I just returned from vacation to an island off the coast of Maine, where I took my family to the island’s museum on Friday. It’s an excellent museum featuring artwork, history, and plenty of maps and old photographs of this old fishing and lobstering island that also became a summer vacation haven.
Monhegan Island is an excellent place to bring kids on vacation because it gives parents an actual break. This is a place you can bring your kids and ignore them. Our kids spent the week fishing, hiking, drinking root beer, and jumping off the wharf or the cliffs into the harbor, all while Katie and I napped, read, walked on our own, or had lunch at the brewery.
The most family-unfriendly thing about the island is that everything is super expensive, including the root beers and crepes my kids bought with their lawn-mowing money and lemonade stand profits.
That made the pricing policy at the Monhegan Museum a pleasant surprise.
The museum charges $10 per adult and $5 per child. But get this: A family (two parents and all their kids) costs $20. (In past years, only two children were covered for some reason.)
Family pricing isn’t unheard of, but it’s always nice to find. It makes something like a museum exhibit possible for people like Katie and me who have a bunch of kids.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, would cost $30 per adult and $17 for each of my four teenagers ($68) and be free for each of my kids under 12. That’s $128 for my family. The Spy Museum would cost $37.05 for each of us over the age of 6, and $23.27 for the littles, for a grand total of $268.08.
Museums and parks that charge admission ought to offer family pricing. Either allow all children under 18 for free, or emulate the Monhegan Museum and simply cap the cost for a family at or around the cost of two adults.
The federal government mostly does this. The Smithsonian museums are free to visit. National parks that charge at the gate usually charge per car, which is basically the same as family pricing. National monuments typically charge per person, but at Fort McHenry, at least, entry for children under 16 is free.
State parks are more mixed. At Maryland’s state park on Assateague Island, for instance, it’s $5 a person during the summer just to enter.
Amid our unprecedented baby bust, we ought to make a societal effort to welcome children, and one step could be universal family pricing at museums and parks.
For starters, the federal government ought to make its rules more uniform and very clear: At any national park, monument, forest, or museum, if you show up with your own minor children, you will not pay for more than two admissions.
If Uncle Sam makes these rules very clear and well known, not only will that encourage parents to bring their kids, but it will also put our government on the record, saying we love families, we will support parents in raising their children, because it’s good for Americans to raise children.
Second, the federal government should require museums that receive federal funding to adopt family pricing. For instance, the National Endowment for the Humanities has funded the museum at the USS Intrepid. But children 13 and older need full-price adult tickets ($38 a pop), and children 5-12 cost $28 each. For a family of five, that’s well over $150 for a visit. Make it a maximum of $76 for a family.
Third, state parks and museums should all adopt family pricing as well. Again, make it clear and uniform so that everyone knows it.
Add all of these together, and it will become a norm. Parents will know that any government-run museum or park will have family pricing, and many private-run institutions will as well. This will also apply pressure on fully private institutions to adopt their own family pricing. As a culture, we need to declare more loudly, yes, we want you to bring your kids.