One runs YouTube, one founded a billion-dollar genetics firm and one's a professor. Esther Wojcicki tells Danny Fortson how to raise children as impressive as her three high-flyers, Anne, Susan and Janet
A door opens and a disembodied voice echoes down the hallway. Esther Wojcicki is apologising before she even enters her sitting room. She's late. "Sorry, I didn't forget about you," she calls out. "I thought it was 2.30, not 2." She chuckles, then disappears again.
It is quiet, except for the muffled blare of a cable news show in another room where her husband, Stan, is transfixed by the Mueller report into Russian election tampering. As quickly as she left, she returns. "Don't worry, I'm not wearing this," she says, pointing to her striped jumper and jeans. "Stripes are terrible for photos. I'll change."
You've probably never heard of the 78-year-old high-school teacher from California. But she has changed your life — dramatically, if indirectly.
Wojcicki is the mother of three wildly successful women: Susan, 50, her eldest, was employee No 16 at Google and since 2014 has been the chief executive of YouTube. Her younger sister Anne, 45, founded the in-home genetics testing company 23andMe. Janet, 48, the middle sister, is a professor of paediatrics at the renowned medical school of the University of California, San Francisco.
The Wojcickis are one of those families. Stan, the patriarch, is a retired Stanford University physicist. Esther is a decorated journalism instructor whose unorthodox methods have led leaders from the likes of Gap and Whole Foods to seek her counsel on how to get the most from their employees.
The principles she applies in her classroom — she is still teaching — are the same as those she used with her daughters. And that seemed to work out rather well. So she has written a book about it, How to Raise Successful People, in the hope that she can help reverse what she calls a "crisis in parenting".
Helicopter parents. Tiger moms. Snowplough parents. They are all doing it wrong, she argues, and are raising a generation of children who "do not possess the skills to make it in the 21st century". They're "lambs", she says, robbed of ability, agency and grit by parents who either do too much for them or demand too much from them. Kids these days, she argues, are "disempowered" and "terrified of failure".
And where she lives in Palo Alto, California, ground zero of the technology revolution, where there is "a billionaire in the next bush", children also just have it way too easy. They're spoilt. "A lot of kids have too much. It's really bad for children to have too much of anything. They don't take care of it. They don't respect it," she says. "You should see the lost-and-found at our school. It's like a fashion show."
The "Woj way", as her daughters have affectionately dubbed her parenting style, is many-faceted — the book runs to more than 300 pages. Yet it can be summed up simply. Trust your kids. Give them responsibility. Let them fail — and learn from it. "Kids can do a lot more than you ever expected them to do. If you trust them, it's amazing how well they do," she says. "They rise to the occasion. If you believe in them, they'll believe in themselves and they'll do incredible things."
You may not agree with everything she prescribes — she let Susan and Janet go to the corner shop on their own when they were five and four years old, respectively — but the results are hard to argue with.
Susan, who has five children and is married to a fellow Googler, runs one of the world's biggest websites. Forbes magazine estimates her net worth at US$480 million. Anne, who has two children with her ex-husband, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, pioneered direct-to-consumer genomics. Her ownership stake in 23andMe is thought to be worth more than US$440m. Janet has done foundational research on childhood obesity and pressured the soft-drinks industry to change its ways.
The Woj women have taken their places atop male-dominated fields and they credit their mother. "We three sisters are the original output of our mum's philosophy," they write in the foreword to her book.
The Wojcicki parenting formula is not prescriptive. Instead, what she promotes is a "universal philosophy of human behaviour" that focuses on a handful of values that were missing from her own upbringing.
Indeed, it was a single, tragic childhood event that showed her what was wrong and made her determined to do things differently for her own family.
