Why the Principal’s Child Is Either the Nicest Student or the Spoiled One—and What Actually Helps
The first time I met a principal’s child, she was in my third-period geography class. She sat in the middle row, raised her hand twice, and stayed after class to ask if I needed help sorting the textbooks. Her name was Lily, and her dad was the principal. For the first few months, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it never did. Lily was the kind of student who remembered to bring extra pencils, asked if I wanted help setting up the projector, and said “good morning” in a way that didn’t feel performative. The other kids didn’t resent her. They just thought she was quiet and a little eager.
I’ve now taught in three schools where the principal had a child enrolled, and I’ve come to accept the old joke is mostly true. Either the principal’s kid is like Lily—helpful, polite, somehow already a junior teacher’s aide—or they’re like Marcus.
Marcus was the son of the principal at another school, and by the second week, the faculty room had a shared understanding: avoid him if you can. He talked over me constantly, left crumpled assignment sheets under his desk, and once asked, in front of the class, whether I knew his mom was the principal. It wasn’t malicious. He just genuinely expected different rules. When I asked him to put his phone away, he frowned and said, “My mom lets me use it during class.”
I did not, in fact, know that his mom let him use it during class. When I checked with her later, she looked exhausted and said, “He’s exaggerating. I said he could check his schedule. That’s it.” But by then, the pattern was already set. Marcus had learned that his mother’s position created a little bubble, and he was comfortable living inside it.
The strange thing is that I don’t think either outcome has much to do with the child’s actual personality. It’s about how everyone around the child handles the identity of being “the principal’s kid.” In school, we make it into a thing even when we don’t mean to. The office staff knows the child’s name by week one. Teachers get an extra heads-up about behavior. Other parents know. The child walks through the building with a kind of invisible label, and that label changes what is possible in ways that are hard to undo.
With Lily, the label worked in her favor. She had high expectations placed on her, and she met them. Her dad never asked me to be lenient with her—actually, he avoided mentioning her at all. But I knew. Everyone knew. So I was careful to be fair with her, to not give her extra attention, and to respond to her helpfulness in a measured way. She got praised, but not too much. She got corrected, but gently. It was a perfect middle path, and I have no idea if her dad engineered it on purpose or if it was luck.
Marcus, on the other hand, had a different kind of presence. His mom was visible in the building all the time, which made him visible by association. Teachers felt awkward calling his mother about a missed assignment because that conversation would inevitably end with the principal saying, “Thanks, I’ll talk to him,” and then the next day Marcus would be briefly surly. It wasn’t that she punished him. It was that the whole dynamic made ordinary classroom management feel loaded. So some teachers just stopped pushing. We stopped requiring him to finish his work in class. We stopped making him wait his turn. He got a lighter version of the rules because nobody wanted to deal with the weird layered relationship between teacher and principal.
That’s the real problem. The spoiled brat isn’t necessarily spoiled at home. They’re often just the product of a school system that can’t figure out how to treat their parent’s job. When a teacher is suddenly supervising the principal’s child, the usual power balance flips. The kid knows it. The teacher knows it. The principal knows it. And everyone is trying to act normal while not actually acting normal.
What helped with Marcus, eventually, was a small shift. I stopped being the one to report his behavior to his mom. Instead, I wrote the same notes I would for any other parent, but the office handled delivery. I also decided I would not make special accommodations in the classroom. When he said his mom allowed something, I simply said, “Great, have her email me about it, and I’ll do the same thing I do for everyone.” That one sentence changed things. He had no way to argue with it. And his mom, to her credit, emailed me exactly once. It was about a late science project, and she asked if he could turn it in the next day. I said yes, because I would have said yes to any other student who had a reasonable excuse. It wasn’t special treatment. It was normal treatment.
I think that’s the key. Principals’ kids don’t need to be handled differently. They need to be handled with the exact same routines, boundaries, and expectations as everyone else. But that’s harder than it sounds because the adults in the building are the ones making it weird. The child just gets caught in the middle.
For parents whose child is the principal’s kid, the most useful thing I can say is this: tell the school you want to be treated like any other parent. Not because you don’t appreciate the extra communication, but because your child needs ordinary messes to stay ordinary. If a teacher feels they have to filter everything before saying it to you, they’ll just say less. And if your child senses they’re protected, they’ll test it. I saw that with Marcus. He wasn’t a bad kid. He was a smart kid who found a loophole, and adults kept leaving it open.
For teachers, the practical version is simple. Use the same language you’d use with any student. “Please don’t interrupt.” “Phone in the bag.” “Turn this in by Friday.” If the child references their parent, respond without drama: “That’s nice. In my room, this is the rule.” As awkward as it is, that consistency is what allows the child to eventually calm down and just be a student.
The Lily types don’t need much. If anything, they need permission to be less helpful sometimes. I learned to say, “I’ve got it, but thanks,” more often than I might have with another student. Because when everyone keeps praising a principal’s kid for being such a good helper, they can start to believe that’s the only way to be loved at school.
I still think about both of them sometimes. Lily probably became a class officer or student body president. Marcus probably matured once he ran out of people willing to bend the rules. I don’t know. The truth is, the label of “principal’s kid” doesn’t decide a child’s future—but the adults around them do shape how many years of school feel normal or extraordinary.
The hard part is remembering that behind the label, there’s just a kid who didn’t choose to have a parent in a front office. They’re not an angel meant to represent the school’s best self, and they’re not a villain meant to test our patience. They’re just in a strange situation where everyone keeps looking at the situation instead of at them. And when we finally stop doing that, the classroom gets a little quieter, a little more ordinary, and a lot easier for everyone.
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