Dealing with parents and children in databases

[eluser]zscott[/eluser]
Hi,
I have a single table database structure that I'm trying to manage through PHP. Each record is a container that could have other records within it. So there is an auto-incrementing id for the record that is associated to sub records via the parentid column. Essentially 1 record could have 1 child that has children that has many children, and I need a way to find all them kids and kill em.

Does anyone have any ideas/ways I could do this with some PHP magic?

Please help :down: