Many parents think kids develop strong social skills from memorizing phrases like “please” and “thank you.” But the real foundation is built much earlier, at home and through everyday interactions.

I’ve studied over 200 parent-child relationships, and I’m a mother myself. I’ve found that kids learn to communicate and connect by watching how their parents behave. And being raised in an environment where emotional safety and authentic connection are modeled makes a world of difference.

Here are nine things that parents who raise kids with exceptional social skills do early on.

Kids learn emotional vocabulary when parents name and normalize feelings.

Parents who say things like, “I feel disappointed we can’t go today, but I’ll take a deep breath and try again tomorrow,” are modeling emotional regulation in real time. It helps kids later express themselves with friends, like saying, “I’m sad you didn’t play with me,” instead of lashing out.

Children absorb how parents treat others: the neighbor, the cashier, and even each other.

A simple, “She has her hands full, so let’s hold the door for her,” teaches more about empathy than any lecture. Small daily acts of kindness become the blueprint for lifelong social awareness.

True confidence comes from being loved as you are and from being given the chance to try (and sometimes fail).

Letting kids try out for the team or pour their own milk, even if it gets messy, says: “I trust you.” When paired with encouragement like, “I love how you kept trying,” kids feel capable and connected, without needing to be perfect.

Every relationship includes conflict. What matters is whether kids learn how to repair.

Parents who say, “You hurt your sister’s feelings. Let’s think of what we can say or do to make it right,” are teaching a critical life skill: Repair strengthens relationships, and kids who learn it early grow into adults who can sustain healthy bonds.

If a child says, “My friend didn’t want to play with me,” some parents might brush it off with, “Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal.”

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But parents who say, “That sounds hard. Want to tell me more?” are teaching kids that their feelings and perspectives matter. That confidence in their voice is the foundation of strong social skills.

Kids don’t always pick up on social dynamics naturally. Parents who gently point out, “Did you notice how his voice got quiet? He might be feeling shy,” help kids tune into the subtleties of human interaction.

These micro-lessons add up and shape socially aware, emotionally intelligent adults.

The second kids argue, the impulse is often to intervene. But the best social learning happens when parents step back just enough.

Saying, “I’m here if you need help, but I think you two can work it out,” creates space for problem-solving and compromise. With time, kids learn they can handle conflict themselves because they were trusted to practice.

When parents treat mistakes as evidence of growth, kids build resilience instead of shame.

A parent who calmly says, “You spilled the juice. Let’s grab a towel and clean it up,” models accountability without humiliation. Children raised this way see mistakes as opportunities to learn. That mindset makes them more adaptable and compassionate with others.

Kids need to see what good listening looks like.

When parents pause, make eye contact, give full attention (without rushing to fix or interrupt) and say, “Tell me more about that,” they teach how to be patient and respectful. Over time, kids carry this into friendships, becoming the kind of people others feel safe opening up to.

Good social skills are becoming more and more important in today’s world, and those skills grow from connection and emotional safety. By practicing early, you’re ensuring that your kid will grow up to be empathetic humans who are ready for real-world relationships.

Reem Raouda is a leading voice in conscious parenting and the creator of FOUNDATIONS, a step-by-step guide that helps parents heal and become emotionally safe. She is widely recognized for her expertise in children’s emotional safety and for redefining what it means to raise emotionally healthy kids. Connect with her on Instagram.

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Something strange was happening at Jeff Hancock’s work.

It was 2022, just after OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT to the masses, and the Stanford professor noticed something was off in the research assignments he was grading. “They looked pretty good, but not quite right,” Hancock tells CNBC Make It. “And then because I had 100 students, I could see that 10 other assignments looked exactly the same with the same sort of not-quite-rightness.”

The papers in question seemed to have a lot of text without saying anything substantive to “advance the work,” and they all did so in the same overly wordy style.

Kate Niederhoffer felt the same sinking feeling of suspicion when she was once asked to speak about her research, but the request summarized her studies in a way that revealed they didn’t actually know her work.

Reading messages that missed the mark “felt like deep effort,” Niederhoffer says. “I’m a quick reader, normally, so I [thought] ‘Why is this feeling so effortful? Also this is so confusing?’”

Niederhoffer and Hancock now have a name for this phenomenon, the feeling you get when you’re reading a message or document that’s so convoluted or incomplete in thought that you start to wonder, “Wait, did a human even write this, or is this AI?”

It’s called workslop, and it’s killing teams and productivity across all kinds of businesses, they say.

Workslop refers to “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”

That’s according to new research from BetterUp, where Niederhoffer is vice president of their research labs, and Stanford Social Media Lab, where Hancock is the founding director.

Like AI art or features of the so-called slop life that came before it, workslop looks familiar in an off-kilter, uncanny way but at its core is devoid of meaning. Think: long, fancy-sounding, copy-pasted language that doesn’t say anything.

