Don't Check Your Kid's Grades. Check Their Group Chat.

The single most reliable predictor of who your child becomes is not their report card, or their curfew. It is the people they spend the most time with.

(Photo: My daughter and her bestie graduating last year from Goldsmiths in London)

I am going to tell you the single most useful thing I learned about predicting how your kid turns out, and, hold onto your coffee mug, it is going to make some parents uncomfortable.

Grades? Mildly important but not a main factor in outcome.

What is?

Check their group chat or their core friend group.

You can hire tutors. You can set curfews. You can run a military-style calendar of structure and values at home. You can read every parenting book ever published and prep trendy organic meals, pay a fortune for private schools, and do everything the experts tell you to do.

But, if your kid is marinating in a digital junkyard, bad friends, toxic people (including coaches and teachers…been there with both!), and emotionally bankrupt adults (including parents of friends), you are fighting a losing battle.

Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future is not just a catchy line. It is a parenting truth. And it is one of the most underrated forces in all of parenting because it operates almost entirely outside a parent’s direct control and most parents refuse to take it seriously until it is too late.

Environment beats willpower every single time

Here is the part that most parents get wrong. They believe that if they just raise their kid right, instill the right values, have the right conversations, that the kid will rise above a bad environment through sheer force of character.

That is a comforting story. It is also mostly false.

I write about this in Puddle Jumpers with an example that tends to stick. Drop a monk in Vegas for a year with ten million dollars and see how that plays out. This is a person who has spent decades training their discipline to a level most of us cannot imagine. And you would still bet against him. Because environment is stronger than willpower. Not sometimes. Almost always.

The same applies to your child, except your child has a fraction of the monk’s self-regulation because their prefrontal cortex is not even finished building yet. I do not care how good they are. If their peer group, their coach, their teacher, or their school culture is toxic, they will not rise above it. Hoping they will is lazy parenting dressed up as optimism.

That is a hard sentence and I stand by every word of it. Because the alternative to saying it plainly is watching good parents lose their kids to mediocrity, or to something more insidious, because they were too polite or too afraid to make a bold move when the environment demanded one.

“Environment isn’t just important. It’s everything. If our kids are placed in the right environments, around people who do hard things, they’ll start to believe they can do hard things too.” That is the core of it. Belief is contagious. So is its absence.

My ex (and amazing co-parent) and I pulled our 12-year-old out of a bad school environment, a horrible homeroom teacher and bad influence friends and put him on home school for the rest of middle school. He went from failing out of school, to a B average, a better friend group, and just finished his first year at U of Oregon studying business and finance (GO DUCKS!).

What the research actually says

This is not just a Navy SEAL Dad’s hunch. The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University published a working paper titled “Place Matters: The Environment We Create Shapes the Foundations of Healthy Development.” The finding was clear. The environments where children live, grow, play, and learn, encompassing both physical surroundings and social relationships, profoundly influence their development. Kids raised in safe, supportive, and stimulating environments are more likely to thrive. Kids in adverse settings encounter more obstacles that actively hinder their growth.

If you still doubt me, ask Darwin how important surroundings are.

Adaptation does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in response to the environment. The stronger, healthier, and more stimulating the ecosystem, the more potential your kid has to evolve and thrive. This is not theory. It is survival mechanics as old as biology itself.

Your kid is adapting to their environment every single day whether you are paying attention to it or not. The only question is whether the environment they are adapting to is one you chose and curated deliberately or one that assembled itself by accident while you were focused on their grades and your career.

Why I treated my kids’ peer groups like building a Navy SEAL platoon

I was relentless about surrounding my kids with people who inspired them. Mentors. Coaches. Trusted friends. Whether it was picking the right school or steering them toward high-caliber peers, their mom and I treated it like I was building a SEAL platoon for a mission. No weak links. No energy vampires.

That sounds intense. It was intentional. Because I understood something that took me years in the SEAL Teams to fully internalize, which is that the people around you during the formative moments do more to determine your trajectory than almost any individual choice you make on your own.

