Parents: 2018 Update Part 4 - Making Deep Impact Easier for Families

"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.


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