Record an Interview With Your Child
When my brother was a kid, he had a green He-Man tape recorder. He, as my mother told me, was sitting in his room, hitting “record” and moving on to wax poetry about his life. It sounded something like this: “Myyy naaaaaame – this is DAVID! I have. A. TAPE RECORDER! I can. Shout. INSIDE! “
Then he would bring it down and make me and our parents listen to his masterpiece. (Think of him as an early podcaster, but for an audience of three.)
Recently I asked my mother if she thinks that these records can be with her somewhere. “Oh no,” she said. “But I would like us to do it.”
Podcaster and author Hillary Frank recently wrote an article for Illustoria Magazine about the time she came across tapes of her then 2-year-old brother saying all sorts of adorable childish things.
(I) decided to play her mom on Mother’s Day. I knew she would love it, but I didn’t expect the incessant cry-laugh-blowing my nose soon after I started playing.
I think the reason my mom reacted so strongly and emotionally to the tape was not only because it had a funny moment; this is a moment that reveals a lot about both my brother and my mother. You can hear his decisive insistence even at the tender age of two, his reluctance to let anyone off the hook.
As a professional interviewer, Hillary has great advice on how to take it one step further and deliberately record your kids’ conversations so you can preserve their voices for posterity. She encourages toddlers to preschoolers to catch them when they are already in the mood to chat. When they tell one of these long fantastic stories from three years ago, turn on the recording on your phone and be sure to point the microphone (on the bottom of the phone) a few inches below their chin. Then ask lots of follow-up questions about the tale they are writing.
For older children, she suggests challenging schoolchildren with a few recorded Could You? Rounds to develop their creativity. And try choosing an unusual setting for recording, such as a blanket fort, to lift your spirits and ease any pressure they may feel.
With teenagers, she advises asking broader, open-ended questions.
I have found that many teenagers enjoy giving advice. In their answers, you can hear how they understand their relationship with the world around them. However, be careful when correcting your teenager or judging his answers; Bringing them up during a recording session will likely cause them to shut down. Make them feel heard and let them rant if they want to.
The point is not whether this is a formal “interview” or not. Rather, it is about getting them to speak, to convey the tone of their voice and the creativity of their thoughts, not to mention cute mispronouncements. This dad took it one step further and decided to mic up his four-year-old during his hockey practice. It’s worth a look to hear him call McDonald’s “Badonalds”:
Most often I watch two videos about my son when he was younger. In one of them, he tries to guess what kind of “animal” he was while we played Hedbanz with the whole family (by the way, I highly recommend this game). Another is a casual conversation about whether ghosts are real, in which I immediately recognized solid gold and started recording halfway through.
Only 2-3 years later, it already sounds different. It’s time to record it again, because I know that in 2-3 years it will sound different from today.