Living in New York through my kids’ middle and high school years gave me an edge here. Manhattan is a pressure cooker of ambition, creativity, and execution. I was surrounded by an eclectic group of friends. Founders, artists, financiers, authors, coders, dancers, musicians, stylists, and executives. And every chance I got, I brought one of my kids along to a dinner, an important meeting, or an event if I thought it would leave a mark.

This was deliberate. I was not just introducing them to cool people. I was curating their exposure to high-functioning, positive adult role models. People who were doing their thing and doing it well. I wanted my kids to have a front-row seat to what excellence actually looks like in the wild, so they would recognize it, be drawn to it, and eventually reproduce it.

Here is where this philosophy demands something hard from parents.

Sometimes the only solution is to change the pond. Different school. Different coach. Different zip code. I know that sounds extreme. But so is losing your kid to a peer group that is quietly pulling them toward the lowest common denominator while you tell yourself it is just a phase.

I am not saying you uproot your family every time your kid makes a friend you do not love. Kids need to learn to navigate a range of people and some friction is healthy and part of the point.

What I am saying is that when the dominant gravitational pull of your kid’s environment is downward, when the pack they are running with is oriented toward apathy or worse, that is not a situation you can values-lecture your way out of. The environment will win. It almost always does.

The bold move, the school change, the different team, the harder conversation about which friendships are actually serving them, is sometimes the single most important parenting decision you will make. And it is the one most parents avoid because it is uncomfortable, disruptive, and forces a confrontation with the fact that their kid’s trajectory is being shaped by forces they have been ignoring.

The audit worth running this week

Look honestly at the five people your kid spends the most time with. Not the ones you wish they spent time with. The actual five.

Ask yourself: is the gravitational pull of this group upward or downward? Are these kids doing hard things, or are they teaching your kid that hard things are for suckers?

Does your kid come back from time with them energized and inspired, or diminished and cynical?

You do not need to panic over one friend you do not love. You need to look clearly at the overall direction of the gravitational pull. Because that pull, compounded over years, is doing more to shape your kid than almost anything you say to them at the dinner table.

This is not about controlling your kid. It is about the environment you curate for them (or not).

I want to be clear about the distinction here because it matters. This is not a call to micromanage your kid’s friendships or to treat every relationship as a threat assessment. Kids need autonomy. They need to make their own choices, including some bad ones, and learn from them. That is the whole philosophy of Puddle Jumpers. You let them jump in the mud.

But there is a difference between letting your kid navigate their own social world and abdicating any responsibility for the environment that world takes place in. Your job is not to pick their friends. Your job is to build an environment, a school, a neighborhood, a set of activities, a home culture, in which the odds of them finding good people are dramatically higher.

You are not choosing the individual relationships. You are stocking the pond. And what you stock the pond with determines, to a degree most parents underestimate, what your kid pulls out of it.

I did not choose Madison’s friends in London. But I spent her younger years teaching her what good people look like by surrounding her with them. So when she got there, she knew exactly what to reach for. She left me a postcard after a recent visit that said, “You’ve taught me to find good people.”

That is the whole thing. Right there. I did not find the people for her. I taught her to find them herself, by controlling the one thing a parent actually can control, which is the environment.

The bottom line

You can do everything else right and still lose the battle if you ignore the environment. And you can be an imperfect parent in a hundred ways, as I have been, and still give your kid an enormous advantage if you get the environment right.

Pay attention to the right one.

Build the pond deliberately. Surround them with people who do hard things. Be willing to make the bold, uncomfortable move when the environment turns toxic. And teach them, by example and exposure rather than lecture, what good people actually look like so they can find them on their own for the rest of their lives.

That is the highest-leverage thing you can do as a parent.

I put all of it in Puddle Jumpers. The environment framework, the research behind it, and twenty years of watching it play out with three very different kids. Link below if you want the whole picture.

Please share this with someone and check out Puddle Jumpers now.