The Kid is in School Podcast · The Kid is in School Podcast

Secrets and Witches 🤫🧙🏼‍♀️

·43 min·2 clips

The “witch’s lair” includes a guillotine with a balloon animal in it and a painting nobody can decode.

The show opens on a road-gig habit: stopping into retro video game stores and old toy stores when there is time to kill. One host says they usually look, rarely buy, and then tells the story of finding a girls-oriented store in the Gettysburg area. The place had a clubhouse feel and was packed with retro toys and vintage toys, which immediately hit the memory button for the other host. She lights up on cue and starts naming the toys she remembers. From there the conversation swings into what happens when kids are already reading far ahead of their age. They talk about a six-year-old who can read almost anything and about the harder job of deciding what should still be off-limits. The point is not that all scary books are bad. It is that adults still have to judge where curiosity turns into too much. They joke about not wanting a child reading the Wall Street Journal because even adult news can feel scary in a different way. Goosebumps comes up as a maybe-okay example, while Tales from the Crypt is treated as the creepier line a kid should not cross, with television and movies sitting in the same too-old zone. A classroom story about a bratty kid and negative attention gives the discussion a more grounded shape. That story turns into a reminder that children often read a lesson very differently from the one adults think they have packaged. The hosts keep circling back to the same funny problem: what a child remembers is not always what the grown-up intended. There is also a quick gag about not using a title out loud when it would not be age appropriate. Later, the talk lands on bedtime weirdness, when a child comes back from reading and wonders if monsters are going to eat her while she sleeps. The hosts treat that with the right mix of exasperation and affection. Another memory follows about a child taking advice from Michelle Buteau as if it were a personal assignment. The joke is that the kid may have needed only one laugh and one clear instruction to feel satisfied. By the end, the episode has become less about toys or books than about the way parents keep re-learning how literal kids can be. It stays loose and conversational the whole way. The best parts come from the hosts correcting themselves as they go. The whole thing feels like a familiar kitchen-table argument that keeps finding a new shelf to stand on.

As heard by us

Nostalgia, parenting, and a girls-only toy store make for easy, funny back-and-forth.

This episode opens with a road-gig detour into a girls-only retro toy store, and that setting does a lot of the work: nostalgia, a bit of side-eye, and a quick look at how old toys and old memories still hit.

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Why you'd press play

A toy-store stop that turns into a funny, very real parenting sidebar.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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