Parents are often caught off guard when a high school counselor asks them to submit a parent statement about their child. These are called brag sheets and are what you should think of when assembling your own. Here are some tips for making your parent statement a brag sheet that helps get your child into college.
Why Parent Statements Are So Important
Your children may dispute this, but you know your child better and longer than anyone else. Your interactions transcend those a teacher or school counselor has had with the student.
- You understand the anxieties that your child has.
- You know the strengths they exhibit.
- You know what makes them proud and what their struggles have been.
For these reasons, your perspective is both essential and insightful. Most of all, you love your child and can see into their souls.
What Is A School Counselor Looking For In A Parent Statement?
A school counselor is looking for anecdotes or stories about your child to help them understand a dimension beyond that which the counselor sees at school. Often, the counselor will lift paragraphs directly from the brag sheet and put them into the student’s letter of recommendation.
The counselor’s letter of recommendation is an essential source for colleges when considering which students to accept. It helps a college put students into the context of their high schools and the general application pool. Your input is constructive for an overworked counselor. It helps showcase your child to the college admissions representative who reads the letters.
What Is In A College Letter Of Recommendation?
The college letter of recommendation includes a School Report Form that tells a college where your child stands among other graduating class members. This form contains demographic information about your child’s high school, including your community’s race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic information. It also asks about the number of volunteer hours required for graduation. This information is vital as it offers an insight into the school community from which the student comes.
The school report form also features a chart that invites a counselor to objectively rate the student’s academic achievement, extracurricular accomplishments, personal qualities, character, and overall performance compared to their peers at their high school. This rating, combined with the college letter of recommendation, can be the most influential piece of a student’s application package the college receives ensuring fair and comprehensive evaluations.
In addition, the transcript and the counselor’s letter of recommendation, if provided, are attached to the school report form. Completing your child’s brag sheet will encourage their counselor to add that piece to the application packet.
What Else To Include In Your Parent Brag Sheet
Now that you know what the counselor will submit on your student’s behalf, you can see how a parent brag sheet may be helpful. A counselor may know your child well or not at all. To provide a complete picture, counselors need information they would not have access to without your help. For example, suppose there is a specific item you want to have included in their letter. In that case, you must share that information with the counselor and tell them you wish to include this explicitly in the letter.
Some examples of necessary information to include in your parent statement:
- Your child was diagnosed with a learning difference in 10th grade but unaware, persevered and earned good grades before that by sheer force of will and determination.
- Through family circumstances, your child is required to care for younger siblings or elderly grandparents after school each day. That has restricted the school-based activities in which they could become involved.
- Your child has a great deal of social anxiety but has pushed herself to take part in the theater program at the high school to try to overcome it. As a result, she has found her passion and friendships.
- A close relative died early in their high school years, and the grieving process was complicated until your son came to terms with the need to continue to grow and learn as a tribute to the person.
- You had a contentious divorce that threw your daughter off her stride. The new paradigm of living partially with each parent has been a difficult transition. Still, as a student, she focuses on her education and activities maturely.
- Chemistry was complex for your son, but he hung in there, signed up for peer tutoring, worked very hard, and received an acceptable grade with no word of complaint.
- Your family moved in the middle of the sophomore year, requiring your daughter to start again with new friends at a different school. While very sad to have left home, she threw herself into this new experience with vigor and had no diminution of her academic performance.
- Your child loves to teach younger kids skills, such as computer skills, tennis, baseball, or any other talents he has. He has a particular affinity for special needs kids and works with them both through his religious group and his school. He never asks for recognition for these services and doesn’t realize he is doing community service work.
Some things to avoid talking about in your parent statement:
- Teachers are too hard on her.
- No one understands just how special he is.
- The school is not very good and therefore she is not doing well.
- His counselor thinks he is a screw up, so he can’t catch a break.
- She should not be expected to get her assignments in on time because she is so busy with extracurricular activities.
- He got an 89 in Calculus, but the teacher wouldn’t give him the A he deserved.
The Bottom Line In Writing Your Parent Statement
Be honest, and don’t blame others for issues with your child’s performance, whether in class or outside of it. The counselor is on your side and wants to present an understanding of the student in the school and the greater community context. What aspects of your child’s personality, skill set, and determination do you admire most? What roadblocks does your daughter scale as though they did not exist? How does your son’s presence on this earth enhance the lives of others?
These are the things to consider when writing the parent statement. Be open, but don’t embellish. Your child has become an accomplished person who will do great things in the world; there is no need to gild the lily.
We also have times when we have all stepped off the right path, and this may or may not be the place to address those if relevant. If your child experienced disciplinary actions, losses, uncomfortable issues, or significant life changes, don’t hide them. Focus instead on the growth that came from them and how your child has demonstrated what they learned from the experience.
If you are concerned about what you have written, run it by a professional for edit and comment. I am always happy to do that for my client families!
