Esther Wojcicki on How to Raise Successful People (Full Q&A)

When it comes to raising successful kids, Esther Wojcicki is three for three. The educator and journalist is the mother of the CEO of YouTube (Susan Wojcicki), the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe (Anne Wojcicki), and a successful doctor. So it’s no surprise that Wojcicki’s book on the topic, How to Raise Successful People, was a bestseller.

Instead, the surprise is how Wojcicki did it, particularly in a world of helicopter parenting where many adults micromanage every aspect of their children’s lives and pressure teachers for better grades. Wojcicki gave her kids a ton of independence, let them learn from big mistakes, and even told them to make their own breakfast.

b.: Why do you think so many parents assume that doing too much — or being a helicopter parent — is how to raise a successful child? How do parents fall into this trap?

Wojcicki: I think the main reason they fall into this trap is that they think they can prevent their child from making the same kind of mistakes they made. They think they’re trying to be helpful, good parents, but what happens is that the child then feels like they can’t do anything effectively or well on their own.

There’s a hidden agenda that neither the child or parent is aware of. The child just thinks, “My mom and my dad are helping me,” but they’re just making it worse, I’m sorry to say. That’s what’s going on and what we need to stress.

If you personally think you always need help writing something — and you can’t write it by yourself — then you’re not going to be able to. You’re always going to need someone to help you. We’re doing more to kids than just that. We’re making it clear to them that the world is a dangerous place and, unless they get the help that a parent can provide, they’re not going to be successful. This even extends to food.

b.: How so?

Wojcicki: The kids end up eating too much because their parents are always asking, “Did you eat enough?” That leads to part of the obesity epidemic. One of my daughters is in pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, and her focus is childhood obesity. And those overprotective parents are forcing their kids to eat, and it sets them on a pattern.

b.: I definitely was a part of the “clean your plate” generation, and now it seems like there’s a lot of evidence that this wasn’t the right thing to do.

Wojcicki: Your body should control the amount of food you want to eat, not your mom or dad. I’ve never seen a child starve themselves, except the ones that get anorexia … because of all these crazy pressures on them to look a certain way. It’s this pressure from parents that is making everyone crazy, including the kids and the parents. The parents are suffering as well because they’re always anxious.

So then we have an epidemic of people taking tranquilizers, or if their kid isn’t doing well in school, then what do they do? They go off to the psychiatrist and get them on Ritalin. He can’t sit still? He needs Ritalin. We have access to all these drugs, and it’s become fashionable for your child to see a therapist. Back in my day, we didn’t know what therapists were, let alone have one.

b.: It seems like there isn’t a lot of insight among parents that this is a result of their own anxieties despite the best of intentions.

Wojcicki: Right; it’s all founded on the best of intentions. I don’t ever want to say that parents are doing this because they’re in some way malaligned — they’re not. They are good people trying really hard to give their kids whatever it takes. They’re just trying too hard.

b.: Are there any stages of development where helicopter parenting is more common or more consequential, or both?

Wojcicki: Younger stages. Those kids can never get it right. And of course they can’t; they’re little toddlers. Parents need to cool it and realize that kids are doing their best. They’re trying their best; it just takes time.

One thing parents lack is patience. Parents become incredibly emotional about this. If it’s something they failed at in school, they find it really impossible to be calm and patient with their child that might be failing at the same thing. That’s why you need a teacher, because a teacher doesn’t have that same emotional connection. They can be more objective and the child can do it 10 times until they get it [right].

I think one of the things that was so special about my program at Palo Alto High School is that I was really patient. I’d let kids revise and revise and revise until they got it right. My theory was that they can learn; it just takes time. And we need to all stop being so impatient about it because it’s only going to make things worse. Turns out, I was right after all those years, and research confirms that.

b.: Before the research caught up, was there a lot of pushback about your more patient strategy?

Wojcicki: The administration was pushing back on me. Other teachers were like, “We can’t let kids do mastery learning. It just takes too much time.” It takes time, but maybe we shouldn’t be trying to do so much with the curriculum. Let’s figure out what we can do so that it works for everybody, not just for you.

But that’s why teachers don’t do it. They don’t do it. They’re already working hard enough and they don’t want to work any harder. I understand that. That’s why I have this acronym, TRICK: trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness.

b.: So what does TRICK look like in practice?

Wojcicki: What I would do is make the initial correction of whatever it was they were doing, and then I would let them do peer editing — because, in addition to peer editing, they have to think about what might be right or wrong with the paper. It’s interesting; kids can find mistakes easier in someone else’s paper than they can in their own paper.

So they were really good at peer editing, and if they didn’t do it right, that was no problem. We’d just do it again and get someone else to help you, or I’d step in and help them. But by giving them this opportunity to do mastery learning — where they mastered something and then got a grade — they could do anything. They could try anything. Their creativity was unlimited because there was never a consequence that they couldn’t handle.

And unfortunately, school [usually] is not like that. School forces kids to do it one time, get a grade for it, and then they add up all those grades. So parents are terrified that “My kid is gonna get a bad grade and he won’t get into Harvard.” Well, so what? Who cares if they get into Harvard or not? They can go to community college and do the same thing.

The pressure parents put themselves under, and the pressure they’re putting their kids under, is creating this epidemic of stressed-out kids, and the only winner is the pharmaceutical industry. I feel bad for all those kids.

b.: Is all this micromanaging at an early age producing more neurotic than successful adults?

