Thrive Dispatches S2 Episode 13: “This Is Your Space”: Children’s Museums and the Radical Power of Agency (with Laura Huerta Migus)

Isolation among families is usually discussed as a feeling. This conversation puts it somewhere more concrete: in what a community has built and kept.

Laura Huerta Migus is Director of Fellowship Alumni Engagement and National Activation & Impact at Ascend at the Aspen Institute. Before that she spent more than a decade leading the Association of Children’s Museums. In this episode of Thrive Dispatches she joins Dr. Matt Biel to talk about the places families have left.

She works from a simple taxonomy. First spaces are homes. Second spaces are the ones we have to go to, like hospitals and schools. Third spaces are the ones we choose. Those are the ones going away.

She is specific about how. Across much of the country, people get from place to place in a vehicle and alone. There are no sidewalks. Getting to a third space is not tenable, or the space was developed out during the urban design process.

We tend to read the result as a set of private choices. She does not. A parent’s options are limited by what their community is able to offer them, and that comes down to investment.

Then there is the evidence from lockdown. Zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens had some of their best attendance years, because they were outdoors and open. Take away nearly every option and people did not stay home. They went to the one that was left.

Children’s museums are her counterexample. She calls them one of the only spaces in most communities “designed for children on their terms.” A pediatrician’s office is not. Neither is a child welfare office. Neither is a classroom, at least not through a child’s own agency, and neither are most playgrounds.

They also talk about what these buildings quietly do now. They test new teaching approaches before schools adopt them. They host custodial exchanges. During the pandemic some became vaccination sites and food distribution points.

A community can stop building the places where families meet each other. Nobody experiences that as a decision. They experience it as a mood.

For questions, comments, or ideas for future episodes, please email us at: thrivecenter@georgetown.edu .

Interview Excerpt

Laura Huerta Migus on what it takes to build a room that belongs to a child:

“So, I think as a parent, if you walk into a children’s museum and you’re like, ‘Why are these big, giant blue blocks there just in a pile? What is that for? Am I paying for that?’ I was like, ‘Well, what’s there, if you’ve ever been into one of those rooms with a bunch of empty cardboard boxes or loose parts and no time-bound program, if you watch what children will do when they are given the agency and they have permission in a children’s museum, it’s their space. It is 100% their space.’

And so that’s radical. The giving agency to humans at the earliest ages, and there are those baby rooms starting, people are bringing their children as soon as they’re born. But if we’re thinking about those spaces from the crawling stage all the way through their tween years, in some cases, it’s a really powerful statement to say, ‘This is the place that is yours, and you make the rules. And you can even remake the space in the way you want.’ And not only is that allowed, that’s celebrated. “

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