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If kids don’t feel trusted — or if there isn’t anyone close to them whom they can rely on — they can really suffer. Esther Wojcicki, an educator and mother of three superstar daughters, explains why trust is essential and how to build it in the young people in our lives.

Esther Wojcicki has inspired thousands of kids through her 35-year-and-counting career as a journalism and English teacher at Palo Alto High School in California. She and her husband, Stanley, have also raised three exceptionally accomplished daughters: Susan (YouTube CEO), Janet, a Fulbright-winning anthropologist, pediatrics professor and researcher), and Anne (cofounder and CEO of 23andMe). So she knows quite a bit about helping young people grow into great grown-ups. Here, she writes about the critical importance of trust and how to cultivate it in children, starting at a very early age.

All you need is one person, just one person who trusts and believes in you, and then you feel you can do anything. Unfortunately, a lot of children — like Michael, a former student of mine — don’t have even one person. Michael was an editor-in-chief of the Campanile, Palo Alto High School’s newspaper, in 2013, and his struggles represent those of many other young people.

For Michael, the pressures started early. “I had very strict parents,” he says. “They would tell me if I didn’t do well in school, I’d be homeless.” His early teachers weren’t very supportive either, and people misinterpreting his behavior and motivations became a common theme in his life. “I would get admonished,” he says, “by peers and educators telling me if I followed the rules and paid attention, of course I’d do better. It was almost part of my core being, to be this thing that was trodden on; everything I did turned into some kind of moral shortcoming.”

By the time he made it to my class, Michael described himself as “completely burned out like a pile of ash.” The school newspaper was the only thing he derived any meaning from, and still he could barely muster the will to show up. But he did. I got to know him as a bright but disconnected kid. He’d come into class and have no idea what he wanted to do or write about.

“To hear outside confirmation that someone believed in me… helped me not to crumble.”

I’ve seen so many students like this — they’re afraid but they’re also rebellious. They’re not cooperative. They’re difficult, even aggressive, and it’s because every single one of them feels bad about themselves. They’re constantly trying to prove to themselves — and to others — that they’re better than everyone thinks, but they’re constantly scared they’ll fall short.

During one of our production nights, Michael was struggling with music theory homework. “I was exhausted, trying to figure out this assignment,” he says, “and I was half-assing it.” Other students teased him for struggling, and he thought to himself, as he often did, “That’s right, I can’t do it.” I saw what was happening, walked up to the kids, and said, “He’s taking longer because he’s smart.” I knew deep down that Michael wanted to get it right, not just rush through it.

This was the first time that Michael had heard an adult say his abilities and intelligence were seen and respected. “To hear outside confirmation that someone believed in me,” he says, “even in the presence of other students who didn’t — it was awesome. It helped me not to crumble.”

That day was a turning point for him. He started to trust himself and called on this newfound confidence during his undergraduate years whenever he encountered obstacles or someone told him he’d never make it. He went on to earn a degree in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, where he’s now a neuropsychiatric researcher. He’d found his one person to believe in him by accident, and it made all the difference.

Parents and teachers can sometimes forget how important we are in the lives of our children. We have so much control we have in shaping their confidence and self-image. And it all starts with trust, with believing a child is capable, even through setbacks, surprises and all the complications that come with growing up.

Trust empowers kids, whether it’s in the classroom or in the world at large, and the process of developing trust starts earlier than you think. Infants who are securely attached to their parents — who feel they can trust and depend on them — avoid many behavioral, social, and psychological problems that can arise later. A child’s fundamental sense of security in the world is based on their caregiver being someone they can rely upon.

Remember, trust is mutual. The degree to which your children can trust you will become reflected in their own ability to trust. Studies show that children rated as less trustworthy by their teachers exhibit higher levels of aggression and lower levels of “prosocial behavior” such as collaborating and sharing. Distrust in children has also been associated with their social withdrawal and loneliness.

“Many parents are operating from their own insecurities or doubts: Doesn’t their child need them?”

If we don’t feel trusted when we’re kids — or if there isn’t anyone close to us we can trust — we have difficulty getting over it. We grow up thinking we’re not trustworthy, and we accept it as a character trait. Like Michael, we become what we think we are, and we can suffer for it.

So how do we go about building trust in our children? We typically think of trust as handing our teenager the car keys and permitting them to drive on their own, or letting our 12-year-old stay home alone for the first time. But trust needs to start soon after kids are born.

