Sign up for Raising Resilient Children, Russell Shaw’s eight-week guide to parenting with more happiness and less worry.

When I was 27, I became dean of students at a school in Northern California. I was responsible for 400 students across grades 6 through 12, immersing myself in the lives of other people’s children and learning so much along the way. But I didn’t have kids of my own.

And then I did. Driving him home from the hospital, I kept twisting around at red lights to check on the tiny person strapped into the car seat behind me. I couldn’t quite believe they were letting me take him home. There was no orientation, no manual, no one checking whether I actually knew what I was doing. Just me, my wife, and this small human we were now responsible for raising into an adult.

That’s the thing no one tells you when you’re 27 and confidently managing other people’s kids or newly a parent yourself: There isn’t a single right way to raise a child. Kids are different, circumstances are different, and anyone pitching a foolproof formula is making a fool’s promise. Still, after 25 years as a parent and more than 30 as a school administrator, I’ve come to believe that some approaches serve kids—and parents—better than others. In my eight-week newsletter series, I want to share some of what I’ve learned. I’m not offering a rulebook. Instead, I’m aiming for an invitation to think a little differently about the job.

Sign up now, and you’ll receive an email from me tomorrow at 6 a.m. ET, and then once a week for seven more weeks. Each week, I’ll discuss a different story I’ve written for The Atlantic. Topics will include motivation, friendship, failure, and AI. I’ll tell you a bit about what inspired the story, why it still feels true to me, and what it might mean for you. I’ll also include an original essay, written just for this course, and I’ll take some of your questions. I don’t have a tidy theory of parenting to sell you, and I won’t pretend that the next eight weeks will resolve the hardest questions that you might be carrying about your own kids. What I can offer is what I’ve noticed along the way: that even on the hardest days, there’s real joy in this work, if you know where to look for it.