Wojcicki: That’s right — neurotic adults who work at companies and are afraid to make a mistake. In my book, I interview the CEOs of companies, and they say the No. 1 problem they have is that they cannot find creative, innovative people who are willing to take a risk. Everybody wants to be reassured on a daily basis. All of these people graduated from big name universities, but it’s an epidemic. It’s everywhere.

b.: Do you think this has a lot to do with why the U.S. maybe can’t keep up with other developed countries [on certain metrics]?

Wojcicki: Unfortunately, this is a worldwide problem. There are helicopter parents all over, but the U.S. is the capital of helicopter parenting. And social media makes it worse, because you can look up immediately, “What should my 5-year-old be doing?” And if your kid isn’t doing that, there’s something the matter with them.

Kids develop at different rates, and people think kids should be standardized — and that is ridiculous. Boys, by the way, have the hardest time of all. All these boys are rebels and they don’t want to follow instructions, and they’re giving everybody a hard time. They fight like crazy.

My theory is that, let’s stop punishing them for not following instructions and give them opportunities to be innovative. Then you will see them shine. By the time boys are 16 or 17, they start to figure out the system and they start to do what is expected.

That’s why you see a lot of boys whose ninth-grade grades are terrible, but by the eleventh or twelfth grade, they get it right. They learn if you’re not going to do it right, you’re not going to go to the school you want.

b.: Regardless of gender differences, it seems that it’s important for parents to model success to their kids. For instance, you were a working parent managing a lot of other responsibilities, and your children got to see you doing this. Did this influence them?

Wojcicki: That is 100% the case. Your kids do what you do; they don’t do what you tell them to do. If you tell them not to speed because they’ll get a ticket, and then they watch you speed? Forget it. They’re gonna speed all the time.

b.: It also seems like a lot of energy that parents spend on hovering and micromanaging could be better spent on supporting kids when they fail. Is this true, and if so, how can parents be more supportive when this happens?

Wojcicki: Yes. First of all, when they fail, the kid is not happy to fail. You should not make it worse by punishing them. All kids want to succeed. The only time a kid wants to fail is if they’re getting back at the parent for something, but that means you set up a really bad dynamic to start.

So one thing you need to do is make sure the communication is open, and in order to do that, both groups have to trust each other. You have to trust that whatever you tell your parents isn’t going to set them off and that they’re going to listen and … help you solve whatever the problem is, along with you.

Most kids don’t tell their parents what they’re doing because they’re afraid of being punished even further. This goes all the way up until adulthood, to the point where young parents won’t let the grandparents in to be with their grandchildren because they’re afraid of being criticized and told what to do all the time.

Grandparents need to realize that they’re not the parents again. They’re there for support, not to boss their kids around. There’s a lot of parents out there who still think they can boss their adult children around. And they say it’s because they made mistakes that they don’t want you to make, but that’s a continuation of helicopter parenting at an older age. You can give advice, and you can say it nicely once, but don’t harp on it.

My friend Julie Lythcott-Haims wrote a book called How to Raise an Adult. She used to be the dean of students for the freshman class at Stanford, and the reason she wrote this book is that all these parents of Stanford students were moving to Palo Alto to micromanage their kids. And there were professors at Stanford who would get calls complaining that their kids were crying over a grade. Could you imagine?

b.: When you first became a parent, did you have a sense of this more hands-off approach from being an educator? Or were you mostly figuring it out as you went along?

Wojcicki: I had one goal for my children when they were born, because the only book I had read was Dr. Spock — and it was all focused on diaper rash and all this and that. He wasn’t into the psychological part of it. So my No. 1 goal was that I wanted my children to be independent as they could be early on. That was it. So I did everything I could to help them learn whatever it was about their environment.

For example, I wanted to make sure they weren’t going to eat plants, because they’re out in the backyard playing by themselves a lot and there are a lot of plants out there that they can nibble. We spent time in the nursery learning about plants and their botanical behaviors, and the kids thought it was normal and fun. And it turns out that a lot of these flowering plants, like azaleas and oleander, if you eat them, they’re poisonous.

I also had a swimming pool and wanted to make sure nobody drowned, so they all learned to swim at a year old. That was not because I was trying to get them ahead on the swim team; it was because they had to protect themselves.

Then I taught them things like how to walk down the street and look and make sure they’re on the right street — where are the street signs, what do stop signs look like. So they learned all of their letters just because they were interested in reading street signs. I did a lot of this stuff just to empower them so they could do it.

I was with my granddaughter this morning, and she’s 7. She’s in charge of vacuuming for the whole house, and it’s a big house — but she knows how to do it. She just helped me vacuum out my car, and she’s 7 years old. I’m not kidding; she is unbelievable. This morning when she woke up, she asked Google Home what the temperature was outside and picked her clothes out based on what was going to be happening that day. I mean, this is an example of what she got from her mom, passed down.

Parents instinctively parent the way they were parented. That is one of those issues. If you don’t like the way you were parented, you need to keep that on [your mind at] a conscious level so that you can make those changes that you wish you could’ve had when you were a child.

That’s why I invented the TRICK philosophy — just remember the word. Am I trusting my child? Am I respecting their ideas by listening at least? Am I giving them as much independence as they warrant at that age? Am I collaborating with my child and not being a dictator? And always remember that kindness is the most important thing of all, because without kindness, none of the other things work.