Act Three: Use Your Words
Dan Savage makes the case for yelling at children. He also reflects on how his views on how to talk to kids have changed over the years.
Act Four: My Other Dog's A German Shepherd
Regular This American Life contributor Dan Savage, a syndicated sex columnist with possibly the filthiest mouth of anyone you could ever meet, finds a TV program so dirty, so weird, and so perverted that he won't let his son watch it—even though it's a kids' show, made for kids, and broadcast on a network for kids.
Prologue
Psychologist Harry Harlow sets out to prove, through a series of experiments with monkeys, that love is a key to normal development in children.
Prologue
We play excerpts from the documentary film Troop 1500. In the film, girl scouts from an Austin, Texas, troop visit their mothers, all of whom are in prison.
Act Six: What Would Joseph Do?
Jonathan Goldstein retells the classic Christmas story, trying to understand what exactly goes through the mind of a man about to become surrogate father to The Lord. Jonathan's the author of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!.
Prologue
Lisa LaBorde has two daughters, and having grown up an only child, she can't understand why they fight all the time. Her idea of sisterhood is more like a scene from The Sound of Music. Wanting to create that kind of bond for her girls, Lisa decides to enlist the aid of science to see if she can turn these enemies into friends—in just one month.
Act One: The Disappearance
Genevieve Jurgensen and her husband Laurent lost their two daughters—Elise and Mathilde—at the ages of 4 and 7. Actress Felicity Jones reads from her book The Disappearance: A Memoir of Loss, in which Jurgensen tries to explain their lives and their deaths to a friend, in a series of letters.
Act Four: One Brain Shrinks, Another Brain Grows
Julie Hill with a story about her six-year-old son, and how he tries to make sense of his father's terminal illness.
Prologue
Leah remembers when her parents got divorced and her dad, a farmer in North Dakota, moved to an apartment in town. It was cramped and ugly, and it had a Murphy bed that made a horrible creak when you brought it down from the wall.
Prologue
Host Ira Glass talks with Cate, a white woman with a black, adopted, seven-year-old son, Glen. Sometimes Glen threatens that he's going to return to his real family—royalty, in Africa.
Act One: The Family That Flees Together, Trees Together
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.
Act Two: One And One Don't Make Two
What if you're remembered in ways that you don't like? What if you're remembered for something someone else did? In this act, we consider the case of Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1965 she spent three days with reporter Jean Stafford, who wrote about Mrs.
Act Three: The Artist Formerly Known As Dr. Sarkin
What happens when you want your dad to change—and he wants to change, too—but there's literally nothing that can be done to change him. Jon Sarkin was a chiropractor with workaholic tendencies.
Act Two: Emerald Green Peugeot
Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, explains the travails of driving his autistic son to the park.