John,
Thank you for your reply. I think I understand. Do I have this right?

The main contact information would go in a Household table with a unique ID.
This would be a contact responsible for payment and care of the student if a
minor with mailing info.

Student name would go in the student table with the householdID as a foreign
key. If an adult is a student, their name would be entered again with a
link to the household table as the responsible contact. In the future, this
would enable a child of an adult student who is already in the household
table to easily be linked back to a household main contact.

I hope this makes sense, I'm typing as I think it through.
Nancy


"John W. Vinson" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 2 Feb 2010 18:22:02 -0500, "Nan" wrote:

Rita, Thanks.
I began to do that but then hit a snag on how to handle the adults who are
students and students who are adults. Also, how to record adult students
who have children in a dance class. There are two right now. I want to
record mailing information only once and send it only to the parent or
adult
student. I have to give it a lot more thought. I think I'm getting hung
up
on calling it a parents table when it really is an adults table.

Rather than thinking of parents and children, try considering it as
households
(with addresses and phones) and students. Each Student (child or adult) is
a
member of a Household; each household will have one or more Students. This
would let you apply the mailing information *to the household*; the
student
table would have a field for the HouseholdID as a link, but would not
itself
contain any address information.
--

John W. Vinson [MVP]