Wojcicki's parents were Orthodox Jews from Russia. Her father, a frustrated artist, cut gravestones; her mother stayed at home. They were poor and settled in Sunland-Tujunga, an agricultural town in the San Fernando Valley in California. In 1949, her 16-month-old brother, David, got into a bottle of aspirin and ate dozens of pills. He became violently ill. The family were turned away by three hospitals, apparently concerned that her parents wouldn't be able to pay for care. A fourth hospital admitted him, but it was too late and he died.
"What I learnt that day is you don't trust people in authority, no matter what their titles are," she says. "My poor mother never recovered. From that day on I always questioned everything, and I think I passed that down to my daughters."
Wojcicki was a precocious student, much to her father's chagrin, who saw Esther's job as nothing more than "to marry a rich Jewish man when I was 18 and have lots of children". Boys, her father told her, "are more important". She cooked and cleaned for her younger brother, Lee, who Wojcicki says was "pampered to the point of paralysis".
Determined to get out, Wojcicki won a scholarship to study at the University of California at Berkeley, where she met Stan, who shared her distrust of authority. He grew up in Krakow during the Second World War, in an apartment "right next to the train tracks that transported Jews to Auschwitz". After the war, he escaped with his mother and brother by stowing away on a cargo ship to Sweden. His father did not, and was held as a political prisoner in Krakow by the communist authorities.
Esther and Stan married after university and moved to Paris and Geneva, where Stan had received a research fellowship. When he was offered a job at Stanford University, they moved back to California. In 1968, they had their first child, Susan, the future empress of YouTube.
Silicon Valley was still mostly orchards. Stanford was known affectionately as "the Farm". There was little sign then that this strip of land south of San Francisco would later birth the biggest, most consequential companies of our time — and create such unique opportunities for her daughters.
As a young mother, Wojcicki was overwhelmed. Aside from Dr Spock, she had no parenting books, nor access to Google any time a child threw a tantrum or developed a rash. She trusted her gut — an art that, she says, has been lost.
"I'm hoping to help parents relax, to trust themselves so they can do a better job," she explains. "Most parents today are stressed." Trust — of yourself as a parent and for your kids — is one of her core messages. It is the "T" in her parenting acronym. There's always an acronym. She calls it Trick, which stands for trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness.
They are all nice terms, of course, but instituting them is difficult, nuanced work. Wojcicki quit her job as a teacher and threw herself into full-time parenting. The home she shaped was the antithesis of her childhood, where girls were second best and her father exerted iron control.
Stan, she says, worked hard and supported the family, but he plays a bit part in the book.
The Woj way was hers and it often meant doing things other parents didn't. Her daughters recall how, when they were very young, she sat them down to explain a compound-interest chart. When they misbehaved, she had them write her an apology. "Writing is thinking, and thinking prompts change," she says.
Wojcicki was aggressively frugal. Cutting coupons was a weekly family event. Anne, the future healthcare tycoon, created a detailed system to organise them. She was "the coupon queen", Esther says. If a cashier did not honour a listed price, Wojcicki would make a fuss, much to her daughters' embarrassment. "I just was determined not to let anything get us down. When we had a goal, we set our minds to do it and we did it. And I modelled it," she explains. "Kids do what you do, not what you say."
The Woj girls were given a lot of independence. Their mother would let them do the family shop, giving them a budget and letting them figure out how to get everything they needed. Her daughters became known locally as "the lemon girls" for a clever business they devised, picking lemons from a neighbour's tree and then selling them door to door — including to the neighbour whose lemons they picked.
It was an entrepreneurial streak that they saw in their mother. After 10 years at home, Wojcicki went to work at Palo Alto High School, which had a faltering journalism programme. She took it from 19 students and turned it into a sought-after course that is 700 students strong and that serves as a model for other schools.
She sends students out to report stories in the community, to check facts, to critique each other, to lay out pages. Every three weeks, they publish a newspaper. By the end of the course, the students run the class, the paper, the entire operation. Wojcicki is off to the side, providing nudges and adult supervision. Her goal, she explains, is "to make myself obsolete".
