On Interviewing Kids

Kate Rope’s new book, Strong as a Girl is not only well-written and thoroughly researched, it includes the voices of so many girls and young women. In this week’s episode, Jess talks with Kate about how she managed to secure interviews with these girls, get permission to use their voices, and manage the paperwork around all those releases.

Find Kate via her website: Kate Rope, @kateropewriter on Instagram, and her Substack Strong as a Human

Transcript Below!

Jess LaheyHey, it’s Jess Lahey. If you’ve been listening to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast for any length of time, you know that, yes, I am a writer, but my true love—my deepest love—is combining writing with speaking. I get to go into schools, into community organizations, into nonprofits, into businesses, and do everything from lunch and learns to community reads to just teaching about the topics that I’m an expert in, from the topics in The Gift of Failure, engagement, learning, learning in the brain, cognitive development, getting kids motivated, and yes, the topic of over-parenting and what that does to kids’ learning—two topics around The Addiction Inoculation, substance use prevention in kids, and what I’ve been doing lately that’s the most fun for me, frankly, is combining the two topics. It makes the topic of substance use prevention more approachable, less scary when we’re talking about it in the context of learning and motivation and self-efficacy and competence and, yes, cognitive development.

So if you have any interest in bringing me into your school, to your nonprofit, to your business, I would love to come—you can go to jessicalahey.com, look under the menu option “Speaking,” and go down to “Speaking Inquiry.” There’s also a lot of information on my website about what I do. There are videos there about how I do it. Please feel free to get in touch, and I hope I get to come to your community. If you put in the speaking inquiry that you are a Hashtag AmWriting listener, we can talk about a discount, so that can be one of the bonuses for being a loyal and long-term listener to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. Hope to hear from you.

Multiple Speakers

Is it recording? Now it’s recording. Yay! Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. Try to remember what I’m supposed to be doing. All right, let’s start over. Awkward pause. I’m going to rustle some papers. Okay. Now, one, two, three.

Jess Lahey

Hey, welcome to Hashtag AmWriting. This is the podcast about reading all the things—short things, long things, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, articles, queries, book proposals. This is the podcast about writing all the things, but more than anything else, this is the podcast about getting the writing done, getting the work of being a writer done. I’m Jess Lahey. I’m the author of The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation, and you can find my work at The Washington Post and The New York Times and The Atlantic and lots of other places.

And today I have a guest—a guest I’m very, very excited about. So today I’m going to be talking with Kate Rope about a topic that I have wanted to cover for a while and have not had exactly the right person to cover the topic with. Kate Rope is a writer. She is a journalist, and she’s had articles at a lot of the same places that I have, actually—like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and things like that. She wrote a wonderful book called Strong like a Mother [Strong as a Mother], and her new book, Strong like a Girl [Strong as a Girl], is coming out in October—October 14, to be precise. And thank you so much, Kate, for coming on the podcast.

Kate Rope

Oh, I’m so excited. It’s a dream come true. It’s—it’s literally like leveling up in my world.

Jess Lahey

Okay, so help me remember where we actually first met? It could have been through Jess Foundation people, because those people in common.

Kate Rope

No, no, it was before then. I think I just sought you out for—for being a source for a couple of articles.

Jess Lahey

Oh, okay.

Kate Rope

Just because of having read your The Gift of Failure.

Jess Lahey

Normally what I do—what I need, what our computers need now—is a function called “How do I know blah, blah, blah?” Because there are all these people that, like, we know them from online, or I know them because I’ve used them as a source somewhere for some article. So I got on my computer, and I looked in my little, you know, search terms, and I put your name in, and I was looking for, like, our earliest contact, and I couldn’t find it. But I think our computers need, like...

Kate Rope

I think it was a phone call.

Jess Lahey

How—oh, okay, well, there you go.

Kate Rope

I think that’s why there’s no record of it.

Jess Lahey

Well, either way, I’m so glad we’re talking now. I love, love, love your new book. I’ve been fortunate enough to read an early version of it. It’s really lovely. You ended up with a beautiful cover—I can’t wait for everybody to see it. I will be posting a picture of it in the show notes. But I wanted to talk to you—and you actually came up with this independently—but this is this topic I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time: about interviewing kids specifically. Like, logistically, there are a lot of hurdles to get through when you interview kids There can be, I know, depending on, like, the when, the where, the why, and the how. But I wanted to talk a little bit about interviewing—how we interview kids, how we interview people in general, how we get permission, how we approach people. So since you had sort of this idea to begin with, I would love for you to start and talk a little bit about your book—how on earth you got acce