4 ms·

Agony to ecstasy: on taking children to museums

53 points by Thevet 11y ago

mbrock 11y ago
I wrote this somewhat tedious text about my relation to museums as I was embarking on a quest to visit and write about all of Amsterdam's museums (I stopped after 5). http://blog.goula.sh/post/76719719068/the-museumkaart http://blog.goula.sh/post/76719719068/the-museumkaart
baldfat 11y ago
My father has a extreemly high IQ and his favorite hobby is learning something new. He is 77 years old and he still attends college classes at our state college (Free for anyone over 65). He took all 5 of his kids to a museum at least once a month. We would drive 3 or 4 hours and then get there when it opened and more than likely be there when it closed. The number one person my dad would talk with was the security people. His thought was they had no real knowledge of the subject and had to work through all the steps so they can explain it better. He was right.
- RankingMember 11y ago
  Maybe it was by virtue of you being his offspring that you could tolerate that, but I can tell you that if I were his kid he'd have been dealing with a seriously exasperated/cranky kid and would've started leaving me at home for his all-day museum visits. Even now, the idea of spending an entire day at a museum makes my brain's gag reflex fire. Even for cool subjects that naturally interest me (history, engineering), there's only so long I can mill around staring at things in a receptive state before my brain says "ENOUGH".
  - baldfat 11y ago
    Well to be honest all 5 of use would NEVER complain. We would leave restaurants and the people would say, "Oh your children are the best behaved children I ever seen." We would say later on to ourselves, "They didn't know what our father would threaten us with." He is a loving father but he would make it SO NOT WORTH IT to complain or misbehave. My children love to learn and don't complain but I don't threaten them :) I think if you raise them to love what you do (For me it is learning, music and food) they grow liking the same things. My 9 year old at Disney World ordered the non-kid friendly Cheese Plate and the waiter sent out a second kid friendly appetizer just to be safe. He later asked her what her favorite thing she ate at Disney (Last night of 5 day stay) and she said the cheese plate.
    - jimbokun 11y ago
      The WORST part of my family's Disney experience was how the meal plan required my younger son to order from the children's menu. My one son was 11, and the other 9. The way the Disney meal plan works, 9 year-olds and under MUST order from the child menu. We kept dragging our kids back to Epcot to eat at the various nationality specific restaurants. Me, my wife, and older son would get a menu with lots of interesting choices, my younger son got to pick from chicken fingers or one other vaguely ethnic dish. He really hated being discriminated against in this way. The one server who really understood the problem was at Epcot's Italian restaurant. We ordered various things, including one item from the children's menu, but our waitress just served everything communally, with no mention of what was the "child" item. Sorry to vent, but you just triggered a painful parenting memory. :)
      - baldfat 11y ago
        We ran into the same thing, but my 9 year old got adults meals half the time by us just asking. Also they feed enough for 1.5 people easily so my wife and I would give her part of our own meals. I went on a Make a Wish trip with my son when he was 9 and he got the adult meal 100% of the time. Disney is awesome with Make a Wish kids.
wilwade 11y ago
As someone who has also gone through all three stages, I think the key for children is choosing the museums and exhibits that they or you like and enjoying them instead of analyzing them. For example, my 6 year old daughter enjoys the local art museum, but I don't think she has looked at any one painting more than 5 seconds. As a parent you have to be OK with missing out on a part of the experience for you and work on the experience for your children. The specific experience I suggest focusing on for young children is just enjoying it, or a specific part. Mostly that means letting them go quickly by that masterpiece and asking what they like about whatever they do stop to see.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  That sounds sensible. Kids - even bright kids - aren't going to be able to understand or appreciate art the way adults do. So I mostly agree with the article. Dragging kids around museums they're visibly bored by to "improve" or "educate" them is a waste of time for everyone. I used to love the Science Museum in London as a kid, because there were buttons to push and levers to play with and giant aeroplanes and spaceships. And sometimes, computers. As an adult I really enjoy art galleries (and science museums.) But I can't imagine six year old me getting anything out of gallery visits at all. Art is too abstract and emotionally complex for pre-teens, and the history to give it a context is too distant from their experience.
  - eitally 11y ago
    You are free to correct me if I'm wrong, but in reading this I can't imagine you have kids. As someone who does, let me affirm that children absolutely get as much out of gallery visits as adults do. It isn't a perfect overlay in subject matter, but they learn as much as you or I. At pre-adult ages, exposure is as critical as understanding, which will evolve only via experience.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Art doesn't have to be abstract and emotionally complex with historical context. It can just be pretty pictures and interesting shapes and such. Children can absolutely enjoy art. But they're going to enjoy it on their own terms. They're not going to understand it or appreciate it the way adults do, yes. But that doesn't mean they can't appreciate it. Obviously if you take your children to an art museum and insist that they spend five minutes staring at each piece trying to understand the context, they're going to hate it. And obviously, you should only do this if you want to teach your children that art is terrible and museums are places to avoid. But if you just let them do their thing, and answer their questions, and try to point out interesting features, they can enjoy it a lot. If your child is young, referring to it as the "fart museum" is a good way to maintain interest, too. This is also a good barometer of the adult's attitude: if you can't stand calling it the "fart museum" because it's disrespectful or too crude or whatever, then you don't have the right attitude to take a small child to the fart museum!
cheriot 11y ago
The museums with the most renown collections* are often the worst at telling the story of why those artifacts are special. Great if you're a historian, a useless collection of old broken things if you're a kid, and incompletely impressive artifacts for laymen. *I'm looking at you, British and Egyptian Museums. Slowly, a handful of museums are catching on. The Holocaust museum in Washington, DC may be the best use of a collection out there.
