When Play's the Thing

Originally posted November 2016

Perhaps now more than ever we need play in our new stay-at-home lives. Children and adults need the agency of play and the ways that play transports them and transforms their everyday worlds. —Play that says the world doesn’t have to be the way it is today. —Play that expresses possibility, delight, and hope.

While play as usual is not currently happening in our museums, many museum educators are very involved in preparing on-line activities that can invite play at home, in small spaces, and outdoors. These days are invitations to museums to think about play in new ways, to reflect on and understand play better, and to plan for more, new, other, incidental, and everyday ways to encourage play now and when museums open their doors again.

And...remember,,, play yourself!

Social distancing during statue play 

Museums are among the few public institutions where play is not only tolerated, but is encouraged. Play has a presence across museums and it is not strictly for children. At The Strong, National Museum of Play, it is the focus of the entire museum. Sometimes the topic of an exhibit, or a strategy for exploration in programs, play might also be the inspiration for reimagining exhibit experiences as the National Building Museum did at The Beach. Games are used to enhance learning in museums just as role-play is used to bring history to life. Science museum exhibits are designed to create playful learning experiences. Increasingly, museums are adding nature play experiences as the Museum of Life and Science has with Hideaway Woods. Play is sometimes a question explored as it was at a Toledo Museum of Art installation.

Concern with learning, well-being, and 21^st century skills has given a boost across museums to better understanding how play intersects with creativity, language development, learning, health, and social-emotional development. Not surprisingly, this positions play as a driving idea in many museum learning frameworks.

But how do we understand play? 

As pervasive as it is, understanding play is no simple matter. Play is complex and multi-faceted. For instance, we may not realize that children—and adults—move seamlessly among play, exploration, and learning without being aware of it. And because play is seemingly so familiar, we often assume that it is self-explanatory. There are multiple theories of play, various play taxonomies, and different types of play. Play hovers at the intersection of multiple disciplines but is not an established academic discipline itself. It is unlikely that staff with degrees in play studies will guide a museum’s exploration of play. Yet, like any cornerstone idea for any museum, having a shared understanding of play is invaluable, if not critical.

Are you and your museum grounded in play? What aspects of play are important at your museum? What is its role in the museum? How does it relate to other priorities and how does it contribute value? Answering these questions is not quick and easy, nor is digging deeper to be more grounded in an understanding of play. There are, however, ways to go about answering them. 

Get started by jumping in anywhere in the activities below. Proceed in no particular order.

1. Play. Play yourself. Play with blocks, bubbles, pieces of fabric, sticks, large pieces of fabric, cardboard boxes, tape, stones.  
2. Read about play: articles, journals, blogs, reports, and books.  
3. Invite and collect childhood play memories from staff and board.
4. Compile collected play memories, combing through them for threads and themes. Incorporate 

   

   What are staff play memories?

   some into the annual report, the museum’s website, grant proposals.
5. Develop a definition of play for your museum with your colleagues.
6. Compare your museum’s definition of play with those from 2-3 other museums.
7. Gather 5 definitions of play from researchers and theorists.
8. Add more loose parts to exhibits, programs, outdoor spaces, increasing the variety and quantity.
9. Think about and explain how those loose parts will inspire and extend play; incorporate these ideas into staff training.
10. Hire people who are OK with loose parts that are varied and that migrate among exhibits.
11. Observe play in your museum: families at play, couples at play, children at play.
12. Record observations about play in your museum. What kinds of play are you seeing? What does it look like? 



How do families play together?

13. From your observations, identify 3 examples of how visitors appear to be learning through play.
14. Talk with other staff about play. How does it look in different exhibits; among children of different ages, for children with different needs and abilities; for teens and adults?
15. Practice distinguishing among different types of play: dramatic play, constructive play, exploratory play.
16. Carefully read graphic panels in your galleries. What do they convey about the museum's interest in play?  
17. Dig into the differences among pretend play, imaginative play, and dramatic play. Are there any? Is one better suited to your museum? Why?
18. Observe play in different settings outside the museum: on playgrounds, in parks, in stores, on street corners, and in natural settings.
19. Talk with parents about play: how do they see their child’s activity at the museum in relation to play? How do they see their role in facilitating it? How do they see play connecting with learning?
20. Talk with teens and with adults about play and how they see themselves playing.

    

    Play with staff (Photo credit: Fantastic Norway)

    
    
21. Develop a perspective on games and gaming for your museum.
22. Look at other “big ideas” at your museum like early literacy, creativity, inquiry, making, learning, exploring, executive function, etc. How does play connect with them? Draw, map, or explain the connections.
23. Develop 3 questions you want to know more about play. Figure out how to go about answering them.
24. Develop a perspective on the role of adults in children’s play at your museum.
25. Locate responsibility for play in position descriptions.
26. Set up play training for museum staff–all museum staff.
27. Sign up for play training for yourself.
28. Search for play taxonomies: Bob Hughes, Corinne Hutt, Mildred Parten, Dr. StuartBrown.
29. Develop a logic model for play and its outcomes at your museum. 
30. Play. Play together as a staff. 

Children in Museums

First published in February 2014, this post looks into the growing presence of children across museums of all types and begins a series that explores their presence in museums from a variety of perspectives.  

There are children’s museums and then there are museums children visit with parents, grandparents, and school groups. From a museum perspective–children’s museums on the one hand and traditional museums children visit on the other–having children as visitors can have quite different meaning. For children, however, the experience between one type of museum and another might be less than museum people generally assume.  

Memories of Museums from Childhood
Before there were children’s museums in most cities, children went to museums, liked museums, and remembered them. In my experience, they still do; and there are good reasons for it. 

The Wood Gatherer

My friend Mary grew up in Milwaukee and remembers vividly going to the Milwaukee Art Museum with her friends Jimmy and Linda, on their own, without adults. Frequently, even weekly in the summer, they would walk down Astor Street and cross Juneau Park and get into the Art Museum for free. They would always visit their favorite paintings. Mary’s was The Wood Gatherer by Jules Bastien LePage. Then they’d each get an ice cream sandwich at the canteen for 10 cents. Fifty years later, Mary was at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and came face-to-face with her favorite painting, on loan from the Milwaukee Art Museum. It stopped her in her tracks, brought back a flood of childhood and neighborhood memories, and made her trip. 

Sweden’s Nobel prize-winning poet Tomas Tranströmer, writes in Memories Look at Me, A Memoir about going to museums as a child in Stockholm. He starts off, “As a child, I was attracted to museums. First the Natural History Museum. What a building! Gigantic, Babylonian, inexhaustible.” (Translated from Swedish by Robin Fulton) Tranströmer was first taken to the museum when he was about 5 years old. At the entrance were 2 elephant skeletons, “…guardians of the gateway to the miraculous.” Inspired by what he saw, Tranströmer visited every second Sunday, started his own collections, and one day, met a professor, “…one of the guardian angels who appeared now and then in my childhood and touched me with its wings.”

While children visit children’s museums now, they also visit “big museums.” I was at a café in St Paul last year and overheard a mother and her 3 boys ranging from 3-8 years talking about going to the museum. Since we were several blocks from Minnesota Children’s Museum, I asked if they were headed there. The middle child said they were going to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to see the Terracotta Warriors. His brother added with emphasis that it was their third visit. A friend says his sister takes her 4 grand children to the local art museum. Each of the children has a favorite painting and insists on visiting it on every visit. Ranging from 5-10 years, they have lively discussions about the merits of their paintings.

In late 2013, 12- year old Jake caught the attention of many museum professionals as he posted, “21 ways how I would create an amazing museum” on his blog, Jake’s Bones. His list about making museums awesome for everyone, especially for children, not only demonstrates extensive museum going, but also reveals an engaged and incisive observer and thinker about the museum experience. His astute, visitor-centered ideas take children, their interests, and capabilities seriously with recommendations such as, “Don’t hide the experts,” “Link exhibits to things in the real world,” and  “Have information for all levels of knowledge.”

Recently I watched as 2 sisters and their parents explore the extensive Degas collection at the Norton Simon Museum  in Pasadena. Moving through several galleries, the girls took

In second position before Degas

turns, pausing at every painting or statue. Each one spent time looking the dancer and then carefully assumed the same ballet pose as her sister and parents looked on. The girls moved to the next painting. 

These are only my examples and no doubt many others could add theirs. Some may stand out as exceptions; clearly a 12-year old blogger with a book contract is unusual. Even as a small sample, however, they show children as enthusiastic museum goers, engaged with art, collections, and people in museums. Their visits are sources of durable experiences with life-long significance. This challenges several notions about children in museums: museums can’t reach children; children aren’t ready for “real” museums until they are older; and children only like some museums–natural history and not art.

