Why the Principal’s Kid Is Either the Nicest Student in School or the One Nobody Corrects
The first time I really noticed Nora, she was sorting the lost-and-found bin. It wasn’t a classroom job. No one had asked her to do it. She just pulled out a red mitten, matched it to a blue one, frowned, put the blue one back. Then she stacked the matching pairs in a neat row on the table. She was eleven.
Nora was the principal’s daughter. That explained the early arrival. It didn’t explain the sorting. I watched for a minute, then asked if she was looking for something. “No,” she said. “It just needed to be done.”
When I mentioned it to a teacher who worked across from the office, she said, “Oh, Nora’s the good one.” She didn’t say it like a compliment. She said it the way you’d identify a type of weather.
I’ve now been in education long enough to have met more than a few principal’s kids. They tend to come in two versions. There’s the Nora version—overly responsible, polite to the point of being uncomfortable, always standing a little too straight when an adult walks by. And there’s the other version: the one who treats the secretary’s desk like a drive-through window and expects a warning instead of a consequence.
I used to think those were two completely different families. But the dynamic underneath is the same, just expressed in opposite directions. The child is never just a student; they’re a symbol. Everyone knows who they are. Teachers adjust their expectations before they even meet the kid. Some go easier because they don’t want a tense conversation in the principal’s office. Others go harder because they want to prove they aren’t showing favoritism. And the child feels all of it.
Nora learned it meant she had to be beyond reproach. Her mom heard about everything. Not because anyone was gossiping, but because that’s how schools work. The principal hears about discipline issues, but also about a lost library book, a scraped knee, a sassy comment in the lunch line. When it’s your child, you hear about it faster. So Nora learned to be perfect. She didn’t get in trouble. She also didn’t get to be a normal kid. She took on the job of making her mother’s job easier, which is heavy for a fourth grader.
The other type, I saw a few years later at a school where the principal’s son, Michael, was in seventh grade. Michael didn’t sort lost-and-found. He stood in the middle of the hallway with his arms out, forcing kids to duck under him. When a teacher asked him to stop, he said, “Okay, sorry,” and then did it again. He wasn’t malicious. He just didn’t think the instruction applied to him.
No one corrected him. Not because teachers were lazy, but because his dad was in the office. One teacher told me, “If I call the office, his dad comes down, and then it’s a whole thing. Easier to just redirect and move on.” A month later, Michael had never gotten a detention. His dad was reasonable, but nobody ever gave him the chance to react, because nobody wanted to be the one bringing bad news about the principal’s son. So Michael learned the rules were for other people.
It’s easy to blame the parents. But I’ve known principals whose kids fell into both categories. It’s not always about what happens at home. A principal can be a wonderful parent, and their child still becomes a little monster at school. The problem is that the school stops acting like a normal environment around the child. The usual feedback loops break.
When a kid misbehaves, a teacher says, “Please stop.” If it keeps happening, the teacher escalates. The kid learns cause and effect. For a principal’s kid, that loop breaks. Teachers use their “teacher voice” less. They make extra allowances. Or they do the opposite: so worried about appearing fair that they come down harder on the principal’s kid than they would on anyone else. Both responses are a little off. Kids notice when adults are behaving oddly around them. For some, it becomes “I can’t make a single mistake.” For others, it becomes “I can do anything.”
So what can you do? For teachers, the most effective thing I’ve found is to ask myself before I respond to the principal’s kid: “Would I do this exact same thing if the parent worked in a different building?” If Michael had shoved his arms in the hallway, I would have said, “Michael, lower your arms. You were asked to stop.” The principal’s kid needs the same specificity and the same boundary. They don’t need a lecture. They need a normal consequence, delivered in a normal tone.
It also helps to stop assigning them symbolic roles. I’ve seen teachers make the principal’s child the “line leader” or the “office messenger” because it feels natural. Sometimes the kid loves it. But Nora didn’t love sorting lost-and-found. She was doing adult work because she sensed that was what was expected. If a principal’s child is always helping, check whether they’re helping because they want to or because they’ve decided that’s the price of being there.
For principals, the useful thing is to be explicit with staff. Say: “I know it’s awkward, but I expect my child to be treated exactly like any other student. That includes consequences. I will not take it personally.” That sentence can make teachers feel safer. And it gives the principal a script if their child asks why they got in trouble: “You got in trouble because you got in trouble. That’s what happens at school.”
The harder part is for the child. They still have to walk around with that last name. But you can change how much of it they have to carry. One small shift: don’t reference the parent when you talk to the kid. Instead of saying, “What would your mom say?” say, “What do you need to do differently next time?” It pulls the child back into being a student, not a representative.
I also think it helps when the principal’s kid has a place to be just a kid. For Nora, that was the art room. By spring, she was staying after lunch to help dry paintings instead of sorting lost-and-found. The art teacher treated her like a normal kid who liked to paint. She didn’t lower the bar. She just gave Nora a spot where the title didn’t follow her around.
I don’t know if Nora is still this perfect. I moved schools. But I think about her when a new principal arrives and the rumors start. Before I meet the kid, I try to remember: they already have a job. They’ve spent years figuring out how to be the principal’s child. The least I can do is let them be ordinary for the forty minutes they’re in my room.
Maybe that’s the best we can manage—not fixing the whole dynamic, just creating one small space where the kid can be in normal trouble, normal kindness, normal boredom. The rest of the building can wait.
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