Posted on 10/29/2022 6:31:50 PM PDT by nickcarraway
RAISING SUCCESSFUL KIDS
Published Sat, Oct 29 20229:55 AM EDTUpdated 10:08 AM EDT thumbnail Esther Wojcicki, Contributor @ESTHERWOJCICKI SHARE Share Article via Facebook Share Article via Twitter Share Article via LinkedIn Share Article via Email I raised 2 successful CEOs and a professor of pediatrics—here's the biggest parenting mistake I see 2:52 I raised 2 successful CEOs and a professor of pediatrics—here’s the biggest parenting mistake I see Here’s a wake-up call for American parents: We are doing too much for our kids. This is the origin of “helicopter parenting,” in which we constantly remove obstacles so that our kids don’t have to deal with challenges.
There were many unpopular parenting rules I followed as a young, single mother. But my No. 1 was: Don’t do anything for your kids that they can do for themselves.
That worked out for my daughters. All three grew up to be highly successful: Susan is the CEO of YouTube, Janet is a doctor, and Anne is the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe. They rose to the top of competitive, male-dominated professions.
Parents need to stop coddling their kids The more you trust your children to do things on their own, the more empowered they’ll be. The key is to begin with guided practice: It’s the “I do, we do, you do” method.
You can try this with all sorts of simple, everyday actions:
Waking up: Have them set their own alarm.
Getting dressed: Let them pick their own outfit.
Breakfast/lunch/dinner: Give them simple tasks like stirring the pancake batter, cleaning their lunchbox and setting the table. Getting their backpack ready: Have them run through a list of what they need to bring that day. Making plans: Let them come up with weekend or after school activities. Checking homework: It’s okay if they don’t get 100% of the answers correct. Let them learn from the mistakes. Chores are especially important. Washing dishes was a big one in our house. All my daughters stood on a little stool at the sink and washed the dishes after dinner.
And when we went grocery shopping, I’d ask them to get two pounds of apples. They had to pick out the good ones, which I’d taught them how to do, and measure pounds on the scale.
If we went over our grocery budget, they’d help me decide what to put back.
Don’t worry about perfection
I expected my daughters to make their own beds every morning. Ha! A bed made by a kid can look like she’s still asleep in it. But I didn’t fight them. As long as they did it, I was happy.
Mastery means doing something as many times as it takes to get it right. Being a writing teacher taught me this. In the 80s and 90s, one of the supposed characteristics of a good teacher was that your class was so hard that many students failed.
But the kids who got a D on their first paper found it impossible to recover and lost the motivation to improve, since they were starting out so far behind.
So I gave them the opportunity to revise their work as many times as they wanted. Their grade was based on the final product. And when it came time for testing, my students performed in the 90th percentile of state exams.
It was the learning and the hard work that I wanted to reward, not getting it right the first time.
Kids are smarter than you think
To be clear, I’m not saying you should make your kids do things they don’t understand or aren’t capable of, nor am I saying you should let them play in the street if it isn’t safe, or walk to the store if the neighborhood is dangerous.
The idea is to teach them how to cope with what life throws at them. One of the most important lessons I taught my daughters is that the only thing you can control is how you react to things.
When you trust kids to make their own decisions, they start to feel more engaged, confident and empowered. And once that happens, there’s no limit to what they can achieve.
Esther Wojcicki is an educator, journalist, and bestselling author of “How to Raise Successful People.” She is also the co-founder of Tract.app and chief parenting office at Sesh. Follow her on Twitter @EstherWojcicki.
Congratulations, wonderful but the most important question, are they going to Heaven and are you going there by extension?
Riding or Push Mower ?
I was given a pair of scissors for any blades that got missed.
He ain’t wrong. 23 and me is a bunch of con artists, conning people into giving up their DNA, and YouTube censors and cancels what they don’t agree with.
So yeah. At least 2 horrible people.
Translated into Hebrew, that would make a cool Israeli special forces unit motto! :)
But please, share your humble brag about how to raise children.
Never heard the term before.......
Helicopter parenting refers to an overprotective and very
involved parenting style. Just like a helicopter hovers, so
do these parents. They typically involve themselves in all
aspects of their children’s lives, sometimes to the detriment
of the kids.
I am very upset that I failed to produce hundreds of peer reviewed articles that helped get me millions in federal grants because I obeyed my masters....
;-)
I have been reading the author Rick Bragg recently. He grew up in Alabama in grinding poverty, but eventually made his way to write for major national news outlets. He wrote his first book, All Over but the Shoutin', about his mother and the great sacrifices she made for her children, in no small part because of her unwavering Christian faith, so that they would have better than she had.
After it was published (and he had bought his mother her first ever house), an interviewer asked him about the scene in the book where he convinced his mother to come to New York City to see him receive a Pulitzer Prize. While she enjoyed the experience, it was not because of the affluence of the city, her son treating her to fancy meals, or staying in a fine hotel. It was because some of the people she met were kind, or interesting to her. She was not much impressed by the Pulitzer Prize.
"What have you ever done that has impressed your mama?" the interviewer asked.
"Not much, yet," said the author, Rick Bragg, with ironic humor. "If somebody would ask her what was the best day of her life, she would probably say it was the day her first child was born. My older brother."
Rick's older brother is a local contractor who lives near their mother in Alabama and works with his hands.
"She would have loved it if I had settled nearby to her and had my wife and children there for her and the family to be with," he said. (Or words to that effect.)
Values. So different from one person to the next.
That is true. In a very real sense, the job is not "raising children", but to raise competent adults.
Where is the success exactly, apart from the cardiologist? “CEO” is a highly overblown and overused title. Youtube is a fascist-owned and operated site, the other I’ve never heard of . I don’t think this mother is especially qualified to give advice on raising successful kids. One fascist, one CEO of nothing and three RBF feminists. Give me a break, they’d be of more value to society in a fatal car wreck.
Talking about things medical how is Jim doing?
Sometimes they are irritating as hell. ;-D
Testing her got results, but rarely pleasing to us.
She was Irish, raised near the docks in St. Louis during the depression.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have a clue.
I TOTALLY agree with you. I just find it very condescending she explain to us how she raised such great kids. Good for her, but what she did are things I assume most parents do for their children. I guess we’re just not smart or enlightened enough. That was how I perceived the article.
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