thirties is, I argued, a path to ennui, depression, and existential torpor.

At the time, I had a seven-year-old and a five-year-old, and I occasionally sensed a subtle objection from some fathers, usually older than I, regarding the book: Hey, buster, you’ve barely started raising your children, what the heck do you know? They didn’t necessarily disagree with the book’s premise; they just thought my writing on parenting was akin to a rookie NFL player’s publishing a memoir after his first year.

I have two teenagers now. First, thank you for your prayers. I used to joke that you hear about the “terrible twos” because three-year-olds and four-year-olds have publicists. Parenting preschoolers is like trying to do math in your head while a cacophony blares in your ears. Parenting teenagers requires doing algebra in the eye of a hurricane. When your kids become teenagers, your days of dealing with literal poop are well behind you, but now you’re coping with myriad metaphorical versions of it.

We’ve had our share of teenage moodiness, slammed doors, furious arguments, tears, and emotional ups and downs at the Geraghty house. In a sign that God has a wicked sense of humor and an appetite for irony, my teenagers have a preternatural gift for smart-alecky responses that go right up to the line of outright disrespect and lean their torsos over it, while technically keeping their toes on the correct side of that line. A careful review of all available evidence indicates that they did not pick up this habit from their mother. Each time they see me take a sudden dose of teenage snark, my parents nearly pee themselves with laughter as I get a taste of my own medicine from about three decades ago.

Humorist Sam Levenson observed, “The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.” He also contended that insanity is a hereditary phenomenon in that you inherit it from your children.

As with just about every other family in America — make that the world — the Covid pandemic threw a massive curveball into our lives. Lots of us who had spent years trying to limit our kids’ screen time (echoing our parents’ telling us to turn off that TV and go play outside with our friends) were suddenly forced to stand by as our children’s education became nothing but lengthy stretches of staring at a screen.

I can’t stand a Zoom meeting that goes more than a half hour, but for at least a year we were supposed to tell our kids to endure five-hour de facto Zoom meetings, four or five days a week. If a prison tried to run a program like this for convicted felons, the ACLU would file a lawsuit contending it was cruel and unusual punishment. It’s as if the nation’s boards of education all remembered that 1984 Apple commercial that evoked Orwell — in which sad-eyed drones stared at a screen, passively absorbing their lessons, numbed into a near-drooling stupor — and said, “Hey, that approach sounds promising!”

In our house, the worst part of the pandemic was January 2021, but it had nothing to do with January 6. We had just lived through 2020 and reached New Year’s Eve, when we watched that idiot New York City mayor dance in Times Square alone with his wife while the NYPD kept the general public away for fear of a Covid outbreak. And we were all thinking, At least we’re finally done with this.

And then January arrived, and . . . nothing much changed. The overwhelming majority of us were still waiting on the vaccines. School was still remote, most events were still canceled, and self-appointed mask police were still yelling at strangers in public. And as 2021 began, I could tell that my younger one was unnaturally, troublingly bummed — in a deep, listless funk of not really enjoying anything. We were coming up on a year of putting life on hold: birthday parties, vacations, sleepovers. The previous autumn had featured weekends of masked flag football; every time my son failed to cover the receiver, I assured the coach he was just practicing social distancing. But winter was miserable other than on the day it snowed, and all the kids went out sledding, a joyous reappearance of normalcy.

In my neck of the woods, schools didn’t go back to in-person classes until March 2021. But the moment they did, my younger child’s mood brightened because suddenly his life was more than a screen. New days brought the unexpected again, alongside the stimulus of interacting with flesh-and-blood people. Nearly overnight, my son transformed from sullen and quiet to a chatterbox.

At the start of the 2022 school year, one of my best friends began a new job at an elementary school that taught kindergartners through fifth-graders. After a few months, he said that the third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade kids were terrific but that he was having discipline problems with the kindergartners and the first- and second-graders. Often it was just the basics, like getting them to understand that they were supposed to stop talking when the teacher spoke. He pointed to a reason I hadn’t immediately thought of: Because of the school closures during Covid, this was the first time a lot of them had been inside a classroom.

Around that time, I also spoke to a wise educator who observed that many kids were two years behind where they normally would be in their social development. The middle schoolers were acting like elementary-school kids, and the high schoolers were acting like middle-school kids. It’s no surprise that when schools reopened their doors, they saw more fights and discipline challenges. When you take the normal hormonal and mood swings of teenagers, add stress, and subtract one to two years’ worth of socialization, you get something as potentially explosive as nitroglycerin.

It wasn’t just the pandemic and school closures hitting families; it was also the ubiquitous social media, addictive as crystal meth. (If they keep you staring at your phone all day and rarely if ever looking up or talking to people, shouldn’t they be called “antisocial media”?) Add to that pop culture, which seems tailor-made to generate body-image anxieties, exacerbate every conceivable social tension, celebrate the shallow and narcissistic, and undermine any parental message about the importance of hard work, persistence, and doing the right thing even when it’s difficult.

As parents, we just wanted a little bit of help in making the world safe and good for our kids. Instead, we got a TikTok-inspired “devious lick” competition, encouraging teens to trash their high-school bathrooms and steal school property. A Netflix series that attempted to dramatize the tragedy of teen suicide inadvertently glamorized it and triggered a short-lived spike in teen suicides. And advocates for labor unions are now trying to convince people that teens’ getting a summer job at Chick-fil-A is an egregious example of child labor.

I know that the slick executives, creative minds, and marketing mavens of Hollywood and Silicon Valley and various interest groups do not wake up every morning and ask, “How can we undermine all of the world’s parents today?” It just feels that way.

