If your child is applying to private schools, you may be compelled to write a parent statement. Writing the parent statement helps private schools understand your child on a deeper level. It helps the admissions officers better articulate why your child would be a great fit for the school.

However, many parents don’t edit and revise their parent statements properly. This can cost your child’s acceptance into their desired private school —thus, compromising their acceptance into university.

Here at PenningPapers, we’ve compiled some of the most important elements of writing the parent statement for private schools.

Table of Contents

1. Should I Have Someone Edit my Parent Statement?
2. How to Describe Your Child for Private School Admission.
   • Deconstruct Your Child’s Characteristics.
   • Keep Your Writing Organized.
   • Honesty is the Best Policy.
   • Structuring the Parent Statement
3. Final Thoughts

Should I Have Someone Edit my Parent Statement?

Yes.

When writing the parent statement for private school applications, it’s crucial to get your work professionally edited. Preferably, you’d have an admissions expert work with you. However, it’s entirely possible to solo the parent statement and write it on your own. It’s just not recommended.

Having a professional college admissions advisor work with you on the parent statement is crucial since they can often see mistakes in your parent statement that other editors and peers cannot see.

Having someone edit your parent statement is a safer and more conservative approach to the application process. The advantages gifted to students who attend an elite private school, especially the ones granted during the college admissions process, are not to be scoffed at. There is a lot at stake. So, being extra careful by ensuring an expert can review your child’s private school application is your best bet.

How to Describe Your Child for Private School Admission.

Deconstruct Your Child’s Characteristics.

When writing the parent statement for private school applications, it’s easy to glamorize your child by impulse. Before you get too excited, it’s crucial that you take a strong, hard look at your children and deconstruct their characteristics at the micro level.

This means really looking back at some of their marks, their strengths, their weaknesses, and what their teachers had to say about them. Does your child seem to do particularly well with writing and literary articulation? Does your child excel in Mathematics and have a specific interest in the hard STEM fields? Do your child’s teachers give them particular compliments that seem to have a theme to them?

Catching the patterns and overall themes behind your child’s experience and performance is crucial to writing the parent statement. Private schools want to know not just the superficial, surface-level qualities that make your student a great fit for their school. They also want to know the more in-depth qualities that constitute your child’s unique makeup.

In addition, your perspective as a parent can provide powerful insight that is otherwise not obvious from metrics like test scores and grades.

Here’s an example of what writing the parent statement ideas would look like.

Maybe you have a student who is very interested in Robotics and has a love for making their designs come to life. If you deconstruct some of the qualities in your child, you may discover that they are not only interested in Robotics, but they also have the following traits.

1. They like to juggle multiple projects.
2. They have an insatiable curiosity.
3. They love to do things unconventionally.
4. They want to make things work to solve problems.

As a parent, you may also see a side of them that most teachers and peers do not see. Perhaps you notice that your child is also hyper orderly because they use coasters beneath their drinks and make sure all items in their room are organized “just right”. This combined with observations 1-4 may make your child the perfect candidate for a future developer in the world of Robotics.

Their orderly temperament, insatiable curiosity, learning mindset, and their need to go against the grain show that they are someone capable of managing disorder but also straying from convention enough that they can innovate. Thus, their talents would best suit the private school they’re applying for to actualize their potential.

Keep Your Writing Organized.

It’s common for parents to get overjoyed and excited about their children applying to private schools. However, it’s also more common for this excitement to compromise the organization and sentence flow of the parent statement.

The parent statement can be quite difficult to write because organizing your thoughts is especially hard. Keeping all the great traits your child has under the word count is brutal, and it means often biting more than you can chew.

If your parent statement comes out as a garbled mess, it can be quite difficult for admissions officers to follow through or even believe what you say about your child. Although you as a parent are older and much more experienced with writing than your child is, we’ve seen plenty of parent statements that were disorganized. So, write with a careful hand and keep your ideas nice and tidy!

One thing you can do is write out all the ideas you have in your mind on a separate google document. Then, color code each idea and expand on them in the parent statement. Write the whole parent statement as if there were no word count. From there, you can minimize the word count to fit the limit. Color coding and reducing the word count in this order help burn off all the deadwood when writing the parent statement.

Honesty is the Best Policy.

Be honest.

Really. Be honest.

We’ve had many parents come to us asking whether or not they should tell the truth when writing the parent statement for private schools. Generally speaking, there is nothing positive that can come out of lying in the parent statement.

Admissions officers read through hundreds of applications. They have the experience it takes to see through lies. A genuine parent statement that is truthful and fully open demonstrates your character as well. If you can be honest about your child, that shines brightly on them and demonstrates to admissions officers that they are under your proper tutelage and care. If you’re dishonest, it shows quite the opposite and reflects poorly on them.

Okay, so what happens if your child suffered a disciplinary issue or had a stain on their record?

Take a step back from the admissions strategy perspective. Instead, think about what most children behave like before the age of 18. You can apply this to a private school setting and a regular public one.

They’re chaotic. Most if not all of them are in a constant state of entropy. That’s what children are like. That’s what teenagers are like. Even a good handful of young adults would have had some level of social engagement that was cringe or less than proper.

Admissions officers are fully aware of this. So, when you say that your child is completely perfect and can never do any wrong, what happens? They don’t believe you.

Instead, if your child has gone through some disciplinary action, be honest and forthright about it. Be truthful and demonstrate how your child has grown over time and can develop the maturity needed to succeed and belong in a private school setting.

This is especially crucial. Admissions officers at private schools are not just looking for academic performance and future academic success. They’re also looking for the kind of temperament that would bring a positive environment to the school.

Structuring the Parent Statement

When writing the parent statement, it is crucial to make the structure well put together and properly oriented. This means separating the paragraphs instead of having all ideas put together into one large block of text.

Most parent statements will require you to answer a set of questions that are already predetermined. More often than not, you’ll be asked to describe your child’s personality traits, what your family is like, and how you and your child will be a positive contribution and fit for the school and its values. These can be phrased differently and vary depending on the private school you’re applying for. But, the principles generally still stand.

We would recommend dedicating a paragraph to each point. However, you can segregate your paragraphs however you please so long as the flow is easy to reach and not choppy.

Don’t forget to answer the question concisely. This means that short and sweet is paramount. But, don’t be afraid to diversify the lengths of your sentences and the usage of punctuation. Sentences without commas, semicolons, and other punctuation forms make the parent statement stale.

Final Thoughts

One of the most common mistakes parents make when writing the parent statement for private school applications is lacking transparency. This is often due to parents fearing that their openness would give fodder for admissions officers to reject their child.

More often than not, this is not the case. Instead, it is the lack of openness that makes the parent statement less impressive than ones that know how to open up. If you consider elements such as your child’s temperament, their style of learning, their ability to connect with others, and any other relevant attributes, you’ll realize that your child is not perfect. There are flaws and there are strengths.

It’s up to you as a parent to write the most accurate representation of your child with both flaws and strengths. It must be done properly, and it must be done with a careful hand. This is what makes the perfect parent statement that truly impresses admissions officers instead of the banal and superficial ones they are often flooded with.

If you don’t know how to write the parent statement in full transparency, or are just struggling with writing the parent statement in general, feel free to contact us for a free consultation. Here at PenningPapers, we’ve helped countless parents get their students accepted into some of the best private schools in the nation.