Babies observe our every move as they learn how to get what they need from us. They know how to make us smile. They know how to make us cry. They may be dependent on us for everything, but they’re a lot more intelligent than we give them credit for. You need to respond to their needs, especially early on so they can feel you and their environment are trustworthy, but it’s also a fantastic time to start teaching your child some important lessons.

Many parents are operating from their own insecurities or doubts: Doesn’t their child need them? And if they don’t, what kind of parents are they? I firmly believe that you want your child to want to be with you, not to need to be with you.

This tension first arises with sleep. Your children can and will sleep on their own if you believe they can do it and if you teach them how. Kids learn to self-soothe, when given the opportunity, by sucking their thumbs, using pacifiers, or playing with toys. My daughters always had stuffed animals, and sometimes I’d wake up and find Susan talking to her teddy bear. Janet used to sing in bed. Because we’d built a relationship of trust, they learned they could entertain themselves and meet a lot of their own needs which meant that my husband and I got to sleep. A win-win.

As kids grow, they can be given more and more opportunities to build their own trustworthiness. The choices you make with your child will dictate the culture of your family. You always want to ask yourself whether you’re actively building trust in them or whether you’re shutting your child down. For young children, little achievements can build their trust and belief in themselves. They tie their own shoes, and it works! They put on their own clothes, and it works! They walk to school, and that works too! Through these small victories, they can see the tangible results of their efforts.

While you can’t always trust a small child to make intelligent choices, you can guide them in considering options and picking the best one. If I gave my nine-year-old grandson a lollipop and told him not to eat it, I know he still would. But if I explained why he shouldn’t eat it, that sugar isn’t healthy and might even give him cavities and that eating it before dinner will spoil his appetite, he could start to learn how to make better choices. OK, he might go ahead and eat the lollipop anyway, but as we work on these kinds of decisions over time, he would build the skills for living a healthy life and take care of himself.

“When we are fearful and hover over our children, they become afraid.”

Each age brings its own instances of trust. When my daughters were around 5, I’d ask them whether they were hungry and then I’d believe their answer. I did bring snacks with me in case they misjudged their hunger. If we were on a long car ride and they didn’t want to eat when we stopped for a meal, I’d explain we wouldn’t stop at another restaurant for several hours and I’d let them determine what to do. I trusted them with their eating decisions.

With teenagers, parents can cultivate trust in a series of steps. For instance, here is how I’d build trust with shopping, one of my favorite educational activities:

Step 1: The parent does everything, selecting and buying all items needed by a child.
Step 2: You trust your child to go with you to the store, and you allow them to make most of the purchasing decisions (giving kids a specific budget is a wonderful way to teach financial responsibility).
Step 3: You let your child gather the needed items on their own; the two of you meet at the registers at a set time and make the final purchases together.
Step 4: Once you’ve built a foundation of trust and taught your child how to be responsible with money, you can give them your credit card and let them shop on their own (many major credit cards allow you to add a minor as an authorized user). Of course, you’ll check the charges and teach them to verify the credit card statement with you at the end of the month.

Another way to gauge your teenager’s trustworthiness is by testing whether they make good on their word. They said they’d be home by 8 PM — were they? If they were late, did they call or text to tell you in advance? After they prove themselves trustworthy, increase their freedoms and responsibilities.

And if they still need to learn to come home on time, have a conversation about what went wrong and troubleshoot together for the next time. Some kids just have a hard time being on time, but don’t give up — give them more opportunities to learn. After all, time management is a skill that many adults lack, too.

If children aren’t empowered with trust and if they don’t feel trustworthy, they’ll have a very difficult time becoming independent. They won’t learn to trust and respect themselves. When we are fearful and hover over our children, they become afraid.

Excerpted from the new book How to Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons for Radical Results by Esther Wojcicki. Copyright © 2019 Esther Wojcicki. Used with permission from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Watch her TEDxBerkeley talk now: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Esther Wojcicki is an educator, journalist and mother of Anne (cofounder and CEO of 23andme), Susan (YouTube CEO), and Janet (Fulbright-winning anthropologist, pediatrics professor and researcher). A leader in blended learning and the integration of technology into education, she is the founder of the Media Arts programs at Palo Alto High School. Wojcicki serves as vice chair of Creative Commons and was instrumental in the launch of the Google Teachers Academy. She blogs regularly for Huffington Post and is coauthor of the book Moonshots in Education.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Rose Wong

Today, it’s not enough to have one birds-and-the-bees talk; it needs to be an open, ongoing conversation. Author and activist Christa Desir explains why and how.

The first few times I talked to high school students about sexual assault, when we got to the Q & A section, I was inundated with what I call the “Does that count?” question.

