Historian David McCullough has a complaint. He has no trouble falling asleep but he awakens during the night and can’t go back to sleep.

What is troubling him is what is going on in our country. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of biographies of US Presidents John Adams and Harry Truman is worried.

He sees our foundation crumbling.

Under assault are the principles on which our country became the most powerful, wealthiest and generous in the world.

I’m concerned, too. Despite the incompetence of almost every socialist government in history, the leftists have taken over higher education. Now they are doing the same in our public schools, the mainstream media and every where else it seems.

We live in an age of tolerance for left wing ideas and apparently nothing else.

IN CONTRAST, Wendy Wang grew up in a working-class family in China which has the world’s biggest communist party.

Like many Asian parents, her mother taught her to work hard and gain a good education before beginning a family.

Having a child outside marriage never crossed her mind. It wasn’t done.

Less than 4% of Chinese births are born to unwed mothers. The same is true in India, Japan and South Korea.

The Asian path to success teaches delayed gratification. It requires education first, then work and finally marriage.

In Asia – unlike America where the media promote free sex, free money and political correctness – public morality and their media reinforce the success sequence.

IF MILLENNIALS want to know the keys to success, they need to follow the success sequence Wendy Wang and her friends did.

They say that the millennials are more likely to flourish financially if they follow the success sequence: Get at least a high school education, work full-time, and marry before having children, in that order.

Some moderates and conservatives are concerned about the leftist indoctrination going on in college classrooms.

They are suspect university degrees may not be worth what you pay for them unless you are going into a highly technical field.

A recent study at the American Enterprise Institute is titled, The Millennial Success Sequence: Marriage, Kids, and the “Success Sequence” among Young Adults.

They persuasively argue if millennials follow this success sequence, they will have a 97 % chance of not being poor by the time they reach their young adult years.

In fact, 86% of those studied had family incomes in the middle class or above.

FOR MOST of us, our children will be our most expensive investment. They will cost far more than a home or anything else.

Yet they are our investment in our nation’s future. They will carry the torch.

Tracking young adults from their teens to early adulthood, sociologists found in ages 28 to 34 that 53% of millennials who failed to complete all 3 steps were poor.

The poverty rate fell to 31% among millennials who completed high school, 16% among those who did and a full-time job, and 3% who put marriage before babies.

How will you share the importance pf this sequence with your children,

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Jerry Bellune’s new $9.99 digital book, “The Art of Compelling Writing,” is available now at Amazon.com. Chronicle readers can get a copy for $4.99 by emailing him at JerryBellune@yahoo.com