Guided by Young Voices: Interviewing Children
Allowing a Child’s Voice to Guide the Story
Experts Weigh in on Interviewing Children
Fast Facts About Incarcerated Parents
Allowing a Child’s Voice to Guide the Story
By Sarah Hughes
Hughes is a freelance radio reporter, based in
I learned my most important lesson about reporting on children from a 13-year-old girl.
I met Denise* a few summers ago while pursuing a story about D.C. area children whose parents are incarcerated. She and her 11-year-old sister, Tanya, were staying with relatives while their mother, Diane, was locked up on charges related to her drug addiction.
The girls and Diane were participating in a D.C. jail program that allows kids extended visits with their incarcerated mothers. It's something like a family summer camp behind bars, where children and mothers bond over arts and crafts activities.
Diane stood out among the mothers in the program. She spoke passionately about how she was going to use this time to show her daughters she was serious about kicking her addiction. She gave me the go-ahead to profile her family, but only with her daughters’ permission. Tanya quickly agreed. Denise agreed too, but reluctantly.
On the first day of the program, Tanya chatted the entire half hour car ride to the jail. "What would the games be like?” she wondered. “Would there be other kids too? What kind of food would they serve?”
But Denise sat quietly, clutching her diary.
I asked Denise to share something from her diary. After a few beats and a “Can I trust you?” glance in my direction, Denise told me about a dream. Her mom was out of jail and they all lived together in a big home. Then she shot me another look that seemed to say, “Enough with the questions.”
I didn’t prod anymore, mostly because I thought I had the storyline sketched out: Mom repents, girls forgive, and with help from a structured program, the family is on the mend. After all, I’d already talked to the key players -- the adults.
But Denise refused to cooperate with this neatly packaged narrative.
At the jail, the girls joined about 10 other kids who were ushered into a big activity room. Their mothers entered, singing Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love Of All." Diane then stood and asked Denise and Tanya for forgiveness:
“I changed your Pampers and warmed your bottles when you were babies. As time went on, I got caught up in my own slavery. [She starts to cry.] I also know I’ve hurt you and what I’ve done is wrong. I need my girls to forgive me with your unconditional love. And I need you to know within your heart that mommy loves you very much.”
Tanya warmed to Diane immediately. When the crafts began, she pulled her chair close to her mother's. But Denise kept to herself and rebuffed her mother’s help, at one point yanking off a piece of lace that Diane had added to her project.
But during a later project that required Diane and the girls to write a poem together, Denise let her guard slip and sidled up to her mother, letting her goofy side show:
Denise: I am a tree.
Diane: You’re a tree?
Denise laughs.
Diane: Is that what you said? She said she’s a tree… she’s silly!
As I watched Denise struggling to decide whether or not to trust a parent who had let her down so many times before, I realized this story wasn’t about Diane. It was about how Denise and Tanya made sense of a crazy, unpredictable adult world -- a world full of broken promises and parents like Diane, who had even forgotten her daughters' birthdays while she was using drugs.
Tanya, buoyed by a simple philosophy of unconditional love, summed up her feelings this way:
"No matter what your mother do, you still love her for who she is.”
Denise developed a different philosophy, evident in a poem she read at the closing ceremony:
I know you’ve made mistakes, but your weaknesses have helped me grow strong. Besides, you’re only human.
That poem meant so much to Diane that she put it on the wall of her cell. It meant something to me, too; a reminder to take the time to understand how children make sense of the world around them. And a reminder to make room in a story’s narrative for a child’s perspective, allowing the child’s voice to guide the story.
*The names of the girls have been changed.
Listen to the original story, reported for NPR by Hughes.
Experts Weigh In on Interviewing Children:
Dr. Paramjit Joshi, M.D., Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Children’s
- Explain to the child why you are interviewing him. Some children may not associate an interview with something positive. They may feel they are being singled out or that they are being interviewed because they are in trouble with school authorities.
- Tell the child about your story, and explain that you want to include the opinions of young people in it. Tell him that his opinions are important.
- Children may not understand all of your questions, or even some of your words.
- If they look puzzled, or clam up, ask, ‘Did you understand the question?’ or ‘Is there a word you didn’t understand or that wasn’t clear?’
- Ask open-ended questions that won’t allow yes or no answers.
- If you interview a child about a traumatic experience, especially a young child, consider that the child may re-experience the trauma as he tells the story. Recognize that this may be tough on the child, and see if a parent can also be present during the interview.
- If you ask a child about something intimate, personal or troubling, recognize that you may have opened a big, messy suitcase of feelings or memories for him. Once the interview ends, the child has to find a way to sort through and re-pack all that emotional baggage.
Woodrow Wilson Senior High School students, Washington, DC:
- Tell us what the story is, where it will be published and who the audience will be.
- Tell us that the interview is optional and that we don’t have to answer questions that make us feel uncomfortable. Let us know that we can opt out if we want.
- Keep in mind that we tend to say things spontaneously instead of thinking them through. We don’t check ourselves the way adults do. So don’t make us sound like idiots.
- Interview us somewhere we feel comfortable, like a coffee shop or a place that has food.
Andy Schotz, Chairman of the Ethics Committee, Society of Professional Journalists:
- Don’t take advantage of [a child’s] naiveté. Show compassion [when interviewing children]... As you speak, try to gauge: How much does this person understand what I am doing, where the story will be disseminated and who will be reading it?
- Pepper the interview with the same question, “Do you mind if I use this?” That way, the child is reminded throughout the course of the interview what he or she is saying may reach a mass audience.
Fast Facts About Incarcerated Parents
One child in 30 – or 2.4 million children – has a parent in prison or jail. And the number of women in state and federal prison increased 2.6% from 2004, according to a 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics report. In its 2005 Kids Count essay, the Annie E. Casey Foundation reported that “in both state and federal prisons, women inmates are much more likely than men to have lived with their minor children at the time of arrest, and they are many times more likely to have had sole custody.” According to the District’s parole and probation agency, about 70 percent of the roughly 15,000 offenders it monitors are parents.
