Should children under the age of sixteen have to be accompanied by an adult when visiting a museum/attraction?
Charlotte Wilkinson
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July 20th, 2011 at 7:27 am
Of course they shouldn’t!
As long as a child is deemed responsible enough to go out alone (by their parents) then I’m not sure what the issue is?
At 11 I went to my local library and museum alone (ok I was probably an odd child). At 16 I was going to pubs (not alone I did have friends, they were 16 too.).
In between those two ages a whole lot of mental development is going on. It shouldn’t be inhibited by enforced adult company.
July 20th, 2011 at 9:46 am
I feel really uncomfortable that the museum I work at has a big sign saying “No unaccompanied under sixteens in the museum”. I understand issues relating to health and safety, but I don’t like the inference that unaccompanied under 16s are somehow untrustworthy. (Or more untrustworthy than over 16s, which I don’t think is true!)
I asked why the sign was up, and was told, “All museums do it. It’s just what happens”. I expressed that I felt the sign was perhaps unwelcoming and giving the wrong impression, but I’ve not been allowed to take it down, or even rewrite it.
If museums are dead against unaccompanied under 16s, fair enough, but I think they need to have good, clear reasons for this, which are communicated to staff, volunteers and visitors. To have a sign up without really being able to justify it, to me, simply looks unwelcoming, and infers that a museum doesn’t trust under 16s to behave appropriately. I always worry that teenagers visiting the museum – for example in school groups – will be offended, as might parents of teens.
Whilst allowing very young children into a museum unaccompanied would not work or follow health and safety guidelines, I think young people aged 14+ should be allowed in on their own. By this age, they are usually going out on their own with friends – shopping, cinema, etc – so why shouldn’t they be allowed to go in a museum?
If museums give young people the impression that they are not welcome, we cannot blame young people for switching off from museums – a reaction that might affect their choices for the rest of their lives. Today’s young people are tomorrow’s parents, and we cannot expect them to bring their children to museums if they’ve felt shunned from museums in the past.
July 21st, 2011 at 8:54 am
A few years ago front of house staff at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery were really good at looking after skateboards for small groups of teenagers. It was such a friendly and helpful greeting – they thought nothing of it because they had teenagers themselves. I hope they still do it. Anyone know?
Rose
July 21st, 2011 at 10:00 am
This weekend we had several young teen groups coming in to see our new Robot exhibition. Which is great in every respect, I really hope through a ‘fun’ exhibition more young people have enjoyed the museum and will come again.
The flip side of that is our ‘regulars’, a small number of kids as young as 8 who come in a lot and who cause low-level trouble because they are bored and the building is free entry: nicking stuff, breaking stuff, giving abuse to staff and other visitors. The fact they are unaccompanied that young says it all, really. I can only hope that they gain something, somehow by hanging out in a museum and library (formal engagement via youth and social workers seems to have had with limited success, perhaps because of the small number of individuals involved, but they do probably gain something from the role model of the staff).
A small number regularly get excluded from the building and in a few cases we’ve given evidence towards asbos.
The trouble is these kids take up a large amount of staff time and energy (and sometimes budget). Rather than not allowing under-16s in, we prefer just tackle bad behaviour (of any age) with strong staff interaction, a straightforward anti-social behaviour policy and no hestitation in calling the police when things get bad.
I can imagine in a volunteer-run museum many of the front-line volunteers might find dealing with bad behaviour difficult or unappealing. It’s sad that bad behaviour and unaccompanied under-16s are so closely linked for many museums.
July 21st, 2011 at 8:05 pm
I’m a museum lover since I was 5 or 6 and sometimes my mother was so tired that she didn’t wanted to go to the museums with me. So a lot of times I would go alone and it was always amazing for me. I was a wild child but I DID knew how to behave in a museum and I used to loooove to walk alone.
So, wouldn’t be lovely if we had in all museum someone who would take this kids around the museum, explain them the museum-etiquette, the history of each piece, etc?
September 3rd, 2011 at 7:45 pm
Well… the world has become more PC and less disciplinarian. Thanks to my parents I was obviously going to museums/galleries since before I was born and as a young child, museum outings were very much a family weekend affair. Confession time; as a young schoolboy I was less than enthralled with cricket and haunted the Geological Museum instead. I had learned how to behave; there was no question on running riot. It simply was not an issue. I gave the IGS no problem and they gave me no problem. I did learn a great deal about plate tectonics and have survived to tell the tale.
Children, teenagers or adults are not a problem. It is how we deal with them and even museum volunteers should know, or be instructed on how to deal with whoever passes through the door. The gifted staff might well give the young a window to higher things.
September 3rd, 2011 at 8:02 pm
It might seem flippant, not meant of course, but there is something called common sense. An unaccompanied pre-teen should invite inquiry, quite naturally. Even a young teenager during normal school hours should.
