Tiger moms—who abide by a strict, academics-first approach to raising kids—had a resurgence in public discourse recently, prompted by Vivek Ramaswamy’s viral rant about how Americans rear their children.
But there are plenty of animals in the parenting-style zoo, and this week there’s been renewed buzz around “panda parenting,” which puts a child’s autonomy front and center.
The term comes from the book How to Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons for Radical Results by Esther Wojcicki. And she should know: The 84-year-old journalist and educator is mom to 23andMe cofounder Anne Wojcicki and the late Susan Wojcicki, former CEO of YouTube. From the age of 5, the girls walked alone to school—just part of the relaxed style dubbed panda parenting, in honor of the seemingly lazy bears.
“Panda moms aren’t lazy,” Esther Wojcicki told the New Zealand Herald. “What they do is give children scaffolding to let them go free. Instead of always intervening, you only help when they need it.”
She stressed, after all, that “your control over your child is over by the time they’re 14,” and past that point, you can only “respect your kids’ ideas and preferences, otherwise communication shuts down, just when they most need your support.”
She explained that she’s no fan of tiger parenting. “I admire [creator] Amy Chua’s devotion to her daughters,” Wojcicki said. “But I think her approach failed to instill a sense of passion or independence in them. The key to happiness is a sense of power over your life, and I think a lot of people feel they don’t have that.”
To help parents remember the elements of panda parenting, Wojcicki developed an acronym, called TRICK: trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness.
Part of what it all leads to, she believes—without the addition of hardship or tragedy—is resilience and grit.
“You don’t want to arrange a difficult situation on purpose for your children, that would be terrible. But one thing you can do, to enable grit, is to believe in your child, to trust them,” she told the Irish Independent. “When you believe in your child, they believe in themselves. And when you give them the opportunity to do things they become more independent.”
Further, she added, “the more you do for them, the less empowered they are. Because they think they need you all the time. So if they feel like they can do it themselves, that gives them the leeway, the power to pursue. They’re like, ‘I can do it, because I know I’ve been able to do things on my own. I believe in myself.’ The trust and respect in a child leads to grit. Everybody wants to know how to get the grit. Well, the way to get it is to believe that you can do it.”
How ‘panda parenting’ fits in with other parenting styles
Research on parenting styles goes back to the 1960s, with child-development expert Diana Baumrind, and has typically looked at three main categories:
- Authoritarian: having high expectations and a lack of warmth and nurturing, with mistakes punished harshly
- Authoritative: balancing high expectations with warmth and nurturing while encouraging independence and using fair discipline
- Permissive: loving and nurturing with few rules, plus lack of structure and discipline
Panda parenting is somewhere between the second two.
“Rather than micromanaging every aspect of their child’s life, Panda parents provide a supportive framework that allows children to make decisions, take risks, and learn from their experiences,” parenting expert and Parenting for the Future podcast host Petal Modeste told Good Housekeeping recently. “Panda parenting offers warmth and support while encouraging exploration and independence. It’s a balance between guidance and freedom, helping kids develop self-confidence and resilience.”
It’s closely aligned with its predecessor, free-range parenting, brainchild of Lenore Skenazy, once dubbed the “worst mom in America” for letting her 9-year-old take the New York City subway alone.
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“The parents are losing their free time, and the kids are losing their independence, and it’s over-the-top today because now we have electronic tracking devices where we can monitor our kids. We can monitor their every move,” Wojcicki told the UnSILOed podcast. “I think we need to remember that when you want to have happy self-reliant kids, you have to give them independence.” And instead of just coming up with your own rules for them, she suggested, “Why don’t you collaborate with them and come up with the rules? You’d be surprised at how good they are at coming up with rules that work for both of you.”
After all, when it comes to tiger parenting, even Chua herself seemed to have some regrets. As she admitted in a 2023 interview, “I still believe achieving excellence can bring a lot of benefits, and I’m glad I instilled a sense of grit in my kids. But the things I regret more are the harsh things I said to them and losing my temper.”
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