Is it a key factor?
If my parental statement is mediocre would that heavily impact my chanes?
My son’s application suffered from mediocre parent statements and he managed to get in. 8-}
My guess is that they are assessing parent support and engagement in the process, not parent writing or story-telling skills. But my opinion and a quarter will buy you a gumball.
I don’t think it can be a key factor, there are too many parents for whom English is a second language and so may have less than stellar essays. My guess is similar to Altras, BS want to know that the whole family is behind the decision to apply and they want to weed out clearly problematic parents.
Possibly it is also a chance to have a parental writing sample to compare to the kid essays in an attempt to weed out parents who wrote their kids’ essays for them. Although in the family I know where a parent wrote the kid’s essays I believe the other parent wrote the parent statements.
*CHANCES (it’s late, I’m tired, apologies)
Parental statements should reveal what parents expect from their child’s boarding school experience. For example, challenging academics & personalized attention is appropriate, whereas expectations of assured admission into an Ivy League school is unrealistic.
Same here. 
Agree that for the most part, parent statements are geared towards what parents expect from the boarding school experience. In our case, I also used the statement to explain some extenuating circumstances that our family went through when my son was in 7th grade. We experienced 2 significant losses of loved ones in a short period of time. While we did not face a loss of one of the 4 of us in our nuclear family, the people we lost were very close family members. One was elderly and not unexpected, but still difficult. The other was around my same age, and was a shock. Due to the circumstances, our family members had to make the types of decisions that no one should ever have to make about their child / sibling / spouse. It took a toll on all of us and was a very dark time. My son’s grades dropped entire letter grades during this period, as he took it very hard. As such, I felt that an explanation was necessary.
When asked what we were hoping our child got from boarding school (or something to that effect), I answered that I hoped he’d learn to clean his room and do laundry once in a while as well as avoid the penal system and get into college some day.
Really, say what you want to say as well as you can say it, and then don’t give it another thought. As long as the school knows you’re on board with the decision, won’t hover, and aren’t expecting them to get junior into any particular college, it’s all good. Unless you reveal something terribly concerning, these statements are not going to be the reason for your child’s acceptance or rejection.
I think they just want to make sure you won’t be whiney, entitled, pain-in-the-ass complainers or meddlesome helicopter types.
^unfortunately, I don’t think all of those are weeded out by the parent statements
I think if you do not appear to be blatantly crazy, the parental statement won’t have much effect.
Yearly cohort studies (aka parents’ weekends) confirm that the parent statement is ineffective for screening out the blatant crazies. =P~
Yes, 89% of us crazies are good at keeping it under wraps when we absolutely need to. A few of our more zealous comrades, alas, do get flagged every year.