Tips for Painless Art Museum Visits with Kids: MFA + DIA in Boston and Detroit

There’s an eleven year spread between our oldest and youngest kids, so we’ve been forced to become experts on finding travel destinations that appeal to a wide variety of ages and/or to find ways to make the sights we choose to see fun and accessible for everyone. But art museums have always been our biggest challenge.

Our pack of big kids loves art museums and would happily wander in a good one for hours. Ari and Milo have taken and adored AP Art History and Gus will take it next year, at his own insistence.

Then there’s Abe.

I don’t think Abe is really especially terrible in art museums; I think it’s more that he’s been dragged to more of them in his day than the average eight year old, so he’s had more opportunities to show his impatience with them.

Still, we keep trying, and I think this summer we had two of our most successful art museum outings of Abe’s lifetime, so I’m finally ready to share some tips gleaned over the years. (It’s quite likely a lot of the reason these visits were more successful than previous ones is that Abe was older than he used to be, but lots of the tips are applicable for younger kids nonetheless).

It also didn’t hurt that we visited two truly impressive museums on this trip: the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

1. Keep it short

I put this first because it’s my number one tip. While there are plenty of fine smaller art museums that you can cover pretty thoroughly in an hour or two, they’re very often HUGE. Leaving after a relatively short time seems almost criminal; there’s so much you haven’t seen! But, truth is, even if you didn’t have your young kid’s attention span as an excuse, there would still be so much you hadn’t seen. It turns out that even with my grown-up attention span, I often prefer shorter art museum visits; longer ones can start to seem overwhelming and all the Art! Art! Art! blurs together. We found that keeping visits to around two hours kept Abe happy and engaged on this trip. Even shorter would likely work better for a younger kid. We sometimes have one parent take Abe out earlier if the older kids still have more they want to look at. On this trip, Abe got a snack down the street from the MFA while the older kids got in more art. We’ve also taken him to the playground next door to the Met in NYC for the same reason.

2. Take advantage of any kid-friendly activities offered

This is always a bit of a mixed bag; some museums are amazing at offering awesome kid and family-friendly activities and others…not so much. But definitely research in advance to find out what’s available and ask when you get to the museum as well. We’ve found that some things have to be printed out in advance and, of course, the employees and volunteers who know the museum best might be able to point you toward great things you didn’t find in your own research.

We’ve encountered a ton of variety in the kind of kid programming available. Often museums have a separate room or area with hands on activities. Here’s itty bitty Abe a few years ago at the Birmingham Museum of Art:

These spaces are great, but they do have their drawbacks if you’re traveling with a mixed age group like we are: namely, they’re only entertaining for the youngest kids, so you usually need to split up while the littles are hanging out there.

Very often there are scavenger hunts of one kind or another that you can either print at home before your visit, pick up at the museum, or find on your phone. These range from very simple (“look for a painting with a horse in it” to much more elaborate with activities to complete as you go. At the Detroit Institute of Arts there’s an app based “GooseChase” scavenger hunt as well as these Eye Spy signs hanging in a lot of the rooms. Abe wasn’t interested in Goose Chase, but we did a good many of the Eye Spys.

At the MFA, they didn’t have anything to hand out (I believe this was because of Covid, though, and that they usually do have something?) but we stopped at the information desk to ask about kid-friendly things and were directed to a few different exhibits that kids tend to enjoy. Abe had fun tracking them down.

My favorite is when a museum has actual hands-on activities that kids can check out, like the backpacks at the Victoria & Albert in London. Most kid-friendly museum ever!

And sometimes you’ll be lucky enough to encounter actual kid-centric tours or activity stations.

3. Have a plan

This might well go along with tip #2, but, even if you’ve come up empty in your quest for some kind of organized kid activity, making a plan about what to see at an art museum beforehand has always worked better for us than aimless wandering. We’ve had a few museums lately where the big kids have wanted to find works from the required 250 in the AP Art History curriculum. Even though Abe’s a long way from taking AP classes yet, he enjoys the process of hunting the works down. Bigger art museums are often quite maze like, so finding the right piece in the right room can be an adventure by itself.

Here are the three works we found in the MFA’s collection (Slave Ship, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?, and King Menkaura and Queen):

If you don’t have specific works in mind, though, spend some time researching the museum’s collections in advance and coming up with a plan to see things that you know will spark your kid’s imagination. All of my kids, young and old, are into music and love looking at collections of old instruments. The MFA has a whole room dedicated to them:

 

The armor is a big hit with most kids at the Met in NYC:

The information desk guy at the MFA directed us to this fun stuff:

The people at the DIA were very eager for Abe to see their current (through the end of 2021) exhibit, “Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City.” Abe’s actually not a super into cars kind of kid, so I was skeptical, but he was indeed impressed and entertained (as were all of us):

He liked this part, where kids had shared their own car designs:

That’s pretty much it for my tips; now for a few more details on this particular trip’s specific art museums.

We lived in Boston for 5 years, from before we were married to when Ari was was a toddler, but we never made it to the Museum of Fine Arts. Nor had we made it there on subsequent visits to the area, so this time we were determined to finally make it happen. We were further determined to make it happen without spending a small fortune for our family of six, so we opted to go on a Wednesday afternoon, when the museum offers $5 admission starting at 3. It closes at 5, but this made it very easy for us to follow tip #1 about keeping things short. Regular admission is $25 for adults and $17 for kids 7-17.

The MFA has an easy to use (but fairly expensive) surface parking lot, so we opted to drive from the campground on this day. If you’re staying somewhere on the T, it’s easy to get to that way, too, with nearby stops on the Green and Orange lines.

We spent most of our two hours tracking down the works from the AP 250 in the labyrinthine museum, as detailed above.

The older kids would have loved more time, but we did make sure to grab a picture of Ari with a lion, so all in all it was a successful visit:

Dave and I actually had been to the Detroit Institute of Arts once before, maybe 25 years ago during a very brief trip to Detroit in college. But it was past time for a return visit. Most of us were able to get in free through our reciprocal membership at our local art museum (some of us have aged out of being included in family memberships these days). The regular admission price is $14 for adults and $6 for kids 6-17. There’s plenty of parking for a $7 daily fee in an adjacent surface lot.

Our primary objective was seeing the amazing Diego Rivera frescos, with their meditations on industry and labor, and they did not disappoint:

But the entire museum is impressive; we felt like there was another of art’s greatest hits everywhere we turned.

And, of course, we did not see anything approaching all of it. Dave ended up taking Abe out early while the older kids and I spent a little more time.

I’ve skipped around a bit in order to keep the art museums together, but next up I’ll pick up with our next stop after Boston–Cape Cod!

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