“What if we’re both drinking, does that count?”

“What if she said yes but then in the middle she changes her mind, does that count?”

“What if neither of us remember the next day?”

This happened with different high school groups, and eventually, I realized that something was wrong with my presentation. I said, “You know what? Let’s reframe this. Let’s put the legality of this aside, and let’s look at this from the perspective of our own values. Do you want to have sex with someone who doesn’t remember it the next day? Do you want to not remember it the next day? Do you want to be someone’s regret? Or, would you rather be someone’s enthusiastic ‘yes’?”

With these questions, the conversation changed. It got much more open, honest, authentic and vulnerable. It turned out their questions weren’t what was wrong; I was. I was too busy pointing out all the scary and dangerous places where sex can go that I forgot to talk about the wonderful, amazing, awkward and beautiful places. And I’m not the only one.

By only talking to our kids about the dangers of sexual violence, we’re leaving girls feeling afraid and boys feeling indicted. We need to give them the chance to explore their sexual curiosity, and we need to guide them through this very complicated, modern sexual world with transparency, honesty, non-judgment and vulnerability.

Unfortunately, we put sex in the same category of risky behaviors as vaping, texting while driving, and sniffing glue, instead of as something that many of us will do throughout the course of our lifespan. Furthermore, we’re failing to give our young people a language around consent. We are not helping them develop a voice to unapologetically own their “No”s and enthusiastically declare their “Yes”s.

How do we do this? Here’s a 4-step guide to help start these important conversations:

Step 1: Teach consent

Create an understanding in children around consent. This understanding needs to start young. They should learn about good touch and bad touch and the difference between them, that their bodies are their own to make decisions about, and that we are listening to them.

This might mean when you bring your child to a big family party, you don’t insist they hug and kiss every single person in the room. In schools, if it’s not a safety issue, perhaps we don’t require that they hold hands with the person next to them in a circle. What kind of message are we sending kids if we tell them, “Your bodies are your own to make decisions about, but you have to hold the next person’s hand because that’s the nice thing to do”? This is a mixed message, and it’s not good for kids. We also need to give kids the opportunity to say “Yes.” In my house, that means I’ll say to my son, “Hey, buddy, you look kind of sad. Could you use a hug?” and he’ll tell me if he does.

Step 2: Advocate for sex education in schools

We adults need to be advocates for comprehensive sexual education in our local schools. That includes positive representations of LGBTQI youth, information about birth control, instructions on how to use birth control, and information about STI’s. If you can’t make sex ed part of the school curriculum, then make sure it’s taught elsewhere in your communities or in your places of worship. And, of course, we must always keep having these conversations in our own homes.

Step 3: Make it an ongoing conversation

We need to accept that there is not just one sex talk we have with our kids. This should be an ongoing conversation, and you should continue it every opportunity that you have. So if you’re driving to school, listening to the radio, and your 11-year-old hears the morning DJ bring up porn — as morning DJs are wont to do — and your kid asks, “Hey mom, what’s porn?”, you might turn off the radio and then distract him by finding out what he wants for dessert. Or, you could answer the question. You don’t have to give him a full treatise on sex workers’ rights, but you could answer this one question and allow him to ask another one. That’s honesty.

The nice thing about sex being an ongoing conversation is if you muddle it the first time, you’ll always get the chance to do it again. In these discussions, we just need to be as open and non-judgmental as possible and admit that we’re not the captains of the ship who know everything. In fact, we are learning as much as our kids are.

Doing this makes you a person who is safe to talk to, and that’s who you want to be with your children. If they tell you, “Oh, hey, mom, I have this crush,” you could say, “Oh really. What are they like? What do you like about them?” instead of assuming that the person is a he or she.  Similarly, if they tell you that their best friend is a “non-binary aro/ace,” you could say, “Oh really! What’s that?” If you know what that is, you could say “What do you think that means? What does that mean to you?” That’s how you open the conversation and how it keeps going.

Step 4: Embrace the discomfort

Acknowledge that it can be uncomfortable at times to talk about sex. A few months ago, I had my 14-year-old son in the car with me. It was just the two of us, and this never happens. So I thought I would take opportunity to talk, and I turned to him. I said, “Hey, buddy, I just want you to know that if you have a wet dream, it’s totally normal. It’s very common. This happens to adolescent boys all the time. Just let me know because I can make sure we get the laundry done right away so it’s not a big sticky mess for two weeks.” He said, “Yeah, Mom, I know how to do my own laundry, but can you just pull over here on the side of the road? I’ll walk the rest of the way to school.”

