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If you’re a parent in the Seattle area, chances are you’ve been to, heard about, or will soon learn about the puberty classes that Julie Metzger created almost three decades ago. Metzger makes what is often a painful conversation actually kind of enjoyable. Strutting around the class with pads stuck to her shirt, she happily says out loud all of the awkward things kids and parents are thinking about puberty. Metzger came up with the idea for the class when she was getting a masters in nursing at

Sometimes what we do as children traps us in time. The rest of the world will forever equate you with what you did when you were young, even as you grow beyond whatever it was that gave you that label in the first place. This is what happened to 17-year-old Marcelas Owens of Seattle. When Marcelas was 8 years old, his mother, Tiffany Owens, died from pulmonary hypertension. This is when your lungs have high blood pressure. People can live a long time with this condition if they get the right

On March 10, 1994, Will Jimerson was 13 years old. He was hanging out around 23rd and Cherry in Seattle's Central District at 1 o'clock in the morning with a group of other kids. By this point in his life, he had already had a few run-ins with the law, including assault with a deadly weapon and theft. On this particular early morning, Will says he found a gun in a jacket. There are different versions of what happened next. Jimerson says he pointed the gun into the crowd, pulled the trigger and

There is a small statue that greets people as they walk into what can be a very difficult place to visit. It’s the entrance to the Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine Unit of the Seattle Children’s Hospital. John Madden, who was a patient here a few years ago, says the 10 days he spent in the unit saved his life. He made the statue as a way of saying thank you to the nurses and doctors who treated him during a dark time in his life. “It’s kind of an abstract, swooping shape with some points on it

Even as adults, there are moments when we realize we are no longer kids. Oftentimes it hits us when the tables turn and we find ourselves looking after our aging parents.For Chris Spengler, it was when her father Henry was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Ushering him from doctors' appointments to group homes around Seattle, she was certainly not a kid anymore. At the same time, her father’s disease gave her a much needed sense of closure about her childhood in Brooklyn. Her father was a tough man

This week Sound Effect brings us stories of the pursuit.

David Liston finds people who don't want to be found; that's part of the job. Liston is principal at David Liston Investigations, a private investigation firm based in University Heights. But this case was different. Liston was looking for a man believed to be homeless in the Seattle area in order to give him a message: You stand to inherit millions of dollars.

The recent public conversations about gender identity and transgender people have tended to focus on bodies: biological sex versus gender identity, the clothes people wear, what bathrooms they use. But one issue that has gotten less attention is the intersection of gender and voice. Even as trans people work to look like the person they are inside, some find that they still sound like someone else.

A warning that this interview deals with some very difficult subject matter: the exploitation of children. It is not suitable for children and some adults may find it difficult to hear. It's heroic to dedicate your life to chasing bad guys and putting them behind bars. However, that pursuit of criminal activity can come with a lot of traumatic experiences and deep psychological wounds.

This week on Sound Effect, we bring you a special premiere broadcast of the live event we put on in May 2016. At the time, our station was raising money to buy our independence, so the Sound Effect team brought together interesting people from around Washington state to tell stories of friends in need.