Poppy Harlow Is Guided by Lessons from Family as She Leads 'CNN This Morning' into New Chapter (Exclusive)

The longtime CNN reporter tells PEOPLE how her Minnesota roots, free-thinking kids and brilliant late father have been her North Stars throughout her career, always guiding her forward

At 41 years old, CNN's Poppy Harlow still thinks about making her father, James Harlow, proud before going on the air.

"My dad was a great attorney and a great litigator because he was really curious," she tells PEOPLE. "He was always tinkering, always wanting to know more ... and he had a big heart."

James died when she was 15, but the lessons he left behind — teaching her to always ask questions, show compassion toward others and put her all into every task — have only become more pertinent as she raises young children of her own while juggling a career crescendo.

"I think you can be an objective journalist and still have empathy and compassion," Harlow says. So she aims to do just that, baring her heart in interviews, looking for the underlying humanity in stories she covers and trying to operate under values that her own kids can look to as they grow older.

Today Harlow is the face of CNN This Morning, leading the newscast alongside rotating substitute anchors as the network prepares to announce a permanent replacement for Don Lemon and Kaitlan Collins.

Related: Don Lemon Reveals Future Plans in First Public Appearance Since CNN Exit: 'Excited for a New Chapter'

Carrying the 8-month-old show through an unforeseen transition period, Harlow still manages to stay calm and focused on set, concerned first and foremost with bridging the gap between her audience and the world around them.

Whether she's interviewing power brokers in business and politics or sitting down with basketball legends for a lighthearted conversation ahead of NBA All-Star Weekend, she makes an effort to ask the questions that she thinks her viewers would ask, if given the opportunity.

"I find the best interviews are when I'm not thinking about myself at all," she says. "When I'm thinking about that person sitting on the couch watching, or that mom or dad making their kid breakfast and listening to us in the background. What matters to them? What matters to their day?"

Harlow's Minnesota upbringing may be part of the reason she resonates with viewers so well: Whereas many in the media bubble are out of touch with life between the coasts, Harlow knows how frustrating it feels to be excluded from the conversation. "I grew up with people referring to where I'm from as a flyover state," she says. "Give me a break, Minnesota's such an impressive place on so many levels."

Now a New York City resident of 20-plus years, she still keeps tabs on what her friends in other places are talking about and experiencing, sometimes realizing there's a story she overlooked that should probably be explored.

Poppy Harlow

When we launched the show, our tagline for it was 'Bringing the World Home,' and that's something that we really set out to do.

The moment Harlow's perspective really widened, though — or in her words, "changed me in every way" — was when she and husband Sinisa Babcic became parents, first with daughter Sienna in 2016 and again with son Luca in 2018.

Related: Baby Boy on the Way for Poppy Harlow: 'We Are Thrilled Our Family Is Growing!'

Motherhood of course helped Harlow anticipate the questions that parents might have about particular issues — like how all she could think about when COVID-19 spread was what it would mean for her children — but it also gave her a deeper emotional attachment to the tragic news she so often finds herself covering. "I feel a story or understand it differently because I think about it through the lens of what they've taught me."

"It's certainly made the hardest stories even harder, when I think about any harm happening to children," Harlow adds. "And it's interesting ... my kids don't see a lot of what's on the news — they're 5 and 7 — so I go home and we may have covered a tragic event, but my kids don't know about it."

She continues: "To them, the world is just wide open and peaceful and wonderful, for the most part. And that innocence will go away soon, but for now, they help me see the good in the world when there is so much bad sometimes."

Related: CNN's Live Broadcast Is Interrupted by a Fire Alarm amid Bomb Scare at Network Headquarters

The kids get a kick out of their mom's profession, a bona fide playground bragging right that Harlow can only imagine they flaunt. "They are super bubbly, super outgoing. ... They tell me to wink at them on TV and I'm like, 'I can't!'" she says with a playful eye roll. "Sienna, the other day, came home from school and was like, 'Mom, my friend didn't believe you've been to the White House.' I was like, 'Well, yeah, I went once for my job.'"

Harlow has tried her best to expose her children to her work, even if they don't sit down and watch the news every morning before school. "I think it's important to integrate the kids as much as I can in what I do so they can see, Why do I leave in the middle of the night? Why am I not there to make them breakfast?"

