“Be Her Safe Space”: An Interview with Kate Rope, Author of Strong As a Girl
In 2015, when I found out I was going to give birth to a girl, my first feeling was elation. But my second feeling was fear, followed quickly by overwhelm. I was deeply worried about my ability to raise a confident, strong, emotionally healthy daughter in today’s world.
Despite the gains women have made since first- and second-wave feminism, it’s still more difficult in America to be a woman than a man. From an obsession with physical appearance to economic inequality to ongoing threats to bodily autonomy, women are still made to navigate a tougher road both mentally and emotionally. And for those who navigate oppression for additional reasons—being female as well as BIPOC, queer, trans or nonbinary, disabled, and/or part of other underrepresented communities—life is even tougher.
Standing in my doctor’s office, I felt neither ready nor equipped to explain these things to a little girl, much less teach her how to tackle and overcome them. I knew I wasn’t alone, but I had no idea where to turn for advice.
Kate Rope is a mother and author who has witnessed girls struggling firsthand. During her time as senior editorial director of The Jed Foundation, the nation’s largest suicide prevention nonprofit that works in schools and universities, Kate became very familiar with the sobering prevalence of gender stereotypes, negative body image, eating disorders, depression, and suicidal ideation.
Using deeply researched and inclusive sources, Kate wrote Strong As a Girl: Your Guide to Raising Girls Who Know, Stand Up for, and Take Care of Themselves (October 14, 2025, St. Martin’s). It’s a look at the biggest stressors facing elementary-age girls today, and how parents or loved ones can help give them a solid foundation from which to draw as they grow. Each section includes input from experts as well as caregivers and girls themselves, plus lists of resources that adults and girl-identified children can access for additional help.
I had the chance to read and chat with Kate about her new book at exactly the right time—just as my daughter is turning ten. But no matter what age your girl may be, you will find useful information and actionable suggestions in this book on how to support her growth into a resilient and capable person.
Megan Hanlon: This book focuses on strength—specifically, the traits and actions girls need to leverage in order to be happy and healthy in today’s complicated (and often misogynistic) world. What about your life, and especially your work with The Jed Foundation, made you uniquely qualified to offer advice on strength? What inspired you to tackle this project?
Kate Rope: Strength means different things to different people. For me, it’s knowing yourself, feeling at home in your own skin, having the support and skills to face hard moments, and believing you’re enough.
I grew up in a home that gave me space to be myself—and parents who got me mental health support early when I needed it. Both shaped how I raised my girls.
I focused on clearing away the outside world’s—and my own—expectations to make space for who they are. From the start, I asked more questions than I gave answers: What do you think? What matters to you? What do you need? I wanted self-awareness and self-prioritizing to feel natural. I also taught them self-compassion skills, which I share in the book, so they’d always be their own strongest allies.
Getting help young made it easy to seek it as an adult—and shaped my work as a writer. My time at The Jed Foundation gave me a front row seat to the serious challenges so many kids, teens, and young adults are facing. It also opened my eyes to the different kinds of mental health challenges faced by different communities and identities and deeply informed the inclusive approach I take in Strong as a Girl.
MH: You point to a deluge of research in this book about how and why wellness should begin at home during the critical elementary and adolescent years. But what happens if we are late—is there such a thing as too late to start?
KR: No! It is never too late to start, and pretty much everything I include in this book could be supportive to teens, young adults and—by design—the caregivers reading it. But there are already some great books out there to support the later years (specifically Lisa Damour’s Untangled), and I wanted to focus on the younger years so that you and your girl can build a foundation that will weather the seismic shifts of adolescence and beyond. But, it is never too late to help anyone tap into who they are and who they want to be.
MH: As you were researching, what did you find most surprising or alarming, and why? As a parent of two girls, what did you learn that you wish you had known earlier?
