Princess Beatrice's husband has revealed he's using the 'TRICK' method to raise his daughter Sienna.

Property designer Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 37, has described How To Raise Successful People by Esther Wojcicki as essential reading for bringing up children.

Edo, who is also father to his four-year-old son Christopher Woolf from his relationship with American architect Dara Huang, says he has become hooked on the child-raising technique.

"The best book I’ve read in the past year is How to Raise Successful People by Esther Wojcicki," he told the FT.

"There is nothing more important than raising and educating our kids and doing it well and she achieved this using the word TRICK.

"It’s great advice offered in an unpatronising way."

The author, Wojcicki, 79, who is known as the Godmother of Silicon Valley, made a splash in the crowded world of parenting philosophies with How to Raise Successful People when it was published in 2019.

Her chosen parenting approach can be summarised in the acronym "TRICK" – trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness – which teaches children to take responsibility for their own lives from an early age.

Wojcicki, a teacher for more than 30 years who serves on countless developmental boards in California, where she still teaches, has raised somewhat of a "superfamily".

Her youngest, Susan, is the CEO of YouTube; the middle child, Janet, a professor of paediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco; and the baby of the family, Anne, the founder and CEO of 23andme, a genetic testing company.

Her strategy hinges on giving your children plenty of freedom and realising you won't be able to control them beyond the age of 16.

Freedom such as letting her then four- and five-year-olds run errands to the corner shop. It all boils down to trust, apparently.

She recommends starting with small things like coming up with the menu for dinner, or planning what to do at the weekend.

"What that does is build up a relationship that says to your child: 'I believe in you'. That's the most powerful thing you can do because when you believe in your kid, they believe in themselves," she said.

The trouble, she thinks, is that society has stopped trusting children.

"We train these kids to feel like they are dependent," she says.

"Life is full of failure! You have to get up from that failure and move to the next step. If you have no faith in yourself you'll never be able to do [anything]."

Wojcicki is big on teaching children to bounce back from failure. If her students – she teaches journalism and English at Palo Alto High School in California and has no plans to retire – flunk an essay she tells them to try again.

"I give them an opportunity to fail and then revise and revise and revise. This pattern of behaviour in one class transfers to their life. That's what learning is: failure and then doing it again."

Her methods are much in demand in Silicon Valley from parents, including the late Steve Jobs, and businesses, which are realising it pays to give their employees a long rein.

"Google is one of the most successful companies on the planet and its mantra is trust," she says.

"I'm training people for the real world. Companies realise if they can follow the model, they can be much more productive."

She thinks mothers today have it tough, juggling work and children. Ideally, one parent, mother or father, would stay home for the first five years, but she reckons that six months is a good start.

"You have to deal with economic realities. The other thing is, when you come home, that doesn't mean being on your phone when your kid is there."

Wojcicki is also "not a fan" of giving children any devices such as phones or iPads. But she is prepared to compromise.

She dislikes gaming, but can tolerate Minecraft provided kids also learn coding. She would rather save phones for teenagers rather than foist them on children younger than 10, but wouldn't ban them outright.

"You want to teach children self-control and how to monitor themselves. Banning the devices is banning the opportunity to learn self-control."

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