The importance of children

Children hold a different place in the Boston/Cambridge hierarchy. Of course our children are the center of our universe, but we're gradually becoming accustomed to children in this area being treated as though they are the center of the universe in general.

The museums around Boston invest heavily in staff. I've chatted to a couple of people working in the  local museum management and they've explained the rationale in prioritizing expenditure on staffing. They see their staff to be their primary resource: the staff are more important than the artifacts or exhibits in relation to the 'experience' of the museum as a whole. In terms of being a visitor, this means that there are lots of chances to interact with experts and to attend live shows rather than just reading the guidebook and looking at the displays and their labels. As a child, this means that the museum becomes your playground and the staff just seem to want to play and have fun with you.

For example, we trot along to the Museum of Science most Friday afternoons after school (it's only a 10 minute walk from the girls' school so it seems a shame not to...). Over the past couple of months, Maya and Iola have dissected the heart and lungs of a dead lamb, rebuilt the skeleton of an ostrich using the actual bones, computer generated shoals of fish to fill an aquarium, climbed into/on top of/under a variety of exhibits, interrogated two voice-controlled avatars, role-played every aspect of being a bee (Iola particularly enjoyed being the Queen Bee and sending two members of staff around the room to look for pollen), and experimented with a Van der Graaf generator (note: Maya was unharmed in the experiment photographed above). Many of the staff now know the girls by name and give us advance information about any experiments or special activities which they think that the girls might enjoy. Maya, in particular, is thriving on all this science and is obsessively following NASA's GRAIL spacecrafts as they enter the moon's orbits and hypothesizing the relationship between neutrinos and time travel.

I can understand how the Museum of Science can easily model itself as a 'child-friendly' museum because the majority of the exhibits are, by their nature, fairly interactive. Over the Christmas vacation, we also visited the Museum of Fine Arts. I forewarned the children that they needed to be on their best behavior: this is a grown-up museum filled with ancient relics, priceless art, delicate sculptures and so forth. Before we arrived, we explained to Iola that she was strictly forbidden from leaning on anything, scribbling on anything, tying knots in anything, or trying to break anything. But we're in Boston now - what was I thinking? We arrived at the Museum and a typically enthusiastic member of staff recommended that we visit the Roman gallery. She gave both girls an ipad with animated explanations of many of the pieces of art, a folding picnic stool, sketch books, and as many crayons as we could carry. In the Roman gallery - literally in the middle of the Roman gallery with statues of ancient emperors on every side - child visitors were encouraged to make their own mosaics. It wasn't possible for child-free adults to get close to the antiquities because hoards of children, glue sticks, felt tipped pens, and tiny bits of paper littered the gallery. By the time the children were given clay so that they could make their own dragons, it seemed completely natural that one of the leading art galleries in America should place the highest of values upon children having an 'artistic experience'. Iola was in heaven.

If you are planning a visit Boston or Cambridge, I strongly recommend that you bring along a child. Everything seems better if you have a little person with you. And if you don't have access to a real child, a cardboard cut-out  will work similarly well in some situations. For example, unaccompanied adults risk life and limb when trying to cross Cambridge streets but if you attempt the same maneuver with a child on the end of your arm the traffic will screech to a halt in every direction. Or get your little person to ask the waiter for a table and you'll be whisked to the front of the queue while all the grown-ups who have been waiting look on in dismay.

So... (and I love the word 'so' - it's a key part of the Bostonian dialect which ensures a long pause in the conversation during which one can recollect one's thoughts while making it virtually impossible for one's audience to (politely) interrupt you)...

So, it is becomes increasingly surprising when we come across the very small minority who do not value children above all other things. We've only met a few people who, ahem, don't really like children very much: the assistant in the expensive cycle shop frequented by Nathan who 'encouraged' me and the girls to wait outside in the cold (I did very much want to point out that none of their bikes, expensive as they are, was worth even as much as Emperor Augustus' big stone toenail); the old lady who marched across Lexington's main street and shouted at Iola for touching one of the flags decorating the edge of the sidewalk;  Maya's Grade 4 teacher who rips up children's work in front of their faces and refuses to teach them if they talk.

But these are anomalies. To be a child in Cambridge or Boston is, as Maya and Iola would shout in their increasingly Bostonian accents, "juhst great"!