KR: The most alarming topic in the book for me is the rise in eating disorders among kids—especially girls (hospitalizations for eating disorders among adolescents have risen seven-fold since the pandemic). But we, as caregivers, haven’t gotten the message. We have these outdated ideas about who gets eating disorders, what causes them, and what they look like that are keeping us from getting kids help early—when it is most effective. Eating disorders are biological, metabolic, and psychosocial diseases that can develop quickly in vulnerable kids, whether due to genetics, sports, social media, neurodivergence or something else. And diet culture blinds us to them, so they’re diagnosed when kids are already very sick. I want parents, caregivers, and educators to understand this so they can act fast. In the book, I share what to watch for, how to talk about it, and where to get help.
Researching the section on intuitive eating changed how I parent. I realized how much I’d absorbed the “healthy vs. unhealthy” food binary. I changed on a dime: filling my pantry with a variety of all kinds of foods and giving them access and self-agency to eat what they want and listen to their own bodies.
I was also blown away by what I learned from sexual abuse prevention experts, especially Feather Berkower of Parenting Safe Children. I didn’t realize how many concrete, effective things parents can do to keep kids safe beyond teaching consent and bodily autonomy. Those simple, powerful, and proven steps—which I included in the book in detail—were enlightening to me. I would have loved to have known them when my girls were younger.
MH: Although you wrote this guide for caregivers of female-identifying children, you included a section on exploring gender identity and sexual orientation with the understanding that no matter where a parent’s personal beliefs fall, they care about their child. Why was it important to you to speak to this topic that has become controversial in our country?
KR: My goal with this book is to help parents and caregivers tune out the noise of the world and truly see the child in front of them. That includes core parts of who they are, such as sexual orientation and gender identity. LGBTQIA+ youth face the highest mental health risks, especially when it comes to suicide, so supporting them is literally lifesaving.
I know parents want the best for their kids, even when they’re unsure what that looks like. I had incredible conversations with Dr. Caitlyn Ryan whose Family Acceptance Project has been supporting families and saving lives for more than two decades. I wanted to reach caregivers who may be hearing messages—from their communities or faith traditions—that their child is “wrong.” So, I laid out the really difficult statistics about the risk LGBTQIA+ (particularly trans) kids face when it comes to mental health AND the very encouraging research on how family acceptance can decrease those risks by leaps and bounds. If just one parent reads that section and is able to look with clear eyes at their kid and support them, then I’ve done my job.
MH: This book was very interesting for me as a mother of a tween daughter, but I also have a son who is about to be a teenager. Mounting research shows that boys and, especially, young men are in crisis in America—loneliness, anger, and suicide are on the rise, the gap in educational attainment is increasing, and their adolescence is stretching out further and further. There are conflicting theories about why, and how to course correct. Do any or all of the suggestions in your book apply to raising boys as well? Or is their experience too different to correlate?
KR: Absolutely. A lot of what I talk about is how to build basic emotional intelligence, self-awareness, self-advocacy, and self-compassion and we can ALL benefit from developing these skills. Additionally, the conversations around consent and pleasure and relationships can help boys enter relationships with greater confidence and care. The sections on child prevention abuse, eating disorders, and effective communication and building support networks all apply to boys equally, as do the sections on supporting gender identity and sexual orientation. Someone recently told me he was listening to my audiobook and felt that so much of it applied to raising his boys. It’s possible I’ll consider writing a book focused on boys in the future, but I know at least one good one coming out next spring, Breaking the Boy Code by one of my heroes in the field Katie Hurley, LCSW, that I hope will be a great support to parents and caregivers of boys.
MH: So many of your suggestions for raising girls come back to helping them find support in a community—whether it’s a scouting group, sports, mentorship, or friends who share common interests. What do you recommend a caregiver do when building a community is hard, because of rural location, parents’ job responsibilities that take up so much time, or a desire to keep girls off social media for as long as possible? Are there non-traditional communities to be found?
