We were asked what makes a museum family or mom friendly. What we have come up with in a few minutes:
1) The museum should be intrinsically comfortable for a mom to nurse a baby. This means there should be places a woman can go and feel discrete without feeling isolated. (No closets!)
2) There should be diaper changing tables in the men's bathrooms. (Hear Hear! This makes a space father friendly too, BTW. The men's bathrooms at the BSM have changing stations.)
3) There should be things to do and see that will interest small children. (We have laminated sheets of photographs of artifacts or circular features around the museum a young child can search for, as well as a block and toy intensive area.)
4) Interactive exhibits are commonly designed with an eye toward being accessible to disabled adults. One of the moms here suggests they could also be designed around being inaccessible to little fingers, A museum should not be a "No!" space. How can we make 'don't touch' places intrinsically or naturally no touch areas without being forbidding about it?
5) Places to sit. Often you find kiddie seats in kiddie sections, and many adults can’t sit in these. Be sure to include a mixture of chair sizes.
Family friendly is a huge and wonderful area of study, and there are resources around. I am a huge Minda Borun fan:
http://www.astc.org/astc_connect/user/view.php?id=595&course=1
Some of the ideas I have found useful in family-friendly thinking are the need to accommodate a non-traditional (in modern terms) learning group, provide furniture that is comfortable for knees from two years old to ninety years old, (Not everyone is comfortable in those cute little kindergarten chairs!) and provide information in several different modalities so that the lookers can teach things to the readers, the readers can teach the doers, and the doers can teach the lookers, and vice-versa, etc.
The former classroom teacher in me recognizes these strategies as the same ones we use in classrooms every day to welcome and teach kids with learning differences.