- noxToken 11y ago
  Have you ever been on a guided tour? I know that museums shouldn't rely on guided tours to be interesting, but for those museums that fail to capture a wider audience, guided tours can be a godsend. When I went to the National Cathedral, we didn't get nor want a guided tour. The architecture was enough to keep us interested. There were enough tours happening concurrently that we could weave about the cathedral at our own pace while still getting most of the tour experience. For people without an inherent interest in the cathedral or its architecture, the tours sounded great. Perhaps the tours would be helpful for potentially interesting museums with awfully boring experiences.
  - cheriot 11y ago
    That's a good suggestion. Guide quality runs the gambit so checking reviews of the licensed guides for a particular museum can save a few bucks. I've had guys recite the brochure and not even get it right. Right now I'm taking the time consuming approach of reading a couple books on major destinations and hoping for the best. Next up, A Short History of Laos: The Land in Between.
bprieto 11y ago
I have taken my children to the Prado several times, and also to the Thyssen and Reina Sofia. They enjoyed their visits, mostly because there were specially made for kids: they had a guide for a group of 10-12 kids, the visits had a theme like Greek mythology, and they only stopped in front of a few paintings. I liked the Thyssen visits the most: only 5-6 paintings with a common theme like music, cities, people... and at the end the kids would do a craft based on what they just saw. The guides took a socratic approach to the visits, so instead of explaining they asked questions like What do you see here? Why did the artist did that? Who is this person in the painting? Was he rich? Is she happy? We parents were with them but weren't allowed to speak before the kids, only to help when they struggled with a question. It was delightful to see the children's imagination run wild with their interpretation of the paintings. Seeing only a few paintings but really being in front of them for a while was a new experience for me, used to the common mindset of having to see all paintings in a museum even if only for a few seconds.
moomin 11y ago
sigh Point of Fact: Felipe II married Mary Tudor, not Mary, Queen of Scots. How exactly did that get past the editors?
kingosticks 11y ago
The majority of museums in London have extra resources for children and they range from pretty poor 'trails'/paper-based games to interactive talks and workshops targeted at particular age groups. What you get highly depends on the people in charge at the particular institution. The goal of these resources is to facilitate alternative interpretations to allow people of all ages to appreciate the collection (and make maximum use of the funding). The idea that all people, even across the same age group, interpret art in the same way is wrong; the idea that one interpretation is better or more right than another is also wrong. Fortunately there are now numerous ways to enjoy museums and galleries and to 'drag' a child around is unlikely to be one of them. Surely that's obvious.
- germinalphrase 11y ago
  This idea of paper-based games is nice, but I hope they are slightly more involved than [can you find five pictures with a donkey in them]. It would be great (particularly at museums that focus on science, industry, etc.) if these games implicitly motivated young people to draw connections between different realms of knowledge. For instance, the connection between transportation and resource extraction is obvious to adults, but a young person may find it helpful if a paper-based game motivated them to consider how the cool steam engines connect with the coal mining exhibit.
angdis 11y ago
It all depends on the individuals and what they're receptive to, regardless of whether you're talking about kids OR adults. Sure, some kids are going to have a meltdown if you drag them through MOMA. Wait until they're older, or structure the experience with some preparation or get professional help (kid-friendly tours). I don't think that the great museums should bend-over-backwards to appease cranky children. Many already do a great job providing age-appropriate activities and that's enough. How much more do we need from these museums?
nlawalker 11y ago
I was indoctrinated (with the best intentions) with a little bit of "museum guilt" as a child - when I visit a place, I sure as hell better visit all the big museums, as I needed to be a "citizen of the world" and it would be such a shame if I went all the way to a place and didn't see the museums. I started enjoying travel a lot more once I got out of this mindset. For me, now, travel is about walking everywhere, soaking up and trying to temporarily become one with the culture, people-watching and thinking about what life is like in this place, trying the food, admiring the architecture, breathing the air and just being in another place. And visiting a museum or two, when it makes sense, especially if it provides some historical context to the place I'm in. Sure, I'm not going to miss the Louvre or the National Gallery, but I'm not going to make myself spend more than a few hours there because it's "required viewing". My 2 cents: By all means, visit museums. But don't make travel a negative experience for yourself or your kids "because we just have to get all these museums in".
- mikeash 11y ago
  I would expand this a bit and say: there is no point in trying to appreciate culture if you don't actually enjoy the experience. (And thus no point in trying to have your children appreciate culture if they don't enjoy it.) It's sad that a lot of aspects of culture (art museums, plays, orchestral music) have been labeled as boring, because people feel obligated to experience them.
nosuchthing 11y ago
Kids would probably enjoy the interactive sculpture installations of a nice playground like Dennis the Menace Park - or an interactive science museum intended for all age audiences like the Exploratorium. Depending on what age the kid is, a natural history musume or modern art museum would probably be wiser than something full of oil paintings. Kids with internet access have seen art. Show them the world, science, fun. Oil paintings are not fun. http://exploratorium.edu http://exploratorium.edu
navbaker 11y ago
I was fortunate enough to grow up with the Smithsonian museums on the National Mall within easy driving distance. Some of my best childhood memories are seeing the t-Rex skull at the Natural History museum and the various space vessels at the Air and Space museum. I am extremely grateful to my parents for having taken us at least once a year.