Children Ready for Museums
Children are constantly making connections between what they see and hear and the experiences they have accumulated in even the first few years of life. Evidence of children’s interest in museums and varied expressions of their interest is apparent in the examples above. In museums children interact with people; they ask information-seeking questions about novel objects and their functions; they borrow language from others; they make meaning they carry forward to new experiences. With rich environments, great volumes of space, interesting finishes and surfaces, and real objects at actual size (very big, very small and in between), museums invite children to notice, explore, ask questions, think, and follow their interests.

Museums are simply great places for children to learn how to learn and enjoy learning. Programs, anecdotes, and studies illustrate how children–from babies to school-aged children, in museums of every type–are open to and benefit from museum experiences.

Young children’s capacity to enjoy and learn from museums is foundational for the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center (SEEC). For 24 years, SEEC has offered museum-based learning in an early childhood program for children 2 months to 6 years at three sites in Washington, DC. While it draws on The Smithsonian’s extensive collections, SEEC’s object-based approach also builds on children’s curiosity, eagerness to make connections, and willingness to go beyond what they see. Children explore objects and exhibits in art, history, and science museums. They interact with curators, scientists, artists, and cultural historians, along with museum educators to learn about the world, get ideas, and build a positive perspective of museums.

Museum fellow, Susan Erdman, writes about taking her toddler to museums now.  She recognizes the value of her son seeing real things and making meaningful connections between objects–vehicles and animals–that he has seen in books and sees at the museum or zoo. Size, color, sound, and smells contribute information and deepen his understanding about what he’s noticing, what’s going on, how things work, and what people are talking about. She knows his brain is already absorbing concepts and museums help build those concepts. The Toledo Museum of Art offers docent-lead monthly baby tours. Based on research by Dr. Kathy Danko-McGee, the Museum’s director of education, the tours for 2-to-18 month-olds focus on interesting shapes, lines and colors. Caregivers are encouraged to name and describe different characteristics in a work of art supporting connections about shape, colors, symbols, and language.

Large objects, with strong, accessible, contextual links

In one of the few studies to look at children in museums, Piscitelli and Anderson explored children’s perspectives and past experiences of museums. The study of 77 children 4-6 years old in Brisbane (AU) indicates that children have extensive experience and positive perspectives about museum settings they visited. They regard museums as places full of exciting opportunities to learn and get new ideas. Exhibits with large objects and strong, accessible, contextual links to previous experiences and knowledge stand out in children’s recollections. Their visual recall and verbal descriptions of exhibits and architectural features are remarkably accurate. 

Children bring to museums a disposition to notice, get ideas, and make connections between what they see and hear and their experiences and interests.

Museums Ready for Children
While children seem ready for museums, museums–other than children’s museums–do not necessarily seem to be ready for children. It’s not that art, history, natural history, or science museums don’t admit children. Many, if not most, do­­. Rather, many museums don’t really value children as children and museum goers. Consequently, they aren’t prepared to serve them in ways they serve adults, experts, tourists, etc.

A typical explanation for a museum deciding to serve children relates to audience development: reach more young families and grow membership. Confusing a museum's need to grow with what an audience group needs is unfortunate. Serving children means serving them well: valuing them, recognizing the significance of early experiences, and welcoming young children as additions to public spaces. Rather than adding an admission category and hosting toddler Tuesdays, a museum must be prepared to welcome children and delight them.

MOHAI (Seattle)

Museums intending to serve children well have staff interested in and prepared to interact with and engage children. From security, to guest services, to educators, developers and designers, and housekeepers, staff should be as pleased to see children, as children are to see them. Serving children well means granting them the greatest reasonable access to galleries, rooms, and exhibits while considering the needs of the objects and building, something that can require creative thinking. One historic house on a very large property didn’t allow children under 10, until it recognized that the gardens and out buildings were great places for children to explore.

Museums committed to serving children well adopt a set of practices suited to children in every museum, regardless of type: multi-sensory, hands-on learning strategies; facilitated and mediated experiences; and child-centered environments. (In fact, the UK has a manifesto for kid-friendly museums.) Supporting these practices is a child-centered pedagogy that recognizes children as competent and full of potential, as active agents in their own learning.