She sacrifices mornings with the kids for work, but as soon as afternoon rolls around, the day is theirs to enjoy together. Harlow looks most forward to dinnertime — "I love to cook, it's my release," she elaborates — frequently relying on the help of Alison Roman recipes and sometimes receiving extra support from Sienna and Luca. It's her son, she says, who inherited her kitchen chops and will grow up to be the cook.

Related: Celebrity Foodies: See What the Stars Are Cooking at Home

"Luca is totally loving and mischievous, he's so much fun," Harlow says. "And he keeps me on my toes. The kid is 5 years old and he's cracked his head open twice in a year. ... The latest was a few weeks ago from doing double cartwheels in the apartment." (She and her husband took turns bringing him to urgent care.)

"My daughter's deeply empathetic — deeply," Harlow says of 7-year-old Sienna, who became a vegetarian on her own conviction. "She came home from school a few years ago where they were raising chicks in one of their classes, and I was making chicken for dinner. She's like, 'Why are we eating chicken? I'm raising chicks in my class.'"

Since then, Harlow has adapted her cooking practices to accommodate Sienna's diet. "My son likes meat, my husband likes meat, and I'm in between," she says. "I try not to eat it around her because she gets very offended."

The after-work rituals with Sienna and Luca, as simple as trying a new recipe in the kitchen, are things that Harlow holds dear when she's on set. They're the kinds of moments she cherished with her own father, who worked long hours as an intellectual property lawyer at a time when work couldn't be done from home.

"He was an incredibly hard worker," she recalls. "He would get up at 4 in the morning, take me to figure skating, get to work, then come home from work for dinner, then go back to the office once I was asleep if he needed to."

"His hard work for sure rubbed off on me," she continues. "My mom to this day, still reminds me to go to sleep and says, 'You need to not work that hard. Relax.'"

Of course, she doesn't always listen. In 2020, then 39, Harlow enrolled in a one-year master's program at Yale Law School with the blessing of both her family and CNN. The choice came as a surprise to some viewers when she announced she would be taking a hiatus from anchoring CNN Newsroom, but the career move wasn't as random as it seemed.

Related: Poppy Harlow Taking Time Away from CNN to Study Law at Yale: 'It's OK to Take a Risk at 40'

In adulthood, Harlow began poring over the briefs her father wrote as a lawyer. "I've gotten to know him better after his death, which is an odd thing to say," she admits. "But when you read what your parent wrote as an adult, you learn about them in a different way — not just as your parent, but as the human that they were."

She grew fascinated by his work and, around the same time, had a formative interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both of which rekindled her interest in studying law, which she had initially planned to do after her father died.

A few months into privately pondering the idea of following in her father's footsteps, one of his old friends from law school blindly reached out and said, "Are you Jim Harlow's daughter? I think I was your father's roommate. I saw you on CNN." He encouraged her to think about Yale's Master of Studies in Law, intended for mid-career journalists to get a better understanding of law without setting aside three years for a full Juris Doctor.

"I thought, 'There's a reason this is all happening,'" she remembers. "I applied and I didn't know if I'd get in, so when I got in I was like, 'All right, let's figure out how to do this.' It was a combination of great support from work and an amazing husband and family to help."

Poppy Harlow

We can iterate so many times in our careers and our lives ... and that's a blessing.

Soon enough Harlow was commuting four days a week between Brooklyn and New Haven for classes. On the three-hour train ride to and from school, her phone was turned off and her law books were open — it was the only way, she says, that she could stay on top of classes and still have time for family when she arrived home.

"I learned such remarkable time management from that year. I was scheduled every ounce, every second," she says, adding that she was still working for CNN via side projects and holiday shifts. "It was so hard mentally, physically, but I'm so glad I did it."

Harlow completed her master's degree in 2022, returning to work and immediately applying her degree to CNN's breaking news coverage of the Supreme Court's historic Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade after nearly half a century.

By fall, CNN had tapped her to co-anchor its new morning show.

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Thinking back on the past few years, even months, Harlow is struck by how unpredictable her path has been — and how much it's conditioned her for the challenges ahead. "My forties are already so much different than my thirties," she says. "I stayed at CNN the whole time, but have had different chapters of it."

And thus begins her next big chapter, as she finds herself steering CNN This Morning into a new era without her co-captains. But she's navigated bigger, scarier situations; she knows no path forward other than through.

"I wake up feeling good about what's ahead," Harlow says. "I really do."

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