Some 40% of people say they’ve received workslop in the last month, according to a recent BetterUp and Stanford survey of 1,150 full-time U.S. workers. These staffers estimate an average of 15% of the content they receive qualifies as low-effort, unhelpful, AI-generated work; it’s happening across industries but is especially prominent in professional services and technology.

One survey respondent, a finance worker, recalled how receiving AI-generated work from a colleague led to more work for them: “It created a situation where I had to decide whether I would rewrite it myself, make him rewrite it, or just call it good enough.”

Another respondent, a director in retail, said they wasted time following up on information they were sent and doing their own research. “I then had to waste even more time setting up meetings with other supervisors to address the issue. Then I continued to waste my own time having to redo the work myself.”

There are tell-tale signs of workslop, Hancock says, including “purple prose,” like using three paragraphs of text when one bullet point would suffice.

It may appear in different forms, from bad code to decks with incomplete information or just strangely worded emails, but it all has the same effect of adding work onto the recipient to make sense of it all. Ultimately, it can erode trust and productivity.

Niederhoffer has herself judged the people who send her workslop. “Why did they do this?” she’d wonder. “Can they not complete the job themselves? I don’t trust them. I don’t want to work with them again.”

The end result is “confusion, annoyance, wasted effort and then some serious layers of judgment,” she says.

AI use has doubled at work since 2023 from 21% to 40%, per Gallup, yet 95% of organizations don’t see a measurable return on their investment in the tech, according to a recent MIT Media Lab report. Workslop could be a big reason why, BetterUp and Stanford researchers say.

People who’ve encountered it say they spend an average of one hour and 56 minutes dealing with the aftermath of it; that adds up to a roughly $186 invisible tax per month, based on their self-reported salaries.

For an organization of 10,000 workers, that’s a $9 million hit to productivity in a year, researchers say.

(Worth noting, this doesn’t account for any productivity gains reported by companies or employees.)

Beyond the financial cost, there’s an emotional one. Recipients of workslop say it takes time and mental energy to figure out how to diplomatically address the subpar work with their colleagues; 53% report being annoyed, 38% confused and 22% offended.

Receiving it makes people rethink their colleagues’ abilities: Roughly half of workers say they consider their co-workers less creative, capable and reliable after receiving workslop from them. About 1 in 3 say they notify their teammates or bosses after receiving confusing AI-generated work, and a similar share are less likely to want to work with the other person afterward.

And though sloppy work has been around forever, AI takes it to another level.

“For me to produce sloppy work, I still have to put in a fair bit of effort. I have to write it. It can be thoughtless, but it still requires effort,” Hancock says. “Now that [the effort] piece is gone, I can generate a lot of useless or unproductive content very easily.”

The phenomenon’s human cost is driven by “shifting the burden onto the other person without recognizing that impact implicitly,” Niederhoffer says. “People forget that because we’re thinking of [AI] as a tool with which we alone work, but it’s actually mediating human-to-human work.”

Minimizing low-quality AI-generated work, and all the consequences that come with it, is up to organizations that bring AI into the fold, researchers say.

Businesses should focus on an organized approach to adopting and promoting AI at work, Hancock says. Without guidance and leadership, he says, workers may act out of fear that if they don’t use AI they’ll be replaced, but if they do, they’ll be judged for it.

What reduces workslop is “a team’s commitment to task quality,” Hancock says. Teams should spend time talking to one another about how they use AI and critiquing the best applications for their needs.

That also requires being forthcoming about when and where you’re using AI. Say you were pressed for time and used a generative AI chatbot to complete a presentation deck, for example. If you tell your colleague that the work you’re sending is AI-generated, they can have a better sense of what prompts you were working with and what your goal was and fill in any missing gaps, Hancock says.

Leaders should focus on human agency and encourage a “pilot mindset” to see how tools can give them more control in their workplace, Niederhoffer says. Managers should be able to provide specific reasons why they want to use certain AI tools for certain projects, and have clear messages on the guidelines, policies and training that will accompany usage, she says.

Having high agency over AI “can be incredible,” Niederhoffer says, “but it’s in stark contrast to this really copy-and-paste mode, where you just let the tool do all the work for you, and you forget to let it augment your human competencies.”

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In late 2019, Rachael De Foe was burnt out, so she took a leap of faith that many dream of but never do: she quit her nine-to-five job without anything lined up.

The Singapore-native had spent the past few years working in public relations at various companies, from large agencies to smaller boutique firms.

“Every single business was chasing what I now like to call the ‘agency monster’ … You have too many clients, so you need [a bigger] team. You have too many team [members], so you need more clients. There’s never equilibrium,” De Foe told CNBC Make It. “I had burned out more than once.”