While museum professionals and researchers may be convinced that young children's benefit from visiting museums include learning, they actually know very little about these experiences and museums’ impact on children and their learning. Mary Ellen Munley’s 2012 literature review of research conducted in museum settings focusing on young children’s learning concludes that this research is lacking. Prepared for the Smithsonian Institution’s Early Learning Collaborative Network and SEEC, Munley’s review notes that museums do provide distinct and positive environments to foster young children’s learning; and young children are interested in artifacts and exhibitions in traditional museums where they learn disciplinary-specific information (history or biology) before being exposed to those disciplines in school settings.

Ezra and friends at the Berkeley Art Museum

For museums interested in serving children well, the limited research on children in museums, and children’s learning in museums in particular, is challenging. It is not, however, surprising. The increase in serving children in programs and initiatives in traditional museums, also highlighted in Munley’s review, is relatively recent. Equally significant, however, is how young children’s learning is viewed. Children’s learning often looks different from older children’s and adults’ learning and may miss being studied. 

Children as receptive viewers of contemporary art may not look like adults being viewers of contemporary art. Children intrigued by dinosaurs may role-play in front of the Triceratops while adults are unlikely to do so. Ideas for stories, investigating, or building come from what children see in a painting, a sculpture, a diorama, skeleton, or people in the museum. As long as learning is viewed as content, concepts, and data calibrated to the school curriculum, what children actually are learning in museums will be overlooked. In Stay Behind the Yellow Line in Curator (56/4), Clarkin-Phillips, Carr, Thomas, Waitai, and Lowe describe a study of 3 and 4-year olds’ constructing knowledge about being a museum visitor and exhibitor. The children’s activities demonstrated their ability to develop an appreciation of art and an understanding of the purposes of museums and art galleries.

Children–Knowing–Museums–Knowing–Children
There are children’s museums and then there are traditional museums that children visit . A good number of museums are somewhere in between. These are museums with a family learning focus, museums that understand that a mission of supporting life-long learning begins with babies, and museums that more-or-less ignore the distinction completely. In this group might be the:

• Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (Amherst, MA)

• City Museum (St. Louis)

• American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore)

• Exploratorium (San Francisco)

Increasingly more museums of all types welcome children to their galleries, exhibits, programs, and events. We know, or at least believe and hope to show, that a full range of museum experiences for children are valuable: children visit museums in their communities and as they travel; they actively pursue interests; they become museum goers and engage in learning at every stage of life. Museums make children want to explore and to learn. Hopefully children are making museums want to learn about them as well.

Changing Our Futures: Changing How We See Children

Glimpsing and engaging the potential of all children

My vision of the great opportunity that children’s museums enjoy on behalf of children has greatly expanded over the last 40 years. When I helped start Madison Children’s Museum in 1980 and when I worked at Minnesota Children’s Museum, I was inspired by what was immediate, physical, and fascinating to children. I focused on the value of objects and environments in children’s development, play, and learning; providing more children with richer, more varied environments; and expanding the range of objects and materials children could manipulate, investigate, and transform through exploration and play. Those are still compelling interests just as I believe that every museum must be a great place to visit, enjoyable for children and families to spend time together, bring friends, and celebrate.

With time and growth—mine, others involved with children’s museums, and children’s museums themselves—we’ve developed a deeper understanding of the fundamental relationship between the well-being of towns, cities, and regions and the well-being of children and families and how children’s museums contribute to this. 

While a children’s museum may make a city more attractive to families, that’s not enough.

The prospects of a town, city, or region and its children are closely intertwined. Children have a lot to gain or lose from the quality of the towns, cities, or regions where they live. Children’s museums have an opportunity to help change those lives.

When children thrive, cities thrive.

Imagine a city without children; a town without schools; or neighborhoods without playgrounds or young families. When cities do not value children or address their needs and those of families, families move away. These places become hollow. A city without children is a city without a future. Conversely, when children are attached to their neighborhoods, feel connected to place and cared for by their community, they want to stay, return, contribute to these places as adults. When children thrive, their communities thrive.

Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, among many others, says the central project of every human community is to care for its children. At the core of this work is valuing children, which is much more than saying we value children. It requires demonstrating respect for them by assuring their physical and emotional safety and a time and a place to be children. It demands that we appreciate them for who they are at every moment of their development, and are respectful of the great possibilities each child holds.

Strong towns and cities welcome
children into civic life.