KR: This is such a great question. There are so many places that offer group activities for girls and boys—including Boys and Girls Clubs, Girl and Boy Scouts, and Girls on the Run—that are available in a lot of rural areas. Sometimes hospitals or even clinics in some communities will offer groups on communication skills or other emotional development. Your faith community can be a great place to look. It could also be really helpful to reach out to other parents in your community to create a group, a book club, afterschool activity, etc. and take turns running it, which can offer both childcare and a lower lift option when work schedules are tough.
While I strongly believe in keeping girls off social media until they are 16, primarily because of the documented harms associated with social media and body image and eating disorders, I also talk in the book about how online communities can be really valuable for girls who are neurodivergent or LGBTQIA+, especially if they live somewhere where it is difficult to connect with others like them IRL. In those cases, I recommend that caregivers rely on online safety resources, such as Common Sense Media, to learn how to support their kids’ safer engagement.
MH: Your sections on letting go and enabling girls to be independent really struck a chord with me. As you mentioned, the struggle is two-pronged: we have our own anxieties about what could happen, from kidnapping to injury, and we also have to worry about what the neighbors or even police (!) will say. What advice do you give, and use yourself, to let go of your fear and become a safety net?
KR: I think the best way to start giving kids more independence is to do it with other parents and caregivers. Find a few like-minded families and ask if they’d be up for creating a small group where your girls (or kids in general) can do some things on their own—but together. It could start as something simple, like walking home from school, running into the local market, or playing at the nearby park without adults hovering. Then, little by little, you can try longer or new outings.
This approach helps in two ways. First, it lets you build your own trust muscle—because giving kids freedom is as much about managing our anxiety as it is about theirs—and it’s so much easier to do that in a group. The reason parents in the ’80s were able to give their kids more independence is that everyone around them was doing it, so it felt normal. When you have a community doing it alongside you, that fear eases. The second part is that if this is a collective neighborhood effort it gives you some protection from being singled out as a negligent parent.
Have the kids come up with a cool name for themselves, and, as their confidence grows, they can suggest new ways to stretch their independence. On the practical side, start a group text thread with the parents for both moral and logistical support. In my own neighborhood, we have a chat like this, and the most common message we ask each other is: “Anyone have eyes on the kids?” It keeps everyone connected and reassured.
Most of what I’m suggesting here, I learned about from Lenore Skenazy, founder of Let Grow. They’re doing amazing work to make childhood independence safer and more accepted—both by changing laws that criminalize parents for letting kids be kids, and by helping schools and communities create independence-building programs. They’ve got great resources for parents who want to rebuild that trust muscle and let their kids step into a little more freedom.
MH: So many of my mom friends and I are operating in survival mode lately. The idea of taking on all of these suggestions feels overwhelming. What is the one subject or book section you feel we should focus on most, if we can’t do it all?
KR: Pause, listen, and be her safe place. Ask more questions than you offer solutions. Invite your girl to reflect on the conversations you are having, let her know you want to hear what is going on inside her mind, so she becomes interested in her own interior life. Work to calm your reactions when she shares her world with you. You can buy yourself time by pausing and then learn more before you react by asking, “tell me more,” “wow, then what happened?” “how did you feel about it?” “Any ideas on how you would like to handle this?”
These simple steps let your girl know that you are a safe space where she can come with any problem. Encouraging her thoughts and introspection help make self-reflection a habit for her, shows her that she has good ideas about how to solve her own problems, and sends the signal that the world wants to know what she thinks. The younger she is, the more you may need to offer a few solution options, but always start with asking for her ideas first to get her wheels turning. All of this will give you more space to think and parent from a place of greater calm and will help her develop the inner compass she needs to chart her own course in life.
About the Author
Megan Hanlon is a podcast producer who sometimes writes. Her words have appeared in Raw Lit, Variant Literature, Gordon Square Review, and other publications both online and print. Her blog, Sugar Pig, is known for relentlessly honest essays that are equal parts tragedy and comedy.
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