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 moreconcrete: in what a community has built and kept.Laura Huerta Migus is Director of Fellowship Alumni Engagement and National Activation & Impact atAscend at the Aspen Institute. Before that she spent more than a decade leading the Association ofChildren’s Museums. In this episode of Thrive Dispatches she joins Dr. Matt Biel to talk about the placesfamilies have left.She works from a simple taxonomy. First spaces are homes. Second spaces are the ones we have to goto, 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 andalone. There are no sidewalks. Getting to a third space is not tenable, or the space was developed outduring 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 bywhat 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 theirbest attendance years, because they were outdoors and open. Take away nearly every option andpeople 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 mostcommunities “designed for children on their terms.” A pediatrician’s office is not. Neither is a childwelfare office. Neither is a classroom, at least not through a child’s own agency, and neither are mostplaygrounds.