One day, she realized that she couldn’t picture herself in her bosses’ shoes. “That’s just not the life that I wanted. So that’s when I decided to quit at the end of 2019,” she said.

Today, the 31-year-old works as a fractional head of communications through her public relations and communications company, Redefy, which she started in 2020. What she didn’t expect was that this leap in the dark would eventually allow her to more than triple her income.

She went from making $72,000 Singaporean dollars (about $56,000) in her nine-to-five job to about $220,000 a year as her own boss, according to documents verified by CNBC Make It.

After leaving her job, De Foe thought she was going to take some time to decompress during the holiday season before finding another job in the new year.

“I had no plan, if I’m being quite honest … my plan was to figure it out,” she said. “At first I [thought] maybe I should look for a different job. But every time I looked at other jobs in the market, it just wasn’t interesting, and I could see the same patterns happening again.”

Then, all of a sudden a global pandemic hit in early 2020.

“I’ll be honest, it was actually really scary at that point of time, because I think two of the functions [first] to be cut [during an] economic downturn, was both PR and HR … so in my mind, I was like: ’Oh no, what am I going to do?”

However, this also presented a new opportunity for De Foe. As companies downsized and cut their PR and communications teams, many ultimately had to find leaner solutions.

“At the peak of Covid, essentially, I had founders and VCs reach out to me saying something along the lines of: ‘Rachel, we just got rid of our agency, but we have this reputation problem … Can you solve this problem?’” she recalls.

What started as some ad hoc freelancing turned into the next chapter of her career. She incorporated her own company and became a fractional head of communications.

While freelancers are hired to execute specific projects or hourly tasks, fractional workers are more embedded into a business — often helping to lead the overall strategy at a company. Also, as opposed to a permanent or staff employee, fractional workers contribute on a part-time basis for multiple businesses or clients.

“As a fractional head of [communications] … I’m completely responsible for the communications function of a company. But because the company may not [need] a full time person, it’s really up to me to make my own hours,” De Foe explained.

“I answer to three CEOs, but I’m my own CEO at the same time,” she said.

Going fractional has allowed De Foe to escape the cycle of burnout she experienced earlier in her career, she said. Instead of continuously chasing more clients or needing more people on the team, she now gets to choose whether or not to take specific clients or projects.

“In the past few years, it’s been very interesting to see the shift in fractional as well, because people who used to be seniors at companies that I’ve worked for have started going the fractional route too,” said De Foe.

She says that fractional work can make sense in a services-based businesses, because “you are the service,” she said.

“You are the person that people want to work with, right? So it doesn’t matter whether you’re sitting under a [bigger] company or [if you’re working alone]. People are looking for that interaction with you, and if you have [the experience or seniority], that’s enough to start on your own,” she said.

Her typical client load ranges from three to five companies at once. This model of working has not only afforded her more autonomy, but also more money.

In the past five years, she’s earned more than $1.4 million Singapore dollars (about $1.1 million), according to documents verified by CNBC Make It.

“I’m never going back to one boss,” said De Foe. “I’m a lot happier. I’m a lot more fulfilled, and I think more than anything — I feel like I can give myself the permission to chase the things that I want to.”

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We’ve all been there: You’re nursing a mistake or wrestling with a tough decision when suddenly someone swoops in with “helpful” advice you never asked for. Instead of feeling supported, you feel judged and second-guessed. 

There’s a psychological reason why advice that we didn’t ask for often stings. Research shows that unsolicited advice threatens autonomy and can undermine something called self-efficacy — your belief that you’re capable of managing challenges. 

When someone offers guidance without being asked, what your brain hears is: “You can’t handle this on your own.” That matters, because self-efficacy is a cornerstone of confidence. Studies link it directly to motivation, resilience, and even career success. 

So how do you handle unsolicited advice? The key is to calmly and respectfully acknowledge it, but never surrender your agency. Here are five simple, effective ways to respond. 

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This is a polite way to acknowledge someone’s input without locking yourself in. It keeps the peace and acknowledges the other person’s contribution, while keeping the decision-making power firmly with you.

This is the softest boundary, best in instances like a colleague weighing in on how you should run your project, or a relative chiming in about your personal choices.

It is ideal for professional and personal contexts where you want to stay courteous, but not invite any more input. 

This shows you’re listening to their perspective while keeping the choice of how to act in your hands. It balances respect while honoring your own autonomy, and research shows that protecting autonomy is key to wellbeing, motivation, and self-belief. 

This is ideal when the advice-giver is senior to you, maybe a boss or mentor. It lets you acknowledge their authority while standing firm in your approach. It’s useful when you haven’t made a decision yet, but know the direction you want. 

That said, if the advice comes from someone with more experience or oversight, it may make sense to follow their direction unless you have a very strong reason not to. You could add add a brief explanation: “I prefer to handle it this way, and here’s why…”

This respectfully closes the loop while signaling you’ve got things under control. It also reduces the chance that they’ll keep offering repeat advice because you’ve been clear about having a direction. 

