>I'm not sure how to explain this. I have a parent-child relation, but there can be different types of children. I'm wondering if I should make a different child table for each type of child, or or try to homogonize them into one child with a field telling what type they are.
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>Having different tables would be good because I need to store different data about different children. The problem is that if I need a new child type, I need a new table.

It sounds like it would help to quantify it more. Roughly how many possible different children, and how different is the data for each?

Obviously you don't want hundreds of tiny child tables, but neither do you want one table with a zillion fields hardly ever filled. Can you organize the possible situations better?