53 points by Thevet 11y ago

I wrote this somewhat tedious text about my relation to museums as I was embarking on a quest to visit and write about all of Amsterdam's museums (I stopped after 5). http://blog.goula.sh/post/76719719068/the-museumkaart http://blog.goula.sh/post/76719719068/the-museumkaart

baldfat 11y ago

My father has a extreemly high IQ and his favorite hobby is learning something new. He is 77 years old and he still attends college classes at our state college (Free for anyone over 65). He took all 5 of his kids to a museum at least once a month. We would drive 3 or 4 hours and then get there when it opened and more than likely be there when it closed. The number one person my dad would talk with was the security people. His thought was they had no real knowledge of the subject and had to work through all the steps so they can explain it better. He was right.

RankingMember 11y ago
Maybe it was by virtue of you being his offspring that you could tolerate that, but I can tell you that if I were his kid he'd have been dealing with a seriously exasperated/cranky kid and would've started leaving me at home for his all-day museum visits. Even now, the idea of spending an entire day at a museum makes my brain's gag reflex fire. Even for cool subjects that naturally interest me (history, engineering), there's only so long I can mill around staring at things in a receptive state before my brain says "ENOUGH".
- baldfat 11y ago
  Well to be honest all 5 of use would NEVER complain. We would leave restaurants and the people would say, "Oh your children are the best behaved children I ever seen." We would say later on to ourselves, "They didn't know what our father would threaten us with." He is a loving father but he would make it SO NOT WORTH IT to complain or misbehave. My children love to learn and don't complain but I don't threaten them :) I think if you raise them to love what you do (For me it is learning, music and food) they grow liking the same things. My 9 year old at Disney World ordered the non-kid friendly Cheese Plate and the waiter sent out a second kid friendly appetizer just to be safe. He later asked her what her favorite thing she ate at Disney (Last night of 5 day stay) and she said the cheese plate.
  - jimbokun 11y ago
    The WORST part of my family's Disney experience was how the meal plan required my younger son to order from the children's menu. My one son was 11, and the other 9. The way the Disney meal plan works, 9 year-olds and under MUST order from the child menu. We kept dragging our kids back to Epcot to eat at the various nationality specific restaurants. Me, my wife, and older son would get a menu with lots of interesting choices, my younger son got to pick from chicken fingers or one other vaguely ethnic dish. He really hated being discriminated against in this way. The one server who really understood the problem was at Epcot's Italian restaurant. We ordered various things, including one item from the children's menu, but our waitress just served everything communally, with no mention of what was the "child" item. Sorry to vent, but you just triggered a painful parenting memory. :)
    - baldfat 11y ago
      We ran into the same thing, but my 9 year old got adults meals half the time by us just asking. Also they feed enough for 1.5 people easily so my wife and I would give her part of our own meals. I went on a Make a Wish trip with my son when he was 9 and he got the adult meal 100% of the time. Disney is awesome with Make a Wish kids.