Use this for repeated or insistent advice, like a coworker who keeps pushing their “better way” of doing something, or a family member who doesn’t trust you to make your own choices. 

It’s a firmer step up from “That’s a useful view. I prefer to handle it this way,” because it explicitly states that you already have a plan.

This reframes the interaction by guiding them toward what you do need, which is emotional support instead of instruction. It channels their good intentions while protecting your sense of control.

It shines in personal situations, like when friends or family jump in with advice, but what you really need is empathy, and someone to listen.

Research finds that emotional support often help us feel better when we’re stressed, while solution-giving can sometimes miss the mark or even backfire. 

This validates their effort but sets a clear boundary. This approach prevents further unsolicited input while leaving the door open for you to seek advice on your terms.

It’s useful when you need to firmly close the conversation, like when you’re getting bombarded with “shoulds” at work, or when someone keeps overstepping in your personal life.

One important thing to keep in mind: Tone changes everything. The very same words can come across as gracious or defensive depending on how you deliver them. Aim for calm, steady, and respectful. That’s what makes these responses work.

Advice will always come, whether you want it to or not. At work, at home, in the grocery line, even at the gym. Your power lies in how you receive it.

Shadé Zahrai is an award-winning peak performance educator, behavioral researcher, and leadership strategist to Fortune 500 companies. She has educated more than 7 million professionals through LinkedIn Learning and is the author of “Big Trust: Rewire Self-Doubt, Find Your Confidence, and Fuel Success.” Recognized as one of LinkedIn’s Top 50 Most Impactful People, she supports leaders at some of the world’s biggest brands, including Microsoft, Deloitte, Procter & Gamble, and JPMorgan, through her firm, Influenceo Global. She earned her doctorate from Monash University. Follow her on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

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Taking a lower-paying job doesn’t usually sound like a positive development for someone’s career. Neither does going on an extended hiatus from work.

But seemingly backwards moves — like starting an entry-level role in a new industry, or going back to school for a career change — often have the potential to make you happier and more successful in the long run, according to bestselling author and leadership expert Simon Sinek.

“I think a lot of people think that if you only maintain forward momentum, that’s the only way to advance,” Sinek said on his “A Bit of Optimism” podcast, in a September 2 episode featuring happiness expert and Harvard University professor Arthur Brooks. “But the reality is: It’s kind of more like a slingshot … At some point, you have to go back, and then it fires forward a lot faster than if you were just walking the stone forward.”

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Happiness and fulfillment come from learning, pursuing opportunities that you enjoy and bouncing back from moves that don’t work out, said Sinek. But people frequently struggle with how these decisions are perceived by others, making it hard to love the process. That’s especially true for students and early-career professionals, who may feel like they’re competing with their peers to reach certain milestones, he said.

“The whole idea of, ‘I’m going to get behind,’ suggests that you’re in a race towards something, which means there’s a finish line and that’s what you’re looking forward to the most,” said Sinek. “And that is completely wrong.”

Once you’re confident enough in your own path to stop worrying about how others will judge your decisions, you’ll feel happier and more fulfilled, he said.

Brooks, the happiness expert, cited himself as an example of someone who made a seemingly backward career moves to ultimately become more successful. He was originally a professional French horn player, dropping out of college to tour as a musician at age 19, he said. For years, he struggled to earn a living as a soloist — and eventually stopped chasing a breakthrough, going back to school in his late 20s.

Returning to academia put Brooks on the path to his current career, he said. “Throughout my life, about every 10 years, I strip my life back to the bolts,” Brooks told Harvard Magazine in December 2022. “I start all over.”

A willingness to take a step back and reassess your career, without worrying about factors like judgment from others or making less money, is a crucial part of finding fulfillment, Sinek said on the podcast: “If you’re too paralyzed by fear and you don’t know how to reinvent yourself and you’re not willing to go backwards in terms of money and power and prestige, you’re screwed.”

If you’re weighing whether or not to shake up your career, you should ask yourself 10 specific questions, executive coach Cynthia Pong wrote for CNBC Make It in May. Those questions include “Have you thought about leaving your field most days in the past week?” “Would your loved ones say you should change careers?” and “What unique skills, talents and perspectives would you bring to a new field?”

Your answers can help you differentiate between the normal, “occasional frustration” that everyone experiences at some point and a pattern of unhappiness and misalignment that you need to address, wrote Pong.

Want to be your own boss? Sign up for Smarter by CNBC Make It’s new online course, How To Start A Business: For First-Time Founders. Find step-by-step guidance for launching your first business, from testing your idea to growing your revenue. Sign up today with coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off the regular course price of $127 (plus tax). Offer valid September 16 through September 30, 2025.

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