These are not just niceties, opportunities we hope some lucky children enjoy. To the contrary, they are among the experiences critical to all children’s optimal social, emotional, physical, and intellectual development and essential to children becoming strong, caring, responsible citizens. For all children these experiences provide a solid start in life. For many, they become protective factors against adversities children will encounter.

How we provide for our cities’ and citizens’ futures matters greatly. A town or city’s quality is more than a vibrant place architecturally, socially, commercially. Strong towns and cities welcome children into civic life; invest wisely through their futures in their everyday and long-term decisions. Our cities, towns, and regions, along with children’s museums, libraries, zoos, and schools, need to ask whether we are creating the future we want for our children.

Making Children Visible to the City

Not only do children’s museums help make cities more attractive, they also contribute to children becoming empowered and invested museum goers, agents in their own learning, and engaged, productive citizens. 

Children’s museums need to and want to matter. Purpose-driven organizations that serve tens of millions of children each year across this country and around the world, children’s museums’ foundational ideas converge around all domains of children’s healthy development; developmental relationships with parents and caregivers; varied, engaging experiences with materials and environments; and supportive community connections.

Placing their audience in their name establishes children’s museums’ core interest. They are not about objects, but about people; they are not about something—art, natural history, science, but are for children. Whether large or small, established or fledgling, urban or rural, children’s museums serve parents, caregivers, educators, and communities because they serve children. Serving children first has earned the loyalty and trust of children and families.

Places for children

In being for children, children’s museums are attentive to what is intriguing to children. They create varied experiences that engage, encourage, and challenge children’s continuously developing and emerging capabilities which may present as interests, skills, dispositions, or abilities that are capable of being developed, across all domains. Social places where family groups go to be together and connect with one another, children’s museums are also spaces family, school, and community groups from across a region meet and interact. Woven into the community fabric, they help build a sense of belonging and add to the region’s infrastructure for well-being. Whether occupying a large stand-alone building or operating in a small shared space, whether in a 5,000 or 400,000 s.f. space, every children’s museum space stands as an investment and belief in children’s potential, what is possible but not yet fully actual. 

Shaping how we view, value, and understand children

Children’s museums’ long-term interest in and knowledge about children represent a prime opportunity to make children, their capabilities, and strengths visible to the city and to shape how cities and their residents view, value, and understand children.

Everyday these museums welcome hundreds and thousands of babies, big kids, and tweens and engage and support parents, caregivers, and teachers. They use and conduct research to inform practices; create interactive experiences with objects, environments, and other visitors; they expand and enrich children’s understanding of their worlds. Across multiple media platforms children’s museums communicate their messages, share stories, and promote their activities and events to members, partners, and the larger community. They display children’s constructions, projects, and accomplishments. Outreach and mobile units take children’s museums into schools, parks, libraries, and neighborhoods.

This Remarkable Opportunity

Children’s museums’ remarkable opportunity is that they both invite children to get to know their communities and they invite communities to get to know their children. Fulfilling this opportunity relies on championing an image of the child—of all children—as actively interested in the world, attuned to possibilities, open to relationships, and full of potential.

(Not a strong image of the child)

Every one of us carries an image of the child inside of us. This image is critical because how we see children shapes our expectations of them as individuals and as a group. Whether they are our own children, museum visitors, students, or neighbors; whether we see them as responsibilities, consumers, or contributors, our image affects how we relate to, talk with, observe, and understand them and choose  opportunities for them.  

It is impossible to overstate the power of this image. If children grow up into our image of them—and we know they do—wouldn’t we much prefer that they grow up being curious, resourceful, helpful, caring, confident? Yet, carrying an image of the child based on strengths and possibilities rather than weaknesses is harder than we imagine. 

While many museums have statements about valuing and respecting children, even the firmest beliefs in children as capable and competent encounter contrary forces, images, and messages about them in and outside the museum.

For starters, we have long been underestimating children because of their size, their short attention spans, their physical activity, and everything they have yet to learn. Over the last 40 years of research on children, however, we have found out not children’s weaknesses and problems, but their capabilities and assets. Research tells us that children are born knowing a lot about the world and other people; that long before they can read or write, they have extraordinary powers of imagination and creativity; that they start understanding the mind at around 3-5 years. Everyday observations of children confirm they are always on the verge of something new.

Everyday, children are on the verge of something new.

