Well, after the basics of physical survival anyway: of food, clothing, and shelter.

There's something more important than education.

Something more important than religion.

Something more important even than love.

The most important task is managing adversity. We talk endlessly about the cycle of soft times creating soft people, which creates hard times that create hard people, wash, rinse, repeat forever. It doesn't have to be this way. Make sure the children are challenged, make sure they occasionally fail, make sure they can turn those failures around into success, and make sure they don't get broken in the process. This sounds easy, but it's not.

The reason is that, to a certain extent, it takes a village to raise a child. Progressives, most famously Hillary Clinton, have twisted this expression with the notion that the government is that village. This is an evil and horrific lie. An endless chain of uncaring bureaucrats and exploitative "educators" is the exact opposite of a village.

Villages started out as collections of extended families. A child had access to a collection of numerous adults that they had stable relationships with. These adults could be observed, asked for feedback, offer training, advice, and wisdom. In the last few centuries and especially the last several decades, this structure has fallen apart. Extended families have broken down into nuclear families. Nuclear families are breaking down into dual-income and single-parent families. It's become rare for children to have reliable access to even one parent, let alone a network of dozens of their parents' family and peers. This has been replaced with a detached and interminable procession of daycare workers, schoolteachers and administrators, pop stars and social media influencers, etc. Many children now grow up with precisely zero strong adult bonds, some have one or two, and it's rare for them to have more than that.

What's fallen through the cracks is management of adversity. Children still have challenges thrown at them, but it's haphazard. Few parents have the time or energy to manage them. Because of this, failures and the damage caused by repeated failure without healing stacked up and the response was the self-esteem movement. Take away the possibility of failure: no winners, no losers, participation trophies for all, the totality of childhood nerfed for everyone's safety and protection, and the obvious and inevitable result is that every failure becomes a trauma. We are living through the results of this evil and twisted experiment that was imposed on our society.

The best way for a child to be able to face adversity successfully and repeatably is if their life has a stable foundation that includes adults that help manage their exposure to challenges, help them overcome them, and help them pick themselves up after failures. Modern socity does not provide this, and it is up to individuals and familys to adapt.

A way forward is needed. People need to start forming and engaging in stable communities based in shared values, preferably in real life rather than online. While I'm not a fan of religion, I can see where churches have helped to fill this role for some and that can be a good thing. However, in my personal life I've seen quite a bit of serious damage done through churches as well, and the parents ignored it because it was church and you're supposed to do church and therefore we're all going to do church even if it puts the kids through hell. There is no intrinsically perfect group and no perfect solution, and it's the parents' job to manage this. Church is one option, as long as it’s not forced in out of convenience when it’s doing more harm than good.

Families of all kinds should do their absolute best, to the point of making significant sacrifices, to keep grandparents available to children unless there is some particularly toxic element that justifies preventing this. Beyond this, dual-parent households should form strong ties to other sets of dual-parent households with similar interests and values. Single parents should consider forming cooperative groups to help with child-rearing. Some already do this, and good for them. No, this is not as good as dual-parent households, but it's far better than the status quo. I'm not against single-parent groups bonding with dual-parent households in theory, but in practice this is going to often create some emotional and / or sexual jealousy. However it’s accomplished, a good group size is probably eight households, give or take one or two. They should all live within close enough to each other that the children can safely walk, bike, or drive between their homes unassisted. Ideally, the groups should remain stable until the children are fully-grown.

Moving in general and moving out of these groups in particular should be discouraged, to the point of it having perhaps half the social stigma associated with divorce. For children, moving is highly disruptive at best and traumatizing at worse. Like all matters in life circumstances can require it, but these days (like divorce) it is done far too casually and often with little to no consideration for long-term consequences. Very short-distance moves to accommodate growing families are obviously ok, and the acceptable distance (up to a mile or three) increases with the age of the children; just don’t leave the youngest behind. There are plenty of communities where this is a possibility.

The goal here is to create a stable and trusted group of adults that can help each other manage their children’s exposure to adversity over time in the modern, highly-demanding world as it exists today. There are other structures that are possible in theory, including polyamory. I’m not going to say don’t do these, but be aware of the dangers of experimenting on children and that if you experiment and your experiment fails then you should suffer significant social stigma for it. In other words, be so absolutely committed to making it work that you’re willing to make major personal sacrifices for the sake of the kids. Oh, and by the way, please choose your traditional spouses with that kind of care as well.

Random note: Neal Stephenson's novel "The Diamond Age: A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" is an interesting work of science fiction that deals with this topic, set in a somewhat anarchistic world. It's often considered a loose sequel to his book "Snow Crash": there's a tiny, very brief hint that one of the secondary characters in The Diamond Age is was one of the protagonists (but not the Protagonist) from Snow Crash.