While recognizing the value of the parental adult has grown,
clarity about their role and how to support them in museums has not similarly increased.
Comprehensive approaches with related strategies for engaging and supporting
parents and caregivers in extending children’s explorations and having a
satisfying museum experience themselves, are lacking.
I have some observations about the nature of this
challenge from my involvement in several studies with parents and caregivers,
master planning for expansion, developing learning frameworks, reading professionally,
and making countless museum visits observing caregiver-child interactions.
Parents and caregivers in museums comprise
a very diverse group.
They are parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nannies, baby sitters,
neighbors, day care providers, camp counselors, scout leaders, field trip
chaperones, and teachers. They are also museum staff and volunteers. They are
stepparents and foster parents; new parents and experienced parents; parents of
one child and of many children. They are first time and frequent visitors.
Some have
a long-term relationship with the child while others have met the children in
their field trip group minutes before boarding the bus. Yet, they also have a
few things in common: an interest in the child and confidence in the museum as
a safe, interesting place for children. Still, it’s quite a mix.
The parent and caregiver role in
museums is complex and dynamic. We have only to think about the
homeschooling adult who
is both teacher and parent to recognize how intermingled and constantly shifting
adult roles are in a museum. Some recognizable roles have been identified by Dr.
Lorrie Beaumont in her research in children’s museums. The Adult Child
Interaction Inventory identifies 6
roles: the Player, Facilitator, Interpreter, Supervisor, Student of the Child
and Co-learner. This is a helpful perspective, but parents and caregivers also
chaperone, hold coats, monitor, observe, manage conflict, push strollers, and
comfort children. They are often multi-tasking. In an interview conducted
recently, a mother of 5 children in a science exhibit in a public library
described what she was doing as observing, answering her child’s question, and
changing a diaper.
Parents and caregivers want to do
well with and for their children. Parents and
caregivers have every intention of doing their best on their children’s behalf.
Multiple factors, however, can overwhelm their best intentions to engage
actively and intentionally with their child during a museum visit as well as in
the everyday moments of life. In any one setting, parent and caregiver engagement
with children will assume many forms with individual and cultural variations in
playing out. Parents and caregivers observe, sit back, listen, take photos,
talk, grab a moment of respite, check email, or direct the activity. They
praise, cajole, and challenge. Depending on the moment, a parent or caregiver’s
interaction may be misconstrued as disinterested, controlling, or intuitive.
Whatever a museum’s
caregiver goals and strategies for engagement are–and they vary from one museum
to another–they need to build on an assumption of good intentions, strengthen the
adults’ position, and support their relationships with their children.
Parents and
caregivers help museums accomplish their goals. Often the ways they do this are
barely visible to museums. Parents
and caregivers have valuable
information about their children that is relevant to exploring exhibits and
activities. They know the child’s passionate interest, a favorite activity, how
she responds to new situations, and the signs of mounting frustration. A visit
to the museum is also an opportunity to act on goals they have for their
children, to encourage their child to try something new, persist when something
is difficult, deal with failure, or feel a sense of accomplishment.
When
they observe, monitor risk, and step in to avoid mishaps, parents and
caregivers contribute to a safer museum environment. Their conversations about what’s
happening, modeling how to do something, and reading instructions advances the
museum’s learning agenda. We
know that in museums children engage more and in more complex ways in exhibits
with adult involvement. By asking questions, making connections with previous
experiences, and adding information, parents and caregivers enrich and deepen
the experience. Just
as they make connections with what happened yesterday, they extend the
experience afterwards, at home, at the store, on a family trip, or reading a
bedtime story.
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This relationship may
be a close emotional bond between parent and child or a supportive connection
between a child and key adult. In either case, such relationships are important
for emotional development and fostering development of a healthy sense of belonging,
self-esteem, and wellbeing. They are based on trust, nourished by time together,
and they deepen familiarity. Built on shared experiences from other settings
and times together, connections are strengthened by opportunities to explore
and discover new ways of being together. Conversations that take place in the
museum may have started weeks ago and may continue for months ahead.
The following
selected Museum Notes blog posts address some of the dimensions of engaging
parents and caregivers, related challenges, and exemplars. Can we give parents and caregivers a reason to
be interested in the museum content–whether it is their child or a topic of
interest? What do parents and caregivers say they want? What do museums want of
parents and caregivers? While there are many ways to address these questions,
addressing them effectively relies on actively engaging, listening to parents
and caregivers, and learning from parents and caregivers.
WhatDo We Want of Parents? Adults in children’s museums generally comprise about half of the visitors.
That’s a very large number considering children’s museums serve more than 30
million visitors annually. In spite of this large number of parental adults on whom
we count to the museum attend with their
children, we vacillate between wanting them to be more attentive to their
children (get off their phones) and not wanting them to interfere with child-directed
experiences.
Parent Voices, New Insights: Regardless of their child’s age or gender, parents and
caregivers are thinking about and providing for an amazing range of
considerations about their children and their museum visit. Even when parents
and caregivers sit back and seem to be sitting back and uninvolved, they are much
more tuned into their children and the serious work of being good parents and
grandparents than we are inclined to assume.
Strengthening
Parent Engagement: While the imperative for effective parent and caregiver
involvement in museums is clear, the strategies for doing so are less clear. Museums
are often in search of ways to connect with parents and caregivers. They lack
the structured and daily opportunities to interact with parents and caregivers
that schools and childcare centers have. Nevertheless, they have some distinct
and promising opportunities they can exercise more fully and effectively than
they currently do.
Messaging With Parents and Caregivers in Mind: Because
parents and caregivers play a crucial role in their child’s museum experiences
(and on-going development), museums want to engage and communicate with them.
How to do so effectively is always a question. When museums bring parents and
caregivers together and listen to them, they gain some useful, sometimes
surprising, insights that challenge assumptions.
Adult-Child Connection: First Person: It’s all well and good to think in the abstract and write about parents and
caregivers at the museum with their children. Being there, with them, in the
moment, however, brings a rich does of reality to what parents and caregivers
experience minute by minute. I gave myself a “so-so with a few bloopers” mark
on a visit to a children’s museum with my great niece and nephew.
