Be careful what you say about schools in front of your kids

Here's something easy to forget during the haze of admissions: your kid is listening, and what you say will quietly narrow their world.

You have enormous influence, more than your eye-rolling teenager will ever admit. Call a school "the stressed-out one" or "kind of a fallback" within earshot, and you may have ruled it out for your kid before they ever gave it a chance. Often it's based on a reputation that has little to do with the school as it actually is today, and even less to do with what it could be for your particular kid. Reputations are sticky and frequently wrong. Defer your judgment, especially the secondhand kind.

There's a second effect that sneaks up on you. Kids repeat what they hear, and they repeat it as fact. The moment a stray opinion lets them sound knowing in front of their friends, out it comes. So an offhand comment doesn't just shrink your own kid's list. It travels, and it can shame some other family's kid out of a school that might have been perfect for them.

That's the part worth sitting with. San Francisco is lucky. There is a school here for every kind of kid, and most of them are good in ways that never show up in the gossip. You don't want a casual line at the dinner table to be the reason any child, yours or someone else's, never finds the place where they'd have thrived.

So talk about schools, of course. Just hold your verdicts lightly, say the generous version out loud, and leave your kid the room to form their own first impression of each place before you hand them yours.