The parent statement

The application asks your student to write, and then it asks you. Most private schools include a parent or guardian statement: a few questions about who your kid is, how they learn, what you hope high school does for them, and why this school. After weeks of being told to keep your hands off your student's essay, this is the one piece that's actually yours.

The questions look easy and turn out to be strangely hard, because "describe your child" is a big ask when you know too much. The way through is the same specifics rule that runs the rest of this process: one true story beats a paragraph of adjectives. "Curious and compassionate" describes half the applicant pool. The kid who spent a whole Saturday teaching their cousin to ride a bike, or reorganized the family's earthquake kit for fun, exists exactly once.

Knowing what schools are reading for helps. Admissions people read hundreds of these, and the flawless-child statement, brilliant and kind and captain of everything, tells them only that the parents polish. A specific kid with real edges is credible and memorable. Your statement also sits in a folder next to teacher recommendations and grades, so a portrait that doesn't match the rest of the file reads worse than an honest one would have. And they're reading you, too: your family is signing up to be the school's partner for four years, and this is where a school senses whether you see your kid clearly and how you'll show up when something's hard.

So be honest about the growth areas, and say what you're doing about them. "Organization doesn't come naturally, and we've been working on it with a planner and a weekly reset" reads as strength: a family that knows its kid and works the problem. Schools aren't looking for finished teenagers. They're looking for families they can work with.

Write it like yourself. It isn't a college essay and nobody is grading the vocabulary; a plain voice that sounds like a real household beats prose that sounds like a brochure. If two adults are involved, a division of labor works well: one drafts, the other reads it for truth. If that read turns up a real disagreement about who your kid is, that's worth a conversation on its own, and better had now than mid-application. The Family Compass exists for exactly that.

Two logistics notes. Parent statements often come due earlier than you'd expect, sometimes ahead of the student's pieces, so check each school's checklist rather than assuming they all land in January. And while the core portrait of your kid can travel from school to school, the why-this-school parts can't: schools can smell a mail merge. The specifics you logged in Field Notes after each visit are what make those paragraphs sound like you were actually there, because you were.