POP CULTURE BOOKS
Kayak, Canoe and Paddleboard Rentals everyday on the Contoocook River
How to Raise Successful People, by Esther Wojcicki (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 279 pages)
The largest selection of Kayaks, paddle boards and canoes for sale in NE! 9 Horse Hill Road, Concord, NH 03303
(603) 753-9804 | ContoocookCanoe.com
127136
Nothing's as good as homemade! Over 20 flavors of homemade hard ice cream Take home quarts and pints. Soft serve & Ice Cream Cakes Also famous for our Italian Sausage and grinders, meatball subs, Chili dogs more!
Dudley’s Ice Cream
846 Route 106 N, Loudon, NH | (603) 783-4800
HIPPO | JUNE 6 - 12, 2019 | PAGE 46
125935
If you haven’t heard of Esther Wojcicki, perhaps you’ve heard of her daughter, the Wojcicki who runs YouTube. Or maybe the Wojcicki who co-founded the genetic testing company 23andMe. How about the Wojcicki who is an epidemiologist and anthropologist who teaches at the University of California, San Francisco. There’s not a slacker among the women in the Wojcicki family, which makes the opening of the matriarch’s new book both heartbreaking and poignant. In How to Raise Successful People, Esther Wojcicki writes about her own childhood, growing up female in a house where the preference was for males. Wojcicki turned 5 the day her parents brought her new brother home from the hospital, and she ran up to him, thinking that he was a special gift, only to be pushed away; her father said something that she said still shocks her today: “Your brother Lee is a boy, and in our family boys are more important.” “He delivered this news as if he had no understanding of how it might affect me. Even now, it’s hard for me to imagine someone saying that to a young child,” Wojcicki writes. This was seven decades ago, and Wojcicki’s parents have passed, but it’s hard to imagine anyone telling Esther Wojcicki and her daughters that men are more important than women today. In fact, Susan (YouTube, net worth $480 million) and Anne (23andMe, $440 million) both made Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of “richest self-made women” list last year. Their late grandfather, meanwhile, was always on the verge of financial ruin, Esther Wojcicki writes. She shared the story, however, not as a means of revenge, but to illustrate the soul-searching that she believes new parents need to do when they have children. Instead of parenting by instinct, she says, it’s important that new parents thoughtfully examine their own childhoods, especially if they were unhappy in some way. “It sounds simple, but we often fail to do it,” she writes. This exercise can also help us forgive our parents for their failings and move on to five strategies that Wojcicki exhorts parents to employ using the acronym she devised: TRICK. TRICK stands for trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness, and while this may sound exactly like something you’d expect from someone who has spent a half-century working for public schools, How to Raise Successful People is neither staid nor predictable. Wojcicki charges out of the gate with a litany of her own parents’ sins, but is equally forthcoming with her own, including the time she told two of her daughters that she was giving each of them the same car; they weren’t too happy when they found out, nor was a grown-up Susan happy when she learned her mother had left her 8-yearold daughters shopping alone at Target. (“It’s Target,” I said. “It’s a well-run store.”) Wojcicki was raising free-range kids decades
before anyone had used the term free-range kids. She believes that parents wrongly baby their children, and that children should receive the same trust and respect that we accord other adults. Babies, for example, should be trusted to fall asleep on their own, rather than parents rushing in to comfort them when they cry. Children who don’t walk or talk “on schedule” should be trusted to develop at the speed appropriate for them. As evidence, she offers her own grandchildren, one of whom didn’t talk until he was nearly 3 but then suddenly started speaking in complete sentences, and another who was thought not to be able to walk, until one day he broke out into a perfect run. As for independence, Wojcicki says parents shouldn’t do anything for their children that they can do themselves, to include coming up with their own boundaries for tech use. Children will often come up with even stricter rules than their parents would, if given the opportunity, she says. And if you need an excuse not to help your child with his or her homework, Wojcicki offers an anecdote from her friend Maye Musk, the mother of Elon Musk. “She never checked her kids’ homework. She couldn’t. She was working five jobs to make ends meet. When their assignments required a parent’s approval, she had them practice her signature so they could sign for her. ‘I didn’t have time,’ she told me, ‘and it was their work.’” Wojcicki’s belief in giving children autonomy over their lives extends from bedroom décor (she let Susan, at age 6, pick out hot pink shag carpeting for her bedroom) to their religious faith (their father was Catholic, their mother Jewish, so the girls got to choose their own path at age 12). She’s also taken this philosophy into the classroom at Palo Alto High School in Silicon Valley, where she heads up the media arts program that counts among its alumni the actor James Franco. All decisions are made by the student editors; her role is advisor. Her ultimate goal, she writes, as both parent and teacher is “to make myself obsolete.” The Wojcicki children were not perfect; Wojcicki spills the tea on the time she and her physicist husband Stanley left them alone for the weekend at ages 16, 15 and 13 … too early, as it turns out, as the parents later were horrified to learn that that their home had been the site of a party attended by about 100 teens. (Wojcicki found out because one of the guests showed up at school on Monday wearing one of Wojcicki’s outfits taken from her closet.) The girls were grounded for a month, and from then on, they had sitters when their parents were out of town. “By the way, we weren’t the only parents who had this experience,” Wojcicki writes. “If you have teenage kids, expect that they will throw a party when you leave.” As some critics have noted, it’s unclear whether Wojcicki’s parenting techniques produced successful people because they work, or because CONTINUED ON 47