wilwade 11y ago

As someone who has also gone through all three stages, I think the key for children is choosing the museums and exhibits that they or you like and enjoying them instead of analyzing them. For example, my 6 year old daughter enjoys the local art museum, but I don't think she has looked at any one painting more than 5 seconds. As a parent you have to be OK with missing out on a part of the experience for you and work on the experience for your children. The specific experience I suggest focusing on for young children is just enjoying it, or a specific part. Mostly that means letting them go quickly by that masterpiece and asking what they like about whatever they do stop to see.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
That sounds sensible. Kids - even bright kids - aren't going to be able to understand or appreciate art the way adults do. So I mostly agree with the article. Dragging kids around museums they're visibly bored by to "improve" or "educate" them is a waste of time for everyone. I used to love the Science Museum in London as a kid, because there were buttons to push and levers to play with and giant aeroplanes and spaceships. And sometimes, computers. As an adult I really enjoy art galleries (and science museums.) But I can't imagine six year old me getting anything out of gallery visits at all. Art is too abstract and emotionally complex for pre-teens, and the history to give it a context is too distant from their experience.
- eitally 11y ago
  You are free to correct me if I'm wrong, but in reading this I can't imagine you have kids. As someone who does, let me affirm that children absolutely get as much out of gallery visits as adults do. It isn't a perfect overlay in subject matter, but they learn as much as you or I. At pre-adult ages, exposure is as critical as understanding, which will evolve only via experience.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Art doesn't have to be abstract and emotionally complex with historical context. It can just be pretty pictures and interesting shapes and such. Children can absolutely enjoy art. But they're going to enjoy it on their own terms. They're not going to understand it or appreciate it the way adults do, yes. But that doesn't mean they can't appreciate it. Obviously if you take your children to an art museum and insist that they spend five minutes staring at each piece trying to understand the context, they're going to hate it. And obviously, you should only do this if you want to teach your children that art is terrible and museums are places to avoid. But if you just let them do their thing, and answer their questions, and try to point out interesting features, they can enjoy it a lot. If your child is young, referring to it as the "fart museum" is a good way to maintain interest, too. This is also a good barometer of the adult's attitude: if you can't stand calling it the "fart museum" because it's disrespectful or too crude or whatever, then you don't have the right attitude to take a small child to the fart museum!

cheriot 11y ago

The museums with the most renown collections* are often the worst at telling the story of why those artifacts are special. Great if you're a historian, a useless collection of old broken things if you're a kid, and incompletely impressive artifacts for laymen. *I'm looking at you, British and Egyptian Museums. Slowly, a handful of museums are catching on. The Holocaust museum in Washington, DC may be the best use of a collection out there.

noxToken 11y ago
Have you ever been on a guided tour? I know that museums shouldn't rely on guided tours to be interesting, but for those museums that fail to capture a wider audience, guided tours can be a godsend. When I went to the National Cathedral, we didn't get nor want a guided tour. The architecture was enough to keep us interested. There were enough tours happening concurrently that we could weave about the cathedral at our own pace while still getting most of the tour experience. For people without an inherent interest in the cathedral or its architecture, the tours sounded great. Perhaps the tours would be helpful for potentially interesting museums with awfully boring experiences.
- cheriot 11y ago
  That's a good suggestion. Guide quality runs the gambit so checking reviews of the licensed guides for a particular museum can save a few bucks. I've had guys recite the brochure and not even get it right. Right now I'm taking the time consuming approach of reading a couple books on major destinations and hoping for the best. Next up, A Short History of Laos: The Land in Between.

