This Is Your Space”: Children’s Museums and the Radical Power of Agency (with Laura Huerta Migus)

<p>Isolation among families is usually discussed as a feeling. This conversation puts it somewhere more</p><p>concrete: in what a community has built and kept.</p><p>Laura Huerta Migus is Director of Fellowship Alumni Engagement and National Activation &amp;amp; Impact at</p><p>Ascend at the Aspen Institute. Before that she spent more than a decade leading the Association of</p><p>Children’s Museums. In this episode of Thrive Dispatches she joins Dr. Matt Biel to talk about the places</p><p>families have left.</p><p>She works from a simple taxonomy. First spaces are homes. Second spaces are the ones we have to go</p><p>to, like hospitals and schools. Third spaces are the ones we choose. Those are the ones going away.</p><p>She is specific about how. Across much of the country, people get from place to place in a vehicle and</p><p>alone. There are no sidewalks. Getting to a third space is not tenable, or the space was developed out</p><p>during the urban design process.</p><p>We tend to read the result as a set of private choices. She does not. A parent’s options are limited by</p><p>what their community is able to offer them, and that comes down to investment.</p><p>Then there is the evidence from lockdown. Zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens had some of their</p><p>best attendance years, because they were outdoors and open. Take away nearly every option and</p><p>people did not stay home. They went to the one that was left.</p><p>Children’s museums are her counterexample. She calls them one of the only spaces in most</p><p>communities “designed for children on their terms.” A pediatrician’s office is not. Neither is a child</p><p>welfare office. Neither is a classroom, at least not through a child’s own agency, and neither are most</p><p>playgrounds.</p>