As the technology revolution took hold around her, sweeping away industries and creating new ones, it redoubled her conviction that her approach was the right one. She was convinced that independence and creativity would serve her pupils better than test prep and memorisation. She saw it at first hand. When Steve Jobs's daughter Lisa was in Wojcicki's class in the 1990s, before his return to Apple, he would come, too, camping out on a corduroy beanbag chair. "He'd talk to the students, play on the computers," she recalls. "He never stopped playing and exploring, and we all know what came of his incredible imagination."
As the years ticked by, however, her pupils appeared to be increasingly ill-prepared for the world that awaited them. "Every semester, my students walk into the beginning class looking like lambs," she says. "They're terrified."
Some are under so much pressure from their high-achieving parents that they buckle, leading to deep unhappiness or worse. Palo Alto was rocked five years ago by a spate of student suicides. "A lot of the kids who committed suicide felt trapped, that they could never be successful in their own way," Wojcicki says. This has been made worse by social media, a world in which Susan plays a central role.
Others are wholly incapable of taking on challenges or handling failure, a result of snowplough parenting, where parents assiduously remove obstacles in their children's path. The recent college admissions scandal, in which families paid millions in bribes to get their children into top universities, is the apotheosis of parental ploughing.
"I feel sorry for those kids, because what does it say to that kid? Oh, I don't believe in you," Wojcicki says. "It's a bad message."
As her girls grew up, so did Silicon Valley. After earning her MBA, Susan worked at Intel, the microchip maker. She bought a house but needed help covering the mortgage so she rented the ground floor and garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who needed space for their little startup. They quickly monopolised her house. Computers were everywhere, including the bathroom sink.
She quit Intel and joined Google in 1999 as the company's first marketing manager. She devised its foundational product, called AdSense, which turned it into the most successful advertising business the world has ever seen.
Since 2014 she has run YouTube, leading its meteoric and problematic rise into a huge cultural force that has been bashed for failing to rein in extremist content. The sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has dubbed the site "the great radicaliser".
A Bloomberg News investigation this month painted a damning picture of Susan, claiming that she ignored problems for years and prioritised growth over safety. Her mother, naturally, has a different view. "I'm actually really proud of her as CEO, because she is trying to make a difference in changing all of that and making sure that YouTube will be safe for kids," she says. "I mean, she's got five. It's really important to her."
YouTube strongly denied the allegations in the Bloomberg report.
Susan did not respond to, or declined, multiple interview requests, including one delivered from her sofa by her mother, who asked if she might have a couple of minutes to speak to The Sunday Times. After they rang off, Wojcicki shrugged her shoulders.
"Everything at YouTube is so political," she says. "[Susan] can't talk without someone previewing the questions in advance, they then tell her what to say and then she'll say it."
Perhaps the most controversial piece of advice that Wojcicki dispenses is about divorce. Her view: don't do it. Not least because it usually involves violating several of her sacred Trick values: respect, kindness, collaboration. "I see so many miserable people and kids who are miserable because of their parents' divorce," she says.
"The model you're setting for your kids when you get a divorce is: 'I can't work things out. I don't know how to resolve things. I have no grit. I have no social skills.'"
It is a touchy subject. Anne married Brin in 2007 on a beach in the Bahamas. He was already one of the richest men in the world. They donned bathing suits and exchanged vows on a sandbar.
Soon after they married, Google became one of the first investors in 23andMe, which was based on the novel idea of offering genetics tests at home. Anne courted controversy from the beginning, battling worries about privacy, whether people could meaningfully interpret the results and what the endgame was once it had acquired millions of individuals' genomes. Last year she signed a landmark deal with the British pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline, which will use the genome data to develop medicines.
As Anne steered the company through several storms, her marriage fell apart. In 2015, she and Brin, who have two children, divorced.
"That was very difficult for everybody," Wojcicki says. "Let me tell you, you have to work at marriage. It's not easy. We need to take really good care of both partners. Especially, you know, the men. Sometimes they feel like they're disenfranchised because here comes this third person and — guess what? They didn't get to interview them before they came into the family!"