bprieto 11y ago

I have taken my children to the Prado several times, and also to the Thyssen and Reina Sofia. They enjoyed their visits, mostly because there were specially made for kids: they had a guide for a group of 10-12 kids, the visits had a theme like Greek mythology, and they only stopped in front of a few paintings. I liked the Thyssen visits the most: only 5-6 paintings with a common theme like music, cities, people... and at the end the kids would do a craft based on what they just saw. The guides took a socratic approach to the visits, so instead of explaining they asked questions like What do you see here? Why did the artist did that? Who is this person in the painting? Was he rich? Is she happy? We parents were with them but weren't allowed to speak before the kids, only to help when they struggled with a question. It was delightful to see the children's imagination run wild with their interpretation of the paintings. Seeing only a few paintings but really being in front of them for a while was a new experience for me, used to the common mindset of having to see all paintings in a museum even if only for a few seconds.

moomin 11y ago

sigh Point of Fact: Felipe II married Mary Tudor, not Mary, Queen of Scots. How exactly did that get past the editors?

kingosticks 11y ago

The majority of museums in London have extra resources for children and they range from pretty poor 'trails'/paper-based games to interactive talks and workshops targeted at particular age groups. What you get highly depends on the people in charge at the particular institution. The goal of these resources is to facilitate alternative interpretations to allow people of all ages to appreciate the collection (and make maximum use of the funding). The idea that all people, even across the same age group, interpret art in the same way is wrong; the idea that one interpretation is better or more right than another is also wrong. Fortunately there are now numerous ways to enjoy museums and galleries and to 'drag' a child around is unlikely to be one of them. Surely that's obvious.

germinalphrase 11y ago
This idea of paper-based games is nice, but I hope they are slightly more involved than [can you find five pictures with a donkey in them]. It would be great (particularly at museums that focus on science, industry, etc.) if these games implicitly motivated young people to draw connections between different realms of knowledge. For instance, the connection between transportation and resource extraction is obvious to adults, but a young person may find it helpful if a paper-based game motivated them to consider how the cool steam engines connect with the coal mining exhibit.

angdis 11y ago

It all depends on the individuals and what they're receptive to, regardless of whether you're talking about kids OR adults. Sure, some kids are going to have a meltdown if you drag them through MOMA. Wait until they're older, or structure the experience with some preparation or get professional help (kid-friendly tours). I don't think that the great museums should bend-over-backwards to appease cranky children. Many already do a great job providing age-appropriate activities and that's enough. How much more do we need from these museums?

nlawalker 11y ago

I was indoctrinated (with the best intentions) with a little bit of "museum guilt" as a child - when I visit a place, I sure as hell better visit all the big museums, as I needed to be a "citizen of the world" and it would be such a shame if I went all the way to a place and didn't see the museums. I started enjoying travel a lot more once I got out of this mindset. For me, now, travel is about walking everywhere, soaking up and trying to temporarily become one with the culture, people-watching and thinking about what life is like in this place, trying the food, admiring the architecture, breathing the air and just being in another place. And visiting a museum or two, when it makes sense, especially if it provides some historical context to the place I'm in. Sure, I'm not going to miss the Louvre or the National Gallery, but I'm not going to make myself spend more than a few hours there because it's "required viewing". My 2 cents: By all means, visit museums. But don't make travel a negative experience for yourself or your kids "because we just have to get all these museums in".

mikeash 11y ago
I would expand this a bit and say: there is no point in trying to appreciate culture if you don't actually enjoy the experience. (And thus no point in trying to have your children appreciate culture if they don't enjoy it.) It's sad that a lot of aspects of culture (art museums, plays, orchestral music) have been labeled as boring, because people feel obligated to experience them.

nosuchthing 11y ago

Kids would probably enjoy the interactive sculpture installations of a nice playground like Dennis the Menace Park - or an interactive science museum intended for all age audiences like the Exploratorium. Depending on what age the kid is, a natural history musume or modern art museum would probably be wiser than something full of oil paintings. Kids with internet access have seen art. Show them the world, science, fun. Oil paintings are not fun. http://exploratorium.edu http://exploratorium.edu

navbaker 11y ago

I was fortunate enough to grow up with the Smithsonian museums on the National Mall within easy driving distance. Some of my best childhood memories are seeing the t-Rex skull at the Natural History museum and the various space vessels at the Air and Space museum. I am extremely grateful to my parents for having taken us at least once a year.