As you can see, sometimes it goes wrong, but that’s all right as long as we keep showing up. With these conversations, we’re building the scaffolding — however rickety it might be — beneath our children so they can lead healthy sexual lives that are rooted in open communication and enthusiasm.

This piece was adapted from Christa Desir’s TEDxOakParkWomen talk. Watch it now:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christa Desir writes contemporary fiction for young adults. She has volunteered as a rape victim activist for more than 10 years, including providing direct service as an advocate in hospital ERs. She is a founding member of the Voices and Faces Project, a nonprofit organization for rape survivors that conducts an international survivor-based writing workshop.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Rose Wong

Children could definitely give the adults in their lives some lessons in parenting. Here are a few, from writer Swati Lodha.

In 2016, author and coach Swati Lodha was on tour in her native India to promote a parenting book she’d written. At one event, an audience member asked a question — but it was for Lodha’s then-16-year-old daughter, Swaraa, who had accompanied her.

His question was perhaps every parent’s nightmare: “Do you think your mother is perfect?”

“Nobody is,” replied Swaraa.

He persisted: “Can you tell me one thing that is wrong with her?”

Her answer: “I could write a book about it.”

Ouch.

So Swati decided to collaborate with Swaraa on a book, as she recalls in her TEDxNNIMSBangalore talk. They interviewed around 200 children — aged 8 to 18 — to find out what the kids really thought about their parents, and what they wished they’d do differently.

You may wonder, “Why should we ask kids for their input?” But after all, we want — and expect — user feedback in most aspects of our lives. As one 14-year-old told them, “When a consumer product is designed, the consumers are asked: ‘What kind of aesthetic features do you want in this product? What kind of functional features would do good?’”

As Swati puts it: Asking for advice is about checking in with kids — but not putting them in charge.

Here are 4 key things that children would like to share with their mothers and fathers, according to the Lodhas’ research:

1. Disagreement is not the same thing as disrespect.

Many of the kids interviewed say that their parents usually see any deviation from their rules or even preferences as disrespectful. Swati Lodha shares a story from her own family. Her daughter, Sharaa, loves to travel with her camera and laptop, which she brings in her carry-on when the family goes on plane trips. On one trip, Sharaa’s dad noticed how long it took the family to get through airport security, so he asked his daughter if she could check her gear instead. Sharaa said no; she prefers to keep her gear with her, worried that the delicate, valuable equipment will be harmed in checked baggage.

But her dad dug in, and the disagreement has become a sore point whenever they travel together. Sharaa thinks her dad has cast her decision as an act of rebellion and willfulness. The last time it happened, her dad said, “You respect these things more than people,” recalls Swati. “My daughter was downcast; she told us, ‘You guys love obedience; you guys dislike defiance.’” Sharaa wishes that her father would respect what she sees as her informed choice to do is best.

As Swati concludes, “What children want from us is that we should recalibrate our relationship with obedience” and respect the reasons behind their behaviors and decisions.

2. Kids don’t need to be told they’re the best.

“Parents … have an emotional investment in their children, so whatever they do becomes the best, and the children also start overestimating themselves in the same way,” says Swati. But the kids she interviewed said they actually didn’t enjoy this inflated perspective. They want to be viewed more realistically and have their parents see them as who they really are — not as who they wish they were. “We should be able to face our fears and our fantasies with equal balance,” explains Swati.

3. Kids get feedback all the time; parents should get some, too.

Growing up is a period of constant assessment when everyone older than a child — parents, siblings, teachers and authority figures — freely volunteers their opinions about how that young person is doing. As one of Swati’s subjects told her, “I am labeled all the time. I am labeled by my teacher as bad at English; I am labeled by my mother as a naughty child; and I am labeled by my sister as being self-centered.” The kids surveyed for the Lodhas’ book pointed out that parents don’t receive all this feedback, and they’d like to be asked for some.

4. Mothers and fathers shouldn’t get so fixated on results.

“Parents love outcomes,” Swati says. “Not only outcomes; they love all the measurable outcomes.” The children they spoke to said they felt pressured by their parents’ emphasis on grades, prizes, medals, game scores and school admittances — especially when it’s in a sport, subject or interest the kids pursued at the parents’ request, not because of their own interest. According to Swati, kids would like their intentions and efforts to be noticed and valued, even when the outcomes aren’t noteworthy.

Watch her TEDxNMIMSBangalore talk now:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Halton is Assistant Ideas Editor at TED, and a science journalist based in the Pacific Northwest.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.