Museum Adventures

A museum is the best rainy-day, too-hot-day and too-cold-day plan there is, and the good ones are far better with children than most parents expect. The trick is not finding a museum that is “for kids” - it is knowing how to use a normal museum with a kid, which is a different skill.

What to look for

A free or cheap admission window. Many art museums have a free evening or a free day, and several - the Kimbell’s permanent collection, the Blanton on certain days, the Dallas Museum of Art - are free most of the time. That changes the calculation completely, because a free museum can be a 45-minute visit instead of a value-extraction exercise.

Something big in the first room. Aircraft, dinosaurs, a locomotive, a whale. Frontiers of Flight, the Museum of the American Railroad and the Houston Museum of Natural Science all lead with scale, and scale is what a six-year-old responds to.

A hands-on gallery, even in a serious museum. Most large museums have one tucked away. Ask at the desk on the way in rather than finding it on the way out.

Somewhere to eat and somewhere to sit. A museum with a decent cafe is a museum you can stay in for three hours.

Making it work with children

• Go short and go often. Ninety minutes is a good museum visit with young kids. Leave while everyone is still enjoying it; that is what makes them want to come back.
• Let them pick one gallery. Handing over the map and following a five-year-old’s choices produces a better visit than a route you planned.
• Play a game. Find something red. Find an animal in every room. Pick the one thing you would take home and say why. It sounds trivial and it completely changes how long a child will look at a painting.
• Go at opening. Quiet galleries are more forgiving of a loud child, and everyone’s patience is at its highest first thing.
• Skip the audio guide for kids and talk instead. Asking “what do you think is happening here” gets more than a recording will.

Regional strengths

Texas is unusually strong on art for a place not famous for it - the Kimbell, the Blanton, the DMA and the San Antonio Museum of Art are all serious collections, most of them free or nearly so. New York outside the city is a genuine surprise: the Corning Museum of Glass runs live glassblowing all day, the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is a pilgrimage, and Dia Beacon is enormous contemporary art in a converted factory that children tend to like far more than adults predict. Hawaii leans into its own story, and Oklahoma into Western art and history.

Best time

Year-round, by definition, which makes museums the natural fallback when weather kills an outdoor plan. Weekday mornings are quietest; school holidays are busiest. Check for free days before you pay.