I can though claim to have heard the Alaskan orogeny, well before Ms. S. Palin felt the earth move.
October 28th, 2011 at 9:42 am
As a teenager, I never really thought about museums as places to go but I now take my kids to them. I think my oldest who is 11 would be perfectly fine to go around a museum alone. He knows how to behave (because he’s had good role models) and really enjoys mostly the historical and the scientific. There should, perhaps, be an age restriction. Maybe that children 14+ may be unaccompanied. That is not meaning to be hypocritical considering what I have already said. I just know that not every child is as well behaved as mine or goes to museums for the right reasons. Saying that, it is not the age of a child which is the problem, it is the way they are raised. Any 8 year old or any 25 year old can cause trouble. Perhaps one solution would be to only allow small groups of unaccompanied teens with the ability for staff to make exceptions to the rules as they see fit and to deal with bad behaviour appropriately and wisely.
I think it does put children off (and, perhaps their parents) if they feel they are not welcome in a place. While I understand that there are SOME children who would not behave appropriately, I have been annoyed myself that my son can not do things on his own just because people believe that ALL children his age are thugs.
October 28th, 2011 at 9:43 am
Actually, thinking about what I said, I just want to add that there are also plenty of kids who misbehave when they are accompanied by their parents. I certainly found that there were rather a lot of “brats” not being watched the last time I visited a museum.
November 15th, 2011 at 3:27 pm
Locals can enjoy the museums at a much younger age on their own. I grew up in an other country where I visited museums with friends as a child but did not explore the UK museums on my own until I arrived as a backpacker at 16 (at which time I was more than ready!). As a teen I was inspired by Julian Barnes “Metroland” and wanted the freedom to explore the National Gallery on my own. More recently, my nephew has visited local museums in Wales on his own since he was 11, and it is a nice safe place for him to be on his own and learn things.
November 24th, 2011 at 6:24 pm
In my last job at a Museum with textile collections we often ran machine sewing workshops for 7-15 yr olds and 16+. We would stipulate that under 12s should be accompanied on their workshops, not simply for the health and safety implications of using sewing machines but also so parents and guardians would get to see and enjoy their children using heritage skills to create their own projects. These could be reinforced at home.
I think the focus should be on supported and interactive learning for a whole family, not just parents attending for child protection or health and safety reasons. No workshop leader or learning officer wants a bored parent sitting to one side, reading a newspaper…it’s not a great message for young visitors. But it is extremely difficult to have one rule for more mature young people and another for the ones who need parental guidance.
November 28th, 2011 at 12:19 pm
It’s a tough subject. At our museum we have no strict door policy, but there has been much debate about whether we should have. The debate is mostly sparked by unaccompanied teenaged visitors who have misbehaved. We are a large city centre museum that is free to enter, as a result we have, on far to many occasions, young people coming into the museum purely to cause havoc it would seem. The behaviour ranges from harmless mucking around, to violence and vadalism – in which cases the police have become involved. This has gone to the degree in some instances where banning orders have been served to young people. The unfortunate thing is though, that if you stop ALL under 16′s coming in, you prevent a wealth of well behaved, inquisitive young minds from accessing and using the collection.
A door policy seems to be like an easy, and dare i say, lazy way out. It stops the problem in its tracks and gives everyone an easier life. But surely a better solution would be to try and find ways to engage these young people. I think there is far to much of an attitude of ‘we don’t want them here!’, when we should be happy that non-typical audiences are coming into the Museum. Of course, I’m sure many places would argue that in the current economic situation many museums find themselves in, we don’t presently have the time or resources to actively engage with this group, which may sadly be true.
It’s a difficult debate, and I don’t think there is any clear cut answer. But we should be having the debate and trying to find solutions that benefit both museums AND young people.
January 26th, 2012 at 1:23 pm
Middleton Railway in Leeds require under 16′s to be accompanied by adult. We have no paid staff, we have a “child protection policy” in place which states “no volunteer may be in 1 to 1 with person under 16. We have nobody CRB checked, our CPP would make it illegal for us to do so!!
It sounds nice to let U16′s in, but in reality, unless you have CRB checked staff you are taking a huge risk.
February 2nd, 2012 at 11:42 am
As a mother of a mature and responsible 8 year old (not just my opinion, no) I like the fact that my local swimming pool has a ‘no unaccompanied visits for the under 8s’ because it shows what is apparent, that children of 8 can be trusted to be on their own in a public environment without a) being molested b) getting abducted by aliens or otherwise and c) rioting. What is wrong with the world? Treat people like dangerous wild animals or delicate wall flowers that must be protected from being crushed, and you will get dangerous wild animals or delicate wall flowers. Of course, there is an issue that people want their children to be free to go out but then won’t accept that this means other adults will be telling them off if they step out of line, which is really the problem. It’s not the kids, it’s the parents! But we all know that.