The Children's Museum

We visited the children’s museum in Salt Lake City today, and I was amazed at how far museums have come since I was a kid. Everything’s hands-on now, interactive. There’s something for everyone. Having said that, I left feeling, well, kind of sorry for today’s kids, and for today’s parents who feel compelled to run around and fill every minute of their kids’ schedules with “meaningful” activities.

The museum was crowded, full of kids of all sizes, jostling for the chance to do this or that activity, with a seemingly equal number of decidedly bored-looking parents and grandparents tailing them around.

But what really struck me was the artificialness of it all. Sure there were some great science-type experiences for the kids upstairs, but downstairs it was all plastic and pretend.

For example, they had an elaborate water play-type section designed to show kids how dams and water currents work. When I was a child, we had those too: we called them “gutters,” “creeks,” and “irrigation ditches,” and they taught us about dams, currents, and erosion equally well, if not better, as we designed them ourselves of rocks and sticks and sand, and built and sailed our own boats on them.

Instead of fake chickens in a fake hen house, we had real chickens in a real hen house, and, get this: we collected real eggs from those hens. What a concept! And we fed real carrots to real horses too, instead of fake carrots to a fake horse, and lived in genuine fear of having our fingers nipped.

The museum had a rock wall like the ones you see in a climbing gym. As kids, poor as we were, we had to settle for real rocks, which we scampered on, over, and around, without warning signs, medical releases, or the slightest bit of “parental supervision.”

Sure, the museum had a nice pretend house and pretend shop—beyond all imagining in the days of my youth—where the most elaborate play house consisted of four walls (maybe) and a window or two. But mostly we just made things up. We made forts from hay bales or blankets or sage brush, and used rocks and sticks as stand-ins for just about everything, and somehow we got by without being bored or feeling deprived.

What ever happened to simple, unstructured play, where kids have to use their imagination and build their own fantasy worlds from whatever they have at hand? To time spent with real animals and playing in real dirt? Today’s kids seem to have lost much of that, and I wonder what it means for the adults of tomorrow.

Despite all the advances in information and technology, the kids of today seem decidedly poorer—their horizons narrower—in spite of it, and possibly because of it. Do we really need more “adventure” museums? In my experience, taking them outdoors and turning them loose seems adventure enough, and when I take my kids to the local creek or pond or into the hills, they laugh, and pretend, and explore, and I never hear them complain about being bored.

None of these insights are terribly new or revolutionary—many of them have been summarized brilliantly in the book “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv (a similar cultural critique lies at the heart of Wall-E, which we watched tonight as a family)—but they struck me with particular force today, as I wandered around the Discovery Children’s Museum, which charges $8.50 a person for the chance to pretend to do things kids used to do for real.

(If you haven’t read the Louv book, you should. He also maintains a website: http://richardlouv.com/ with a link to his blog: http://www.childrenandnature.org/blog/. Photo courtesy of blessed1with8 on Flickr; available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jillybean4jesus/2785846232/.)