It seems there’s never been more widespread interest in getting kids interested in world affairs and current events, and yet the main way of cultivating that interest is to tell them that climate change will cook them, a mass shooting could happen at their school at any time, America is a cesspool of hate and intolerance, and changes in the global economy mean they’ll always live with dire financial uncertainty. No wonder American teens are more depressed than ever. Some grown-up is always telling them that everything sucks and they’re doomed.

If you go on a cruise — say, ahem, with National Review in Alaska, June 2024 — the voyage begins with a mandatory lifeboat drill, and during the drill the crew makes clear that evacuations still honor the traditional code of “women and children first.” It’s not merely obligation or social pressure, or the cold logic that women and children are more likely to be vulnerable in a dangerous situation, that makes men honor that code. Men, at their best, are protectors. We take on particular responsibilities, risks, burdens, and challenges because, on some level, we’re made for this. John 15:13 declares, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Very few of us are aiming for that scenario, but we’d all like to believe that in a moment of crisis, we would demonstrate love by declaring, “You, your safety, and your survival are more important to me than I am to myself.”

And that’s parenting: waking up one morning and discovering that an enormous amount of your own soul is invested in someone else. Your children’s triumphs make you feel better than your own triumphs, their setbacks and disappointments hurt more than your own. (My wife and I have noticed that it’s rarely a good idea for kids to tell their parents they’re having a fight with a friend. The kids will usually work it out, forgive, and move on. But parents don’t forget and will keep a little mental black mark next to that friend’s name for the rest of time. When you conclude that someone has wronged your child, you discover a capacity for holding grudges that is so intense that the Hatfields and McCoys would tell you to let it go.)

Assume that somewhere around here in this essay, the NR editors will cut out several paragraphs of me gushing about my kids’ report cards, superlative achievements in afterschool clubs and programs and summer camps, and their dynamic performances on the flag-football field against competitors who seem old enough to drive themselves to the game.

And I know the eye-rolls that greet a parent who just won’t shut up about how amazing his kids are. But cut us dads a little slack; there’s no point in bragging about what we’ve done. We’re adults, we should be capable of doing tough things! The fact that our kids have done something great is way more impressive, because in our minds they were spitting up baby food just a few years ago. Any accomplishment becomes exponentially more extraordinary when you’re watching someone sing, or run, or create, and you realize, There was a time when I had to teach this person how to use the toilet. And that time never seems as long ago as the calendar insists.

Yes, some parents live vicariously through their kids. And maybe a quarter or a third of parental pride is wanting to share the evidence that, so far, you’re doing this parenting thing correctly. But that remaining two-thirds or three-quarters is pride in them, that they somehow managed to do this thing — maybe overcoming any errors you made in the endlessly improvisational job of parenting.

Not everybody is cut out to be a parent, and not every man is cut out to be a father. If the thought of fatherhood fills you with fear, maybe you’re accurately sensing that it isn’t for you. Or maybe it’s a sign that you take the responsibility of fatherhood seriously. A little fear can be a good thing — it’s a sign that we care about something and recognize what’s at stake.

I’ll let you in on a secret: As a parent, you’re always going to have to trust your instincts. There’s no comprehensive rule book on parenting; and, anyway, the authors of parenting books, as smart and well-researched as they may be, never met your kids. You’ll screw up sometimes. (Hopefully, your spouse will be there to gently or not so gently nudge you in the right direction.) And, as in many other aspects of life, doing the right thing will rarely make you popular. Your kids will need limits and discipline, and some days they’ll resent you for it. But kids know on some level that they need limits and that the responsible parent or two who is setting and enforcing them is doing so because he or she cares. It’s the children whose parents allow them to do anything they want who often harbor doubts about whether they’re really loved.

What else are you going to do with your life? Yes, we can find meaning in a lot of places in life — romantic relationships, friendship, community, faith, work, art, the honing of a skill, travel, and discovery. And if you have a single- or double-income, no-kids life, and it works for you, God bless ya. But for most of us who have seen a small person emerge from our wife, fatherhood gives life unparalleled meaning. Buddy, it matters if we get out of bed in the morning, because somebody needs us. Parenthood, for a lot of us, may well be a de facto antidepressant — not because you always feel good, but because you no longer have any time to sit around feeling bad. Your kids will always need you in one way or another — first for bottle-feeding and diaper-changing, then as fellow pretend superheroes and to apply Band-Aids to skinned knees, and then, when they’re teenagers, as a free personal Uber service or, once in a great while, for unexpected deep talks about the meaning of life.

As those essays by the aged warn, the only people who will really remember the overtime you put in at the office will be your children. A lot of what we do on a day-to-day basis doesn’t matter much in the long run. That seemingly all-consuming work project, the striving for that big promotion, those intractable deadlines, that unexpected challenge that seemed so stressful — in a decade or two, few will remember and even fewer will care.

Don’t get me wrong, work is great, and on my best days as a reporter and writer I have a little tiny bit of influence over those who read me — maybe I can get them to see something in a new light, leave them knowing more than before, or simply make them laugh, hopefully on purpose. When I keel over, though, you probably won’t attend my funeral. (If you do, thanks in advance.)

But I know my kids will be there, because what I did with them, day after day, night after night, year over year, mattered so much more. I won’t pretend to have everything figured out about life, but I did figure out the immeasurable value in being one link in a great chain of family, stretching back to our ancestors and continuing into the future, into whatever the world throws at us next.

Besides, my kids might live long enough to see the New York Jets win the Super Bowl someday.