Unfortunately, when we don’t focus on potential and strengths—children’s or others’—we tend to focus on problems. We see limitations and deficiencies needing to be fixed. Rather than being attentive and amazed by what children have accomplished and can do by 2, 5, or 8 years, we focus on what they don’t know or can’t do. Often, we confuse the fact that children are novices in areas in which they have an understandable, age-related, limited range of experience with their not being capable. Think of the many children 3 or 4 years and younger who develop an impressive fund of knowledge on topics interesting to them. Their expertise may be dinosaurs, earth-moving machines, horses, or sports stars. They use accurate terminology, have domain-appropriate schema, and make subtle distinctions that escape most adults. Their focus, persistence, and motivation to learn are apparent and impressive. Yet we focus on what they don’t know, or that they can’t spell or read.

The idea of making meaningful marks starts early

We also interpret emerging skills as failed efforts. When we see the marks that toddlers make on a page using pens or pencils, we see these marks as scribbles. Messy, careless, they don’t resemble letters and numbers so they don’t qualify as writing. We are unlikely to see them as a toddler’s emerging understanding that marks have meaning; or as drawings that represent and communicate ideas; or as evidence of agency. And, while we are delighted to think about children having questions about why things happen and investigating them, we fervently hope these explorations aren’t too messy, noisy, or active. 

We have ample evidence of children as complex and complete from birth with an inherent competence and eagerness to learn, teach, and form connections. We also know that building on such an asset-based view of children is in the best, long-term interest of both communities and children. Too often, these views recede into the background, and may not be considered at all.

Leading with a Strong Image of the Child

Individually and as a group, children’s museums need to be out in front, actively shaping a view of children as strong, capable, and essential to the community’s well-being as well as creating experiences that favor this view. 

Social, caring, interested in relationships...

To make children and their potential, or potentials, visible, children’s museums must firmly hold an image of the child as competent and full of possibility. While the particular image of the child is specific to each museum and its community, every image reflects strengths. And there is no lack of assets to highlight. Children are inquisitive, bold, and resourceful. They have ideas and hunches and negotiate with everything the environment brings to them. They are social, caring, and interested in relationships. They are thinkers, doers, experimenters, and learners. Inventors who collaborate, they are confident individuals who communicate. From birth, children are active agents in forging their understanding of the world. 

While summarizing this on-going, life-changing work of building communities that value children for their strengths and potential is not simple, inevitably it involves the following.

• Articulating a shared understanding of the child as strong, capable, and pull of potential. Each museum will find its own path to developing, working with, and broadly sharing an image that is: grounded in its vision and mission; explored through multiple, lively internal discussions; strengthened by on-going observations of children; and based in research. An image of the child becomes magnetic north across a museum in all of its work.  

• Reflecting on an evolving a view of the child. Centering the museum’s language, thinking, planning, and practice around this image takes hold gradually. Over time, revisiting the museum’s view of children, how it’s understood in changing contexts becomes an established practice that generates new insights and shifts. This process deepens and enriches the image of the child and connects it to the museum’s thinking, learning, creating, and growing.

• Listening to and learning from children. Children’s talk, gestures, and actions; what they make, and unmake; how they act with confidence or hesitation; what they choose and avoid provide a wealth of information about them and how they experience and understand their world. Information and insights from children provide new perspectives and starting points for planning museum offerings. 

Children's work can challenge adults' views of
children are able to do

• Creating environments and experiences that are responsive to and leave room for children’s unfolding capabilities. Engaging children’s strengths and potentials involves shifting from what they should do, to what they can do; from doing things in a predetermined way, to doing things the child’s way; from teaching skills to activating skills. Emphasizing and amplifying strengths generate new, more inclusive approaches and a wider range of possibilities.

• Capturing and documenting insights into children’s capabilities. Integrated into museum experiences as activities, text, and images, children's input and examples of children’s projects, words, images, and drawings both inform and challenge adults’ views of children and what they are able to do; and elevate their value of children’s thinking, observation skills, and knowledge. Compelling examples of children’s capabilities, children’s words and images anchor the museum’s messages about children and their strengths.

• Cultivating a whole-hearted commitment from many stakeholders. Meaningful change in how a community values its children is unrealistic without shifting how we all see children. Children’s museums’ work helps partners, allies, and friends, towns, cities, and regions, recognize the importance of what is possible but not yet actual for children. While caretakers of this work, children’s museums must work closely with others and boldly lead this greater effort.