Esther Wojcicki’s three daughters turned out well by any measure. Susan became CEO of YouTube. Janet became a professor of pediatrics at UCSF. Anne co-founded and ran 23andMe. People kept asking Wojcicki how she did it. This book is her answer.
The framework she proposes is called TRICK: Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness. Each word gets its own section, and Wojcicki fills them with stories from her own parenting, her thirty-six years teaching journalism at Palo Alto High School, and examples from other families and cultures. The argument is not complicated. Children who are trusted to make their own decisions learn to trust themselves. Children who are given independence develop competence. Children who are respected become respectful. None of this is revolutionary on paper, but Wojcicki’s point is that most modern parenting operates on the opposite principles: control, fear, micromanagement, and the assumption that children will fail without constant supervision.
Wojcicki’s teaching career provides a second thread. She built one of the largest high school journalism programs in the country, running it like a newsroom where students made real editorial decisions, managed their own deadlines, and dealt with the consequences of getting things wrong. The program produced students who went on to work at major publications, tech companies, and startups. Wojcicki attributes this to the same principles she applied at home: give young people real responsibility, then get out of the way.
The book pushes back against helicopter parenting with the conviction of someone who has spent decades watching its effects. Wojcicki argues that over-parenting produces anxious, dependent young adults who struggle with decision-making because they have never been allowed to practice it. She is blunt about this: the anxiety epidemic among teenagers is, in her view, partly a product of parents who cannot tolerate seeing their children struggle.
There are practical sections on discipline, technology, education, and how to handle situations where children make serious mistakes. Wojcicki’s approach is consistently to ask what the child can learn rather than what punishment fits. She also addresses how her framework applies to different socioeconomic contexts and cultural backgrounds.
Susan Wojcicki, the late former CEO of YouTube, provided a foreword. The book was published in 2019 and became a New York Times bestseller. For founders and business leaders who are also parents, or who manage young teams, the TRICK framework offers a way to think about leadership that starts with letting go of control rather than tightening it.