She is careful to keep her comments general, but later points to my perch on the white cloth sofa. "Two days ago, Sergey was sat right there," she says, without expounding further.
Closing in on her 79th birthday, Wojcicki has no intention of retiring. "What else would I do? I might drive everybody crazy, you know?" She certainly acts younger than her years. She is tall, about 5ft 10in, and trim, and recently discovered Forever 21. The chain has become her favourite place to shop. "I love it. And H&M. I love all that fast fashion," she says.
In January she launched a non-profit called Global Moonshots in Education, whose goal is to "teach other teachers and parents how to give kids more agency and more control of their learning".
Practically, that means getting schools to carve out 20 per cent of traditional teaching curricula to allow children to pursue passion projects. The approach is a replica of the one put in place by her former son-in-law at Google, where side ventures dreamt up in employees' spare time resulted in several products, including Gmail.
In a world where technological disruption is accelerating, "the stakes are higher than ever", she adds.
Might we soon see the Woj way creep into our schools? It is certainly plausible. By virtue of her own track record, her high-achieving kids and the circles in which they mix, Wojcicki has access to some very powerful people. "Sometimes I go to social gatherings where they're all there. All the captains [of industry]," she says. "So I take the opportunity to tell them all about my Global Moonshots and see whether they would like to help support that."
She then slips effortlessly into the pitch, as if I was just another tech billionaire with a cheque to write. "Education is the basis of everything," she argues. "If we can give all kids an opportunity to be empowered, no matter where they start out in life, I think we're going to make an important change for the 21st century."
Bringing up accomplished people has its downsides. Her daughters had agreed to come to their mother's house for a photoshoot, but, at the appointed time, they were nowhere to be seen. They ended up arriving 1½ hours late.
"The problem with raising successful people," she says apologetically, "is that when they get to high positions, they forget about the concept of time." Even for the Woj girls, sticking to Trick is tricky indeed.
The Woj Way
Tech is one of the things parents ask me about the most. They're right to be concerned. It's something we all have to learn to control. I hope it helps to share my Ten Commandments for Tech:
1. Set up a plan with your kids, not for your kids.
2. No phones during meals, whether in your house or someone else's. A 2018 study found that subjects who used their phones during dinner felt more distracted and experienced less enjoyment.
3. No phones after bedtime. Children need to sleep and phones are a distraction. Explain the critical importance of sleep for their brain development and remind them that they grow when they sleep.
4. Use your discretion with small children. Younger ones, from the age of four, should be taught to use mobile phones in case of an emergency. Show them how to call for help — they're capable of learning. Starting in the third grade [8-9 years old], children can be taught appropriate mobile phone use for school assignments and at home.
5. Children should come up with their own mobile phone policies for family vacations, weekend events or any kind of social activity where they need to be present. Be sure they also choose a penalty for disobeying their own policy (losing a certain amount of time on a device is a good way to teach them how to stick to the rules).
6. Parental controls can be important for young children. But after the age of eight, children can learn self-control. If they violate your trust or agreement, parental control switches back on.
7. Parents should model how they expect their children to behave around technology. I have seen parents on their phones non-stop and they call that "family time". That is not family time.
8. Discuss with your children what pictures are appropriate to take and what audio is appropriate to record. Sometimes kids lack common sense. Explain that whatever you do online (in written form or any type of media) leaves a digital footprint that you should be proud to share with the world.
9. Explain cyber-bullying and help them understand its negative impact not only on others but on them. You never know what kids think or consider funny. Teaching children what defines humour is hard, but it's important. My rule: laugh with your friends, not at them.
10. Teach children not to give out personal identification information.
© Esther Wojcicki 2019. Extracted from How to Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons for Radical Results (Hutchinson £16.99), published on May 2
Written by: Danny Fortson
© The Times of London