Kitty Felde explores the mystic link between boys and guns when her cousin's husband, a liberal in Berkeley, gives her lessons in his newest toy: a gun that shoots potatoes 450 feet in the air. The "spud gun" has a special property: Any man who sees it instantly wants one.

Lots of babysitting is done by family members. Hillary Frank reports on what can happen when a teenaged son is put in charge of his younger brothers.

Andre, 6, and his 4 year old brother Luc are experiencing Christmas for the very first time. They’re adopted and have recently moved to the U.S. from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ira talks to "Cheryl," an anonymous blogger who's been documenting life with an 8-year-old son who seems to take pleasure in causing chaos. He's tried to kill his little brother more than once.

When Sarah was 10 years old, she got a heart transplant. Soon after, her mother decided to find out more about the person who saved her daughter's life.

The Jarvis family, a group of eight, goes on the run from the law—for seven years. They live on a boat, in a treehouse in a swamp.

James Spring had hit his late 30s, and found his life utterly unremarkable. He needed to do something big.

Two quick real life fables about the power of sibling rivalry.

An excerpt from Your Radio is Haunted. (6 minutes)

Host Ira Glass describes a children's book from the 1970s called Nobody's Family Is Going to Change by Louise Fitzhugh, the author of Harriet the Spy. On the surface, it sounds like a rather menacing title for a kids' book. But in fact, the story is about how kids can finally find peace if they stop hoping that their parents will ever be any different.

True stories of what happens when children are allowed to bring nature's own creatures into the house as pets. When it comes to rodents, fish and amphibians, it often works out badly...for the pets.

We listen in on a ritual that happens in millions of families every week: kids getting dropped off at the babysitters. Six-year-old Dylan and nine-year-old Sarah explain what they can and can't get away with when they have a babysitter.After that, host Ira Glass has a few words about Mary Poppins, who is the Gold Standard of all fictional babysitters.

Producer Jane Feltes talks with the first people on line for the bus to Colorado: Two twin, six-year-old sisters.

Daniel Pinkwater reads his children's picture book Devil in the Drain. (4 minutes)

Host Ira Glass talk with Claire, who obsessed over a Chilean friend — and then started to tell people she was Chilean herself.

Ira talks with Connie Rex about the deer she and her sisters kidnapped and ended up putting into their school’s Christmas pageant in Woodruff, Utah, in a starring role.

Reporter Starlee Kine observes what would have happened if the U.S.-led invasion of Grenada in 1983 had been decided not by Ronald Reagan, but by a bunch of middle schoolers...and she remembers a class trip to the Nixon library, where Nixon aide HR Haldeman spoke.

What happens when the kid next door wants to be your new friend...and comes over, tries to talk to you, befriends your dog. Are you a bad person if you don't want to accept the tiny hand of friendship? Cheryl Wagner tells the story of her young, persistent next-door neighbor.

Guest Host Chana Joffe-Walt asks her kids when they first encountered adult fallibility.

Shalom Auslander reads his true story, "The Blessing Bee." It's about the time when, as a third-grader at an Orthodox Jewish school, Shalom saw his chance to both make his mom proud, and push his drunken father out of the picture. Part of his scheme involved winning the school's bee on the complicated Hebrew blessings you say before eating certain foods.

Jyllian Gunther visits The Brooklyn Free School, where there are no courses, no tests and no homework, and where the kids decide everything about how the school is run, including discipline.

Host Ira Glass describes what thousands of people do all over America on our holiday weekends: we go to historic sites with our kids and stare at bricks and statues, trying to feel some connection with the past. It's not easy.

Andrea Morningstar tells the story of a ten-year-old girl from small town Michigan named Sarah York, and how she became pen pals with a man who was considered an enemy of the United States, a dictator, a drug trafficker, and a murderer: Manuel Noriega.

A father and daughter (Adrian LeBlanc and his daughter Adrian Le Blanc) decide to write his obituary—together—not really thinking very seriously at first about the real meaning of what they were doing.