As a kid, there’s nothing scarier than other people’s families. Their macaroni is strange, they don’t watch TV as much as your family – miss u! – and sometimes you have to hold hands with their brothers while saying grace. Shudder. Families in the suburbs fall into these basic categories:

The Super Christian Family: This family prays out loud, and they un-ironically like show tunes. The mom makes super fatty pastries and decorates the house with craft fair miscellany. The kids are often super slutty because all that religion just gives them these feelings.You can tell the parents have their eye on you because you get to babysit yourself and you  bring smutty books into their house, like the Sweet Valley High series.

The Yuppy Family: This family confuses you because they don’t even have a TV. What do they do all the time? you wonder. You suspect it involves learning Spanish – they say aqua, not water – and practicing skiing on the Nordic Track. You find them generally intimidating and sometimes ask your mom why you guys don’t go to farmer’s markets every weekend like The Yuppy Family.

The Super Dysfunctional Rich Family: You like going over  there because you can sit on their pool table and play the newest video games. Once you’re almost 13, their mom starts out offering to let you guys get drunk in their house – “Better here and safe than somewhere else!’ You can often hear their parents shouting at each other and you generally avoid their teenage son after he brought that gun to school.

The Hoarders: You go to this friend’s house once and never again. This friend tends to be spooked from day to day, a bit out of it, and now you understand why. There is a stack of dirty laundry literally blocking the front door. You find a half-eaten sandwich in the couch, and when you lift the cushion you find dozens of used hair nets. Uh, I think I hear my mom calling!

The Garage Sale Family: Oh, NBD, we’re just having another garage sale. We’ve always got some stuff to get rid of!  May I interest you in a realtor’s old luggage tags? Oh, be right back. Someone parked right in front of the driveway again.

The Trashy Family That Got Kind of Rich Somehow But Didn’t Get Class: A few decades ago the dad invented some kind of optimum catfish lure or something else niche and weird like that when he was tooling around in the garage after drinking a case of Budweiser. He fortuitously made a small fortune – not enough to retire or live like a king, but enough to buy a nice $300,000 rambler in the neighborhood with all these other families. But though you can take the family out of the trailer park, you can’t always take the trailer park out of the family. Their house is decorated in ‘Native American art’ (aka an airbrushed painting of a desert and a wall-sized dream catcher they bought at a flea market). There is an ashtray on every surface of every common area. There is dog hair in the sinks. You might hang out here purely because of pragmatics (the parents probably let you smoke pot and watch R rated movies when you were in middle school) but you don’t really like it.

The Sports Family: Every damn time you’re in the car, someone from this family is out running. Every time you drive by their house, they’re packing up their soccer balls for a game the kids are in/parents are coaching. You like them but you secretly wish they’d all get fat.

The Normal People: The people in this family seem to actually like each other, not even the kind of liking that involves subtle and soul-crushing power struggles. The brother constantly references funny things the sister said with genuine affection, and she laughs over her shoulder while making homemade ice cream sandwiches. The way they like each other isn’t even creepy and weird, and you like all of them too. Sometimes they go on quirky vacations as a family and bring you back a thoughtful and eccentric gift, like a Jackalope wearing a T-shirt with your name on it. Aw!

The Dog Family: Every aspect of going to this family’s house is characterized by dogs. It smells like dogs, there’s constant barking, the only reason that you ever see them outside is when they’re chasing a dog that ran away.

–Becky Lang and Sarah Heuer