"I look to museums to help me teach my child. I need all the help I can get!"
- This and all quotes from parents responding to 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers

Parents and caregivers are stressed.  They are trying to pack a lot of things into a busy schedule (and affordably). Sometimes, even if they want to visit a museum, it just seems so hard. So hard to pack up the gear, deal with timing and a toilet-training toddler, corral children into the car, motivate a tween to come along, and then get out the door to stand in line and, hopefully, have a great day.

So we need to make it easy. And when I say that, I don't just mean easy to visit logistically (though we need to do that too), I mean making parents lives easier. Be a deliberate, explicit solution in their lives.

• "Museums allow for an easy way to expose my children to different ideas."

Being easy means fulfilling needs. Parents today are barraged in their life with advice about how to make their kids smarter, better thinkers, more compassionate, better athletes, and so on and so forth. Ad nauseum. It is relentless. And it isn't always clear how to best accomplish any of it.

Which brings us to museums as solution.

• "Oh god the horror. What an interesting and terrifying question."

In the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, I asked museum-going parents to consider what a community or world without museums would be like, and how it would affect their parenting. Most were horrified at the thought, and shared how a lack of museums would make their job as a parent so much harder. For example:

Parents don't always feel they have the ability to nurture creativity in their children:

• "It would affect my family negatively.  There would be no imagination, no creativity …"

Parents realize they don't have the expertise to explore every subject with their children:

• "That would be scary! There isn't enough time in the world to be an expert in all fields to expose my kids to all realms that museums can do in a few visits."

Parents don't have the time and resources to create interactive experiences for their children:

• "Museums fill a hole that I, as a parent, wouldn't be able to fulfill. In theory, I would do more research to come up with more interactive activities to do with my child to help teach him a variety of things, but in reality, I don't have the time for that (or the money to purchase a variety of necessary tools)."

And parents would struggle to make the complexity of the world tangible (at least, not without the help of museums):

• "I think museums are one of the greatest aids to learning. You are able to see and experience far beyond the scope of your own world. True compassion, awareness and understanding can be achieved through experiencing what is otherwise intangible. Without museums, the burden of making learning a living, breathing conceptual and experience would be a unbelievably heavy."

I could go on (after all, I have thousands of these quotes). But for all of these parental challenges museums are a primary answer. And without museums around to provide these things, parents would feel even more pressure, stress, and anxiety.

• "[Without museums] my anxiety level would probably go through the roof in terms of how to help my daughter get switched on to and make sense of the world and concepts I may (or likely may not) be familiar with!"

Now, most museum-going parents don't articulate this role of museums in their lives, that museums make their job easier. Indeed, as I recently shared, most parents find museums only slightly more pleasure than pain to visit. Why? Because parents are in the weeds of everyday parenting, and are seeing the everyday challenges of getting kids out the door to a museum. Consciously thinking about, and articulating, the overall impact of museums is not something most parents take time to do. Yet when presented with a world without museums, that impact became instantly clear to them.

So, museums are already a solution … a unique, easy-to-access, solution for parents. Museum-going parents can articulate that. But we need to do a much better job of articulating it for parents, and presenting museums as a feel-good, affordable, easy solution to encourage broader museum attendance from all families, whether museum-going, casual visiting, or non-visiting. Because when we articulate and deliver on these needs our impact is clearer, our case for support is stronger, and our ability to transform lives expanded.


By the way … if you would like a daily dose of a randomly selected #imaginenomuseums quote from museum-goers, follow my Twitter feed @susiewilkening or my Facebook page @wilkeningconsulting.


Make the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers possible!

Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field?

If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum. 

The leisure time crunch. It's what parents experience on most weekends … a list of things that need to get done, children to keep an eye on, children to shuttle around, and then falling into bed, exhausted. As shared earlier, 45% of museum-going parents report they get zero relaxation during leisure time.

So if you have a busy family, and exhausted parents, where do museums fit in? Are museums an obligation, something one does for children (just like all good parents do), or is visiting fun and relaxing? And how does all of this affect what parents think about the impact of museums?

Let's take a look at what parents said in the 2018 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, and try to sort this out.

Exhausted Parents

First, the bad news. Exhausted parents are more critical museum visitors. Compared to parents who felt more relaxed at the end of the weekend, exhausted parents were:

• Less likely to say museums contribute to quality of life
• More likely to say visiting museums is "hard work"
• Reported fewer impacts of museums in their lives
• And just generally had more negative responses

I'm not surprised. I have those weekends too, and they make me crabby as well. Sometimes the idea of an "enrichment" activity for my kids makes me want to go hide under the covers. So it is no wonder that, for many museum-going parents, museums are seen as yet something else to fit in, and thus somewhat painful to visit.

The Pain/Pleasure Index

So how painful is it really to visit museums? To find out, I asked parents if visiting museums was more work or more pleasure. Respondents were given a slider, and asked to choose where visiting museums fell, which turned into a numeric score for me (which was then easy for me to average across segments; thus, if 100% of respondents said "total pleasure", the score would be 100, while a score of 0 would mean 100% of respondents said "hard work").

Overall, parents scored museums a 55 … only slightly more pleasurable than painful. Not a great result. Two factors were most likely to affect the score:

• Age of children: it dropped to 49 for parents of children young children (<5) and goes up to 60 (somewhat more pleasurable!) for parents of elementary schoolers and tweens/teens; and
• Parental stress: the more stressed parents report being, the lower the score, while "relaxed and ready for a new week" parents score higher.

But then it gets more interesting. The more parents visit, the more likely they are to consider museums "hard work." Additionally, those recurring visitors (especially with younger children) are more critical of museums and have generally more negative responses overall. (Note the opposite is true among those who are not parents of minor children: then, more visits then equals happier visitors.)

The pattern, then, is of stressed, high-visitation rate parents who feel obliged to visit museums in order to provide their children with enrichment and learning, but just are too exhausted to enjoy it themselves.

Since these stressed-out parents are nearly half of museum-going parents, and it isn't like the other half are relaxed and engaged 100% of the time either, it begs the question: what can museums do to make visiting museums a stress reducer in parents' lives? How can we be a solution in their lives, not just one more thing to cram in?

And if we can figure this out, would it make visiting museums more appealing for casual and non-visitors as well?


Do you value this research? Does it help you in your work at your museum? Do you want it to continue to help you and our field?
​
If so, consider how useful it would be to know how your museum's stakeholders feel about your museum, lifelong learning in museums, and more. By enrolling your museum in the 2019 Annual Survey of Museum Goers, you can easily benchmark the visitation rates, motivations, attitudes and preferences, and demographics of your stakeholders. Additionally, you can compare your results to your peers, begin to track them over time, and gain far more contextual information through your custom results and report. The fee for 2019 is only $1,000 per museum.