Second Guessing Your Choice of Schools? Please Don’t

Now that you’ve had a few months to resume life as you knew it before LA private elementary school applications, a little nagging voice inside you may be whispering, “we made the wrong school choice”. After all the applications, interviews, nightmarish testing days? Yes! It’s possible to have doubts, second thoughts or worse, moments of total panic where you decide that it’s all wrong and your child really should be with her best friend at school x and why didn’t you, as her parent, make this decision that could impact her for life? You decide in a moment of complete delusion, to call the school on Monday and see if you can undo your admissions offer and get her into her best friends school even though you declined their offer. Then, you come to your senses and realize that’s a terrible idea.

 

You’ll keep hearing things that may make you pause and get that little voice inside you stirred up again…a friend whose daughter already has two best friends and school hasn’t started yet. Someone else you know who met a bunch of moms from the new school who invited her to Cabo for the week. And so on and on and on…That little voice only needs a tiny nudge to get its wheels spinning in your head, convincing you that you picked the WRONG SCHOOL. And school hasn’t even started yet. There are many years left for that voice to work its magic.

 

It’s totally normal to hope you’ve selected the right school for your child. And, once you start attending events–even before school starts–you may have more moments of panic. I did. What if another child is unfriendly to your child? That happened to me. A child at a welcome event scared the you-know-what out of my daughter and she screamed in terror. What if parents you meet from your new school have interests you don’t share? What if you host family isn’t a great “host”.

 

Any and all of this stuff can happen. Sometimes events are “parent- run” and the school has no knowledge about what is going on. Speaking from experience, it took me a long time to meet parents I really clicked with. My daughter had a rocky transition to kindergarten. It was really tempting to have thoughts of another school at those moments when things weren’t going so well. The first few months of school are not a great way to judge the school experience, either your child’s or you own. Give it more time. Lots more!