The short answer: how much to practice for a school interview. Less than almost anyone tells you. A handful of short, conversational sessions, a few questions at a time, spread over a few weeks; you're done when your child can talk comfortably about a few things they genuinely like and can use their recovery line without being reminded. That's the finish line. Past it, practice subtracts: after twenty years across the admissions table, I can tell you the most heavily coached kids were reliably the most nervous ones in the room.
How much should a child practice for a school interview?
Over-preparation doesn't happen because parents are foolish. It happens because love plus fear has no natural off switch: one more session, one more question, one more pass at the answer that wasn't quite smooth. And the industry around families rarely says stop, not out of bad faith; help that's sold by the hour simply has no built-in finish line. Parents have to bring their own. This piece is that finish line.
Start with what over-coached sounds like from my side of the table, because it isn't what parents expect. It isn't a struggling child. It's answers that arrive too fast, polished past the age of the speaker. It's a child pattern-matching, listening for the question they prepared instead of the question they were asked, and deflating on the first follow-up, which is exactly where the real conversation was supposed to begin. It's the fake weakness that's secretly a strength. I'll be plain about it: the biggest interview mistake I saw across twenty years wasn't nerves. It was rehearsal.
What are the signs of over-coaching?
The signs at home arrive earlier, and every practice session has exactly one test: is your child calmer at the end than at the start? If anxiety is rising session over session; if you've started correcting mid-answer; if sessions are running long, or nightly; if your child has started asking "was that right?". Practice has crossed from preparing into performing, and the performance it's producing is anxiety in a costume.
When should you stop practicing?
The finish line itself fits in a sentence. Your child can talk comfortably about a few things they genuinely like, and can use "let me think about that for a second" without being prompted. That's it. Not polish. Polish is the thing that reads as coached. Stopping while it's still comfortable isn't settling; it's the strategy, and it's the line that separates this advice from every coaching pitch you'll read.
What should you do instead of one more session?
So what do you do instead of one more session? The night before is for dinner and sleep, not review. If your hands need a job, give them logistics: lay out the clothes, plan to arrive with fifteen minutes to spare. A rested kid who sounds like themselves beats a drilled kid every single time, and the person across the table can tell the difference inside ninety seconds.
Jennifer Hines spent twenty years as a Dean of Admission at Noble and Greenough School. Her free guide, What They're Really Asking, decodes fifteen interview questions from the other side of the table, and shows why the quiet kid is often the one who lands them best.