ABSTRACT
Variations on ‘taking the children’, or ‘for the educational benefit of the children’, are frequently cited reasons chosen by survey respondents for visiting museums and other heritage sites (Falk and Dierking 1992: 15; Smith 2006: 139, 216). ‘Family’ is also often identified as an important aspect in heritage engagement (Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998; Ashton and Hamilton 2010). However, what does ‘taking the children’ mean? This chapter draws on interviews with visitors to a range of museums and heritage sites in both England and Australia. The data are part of an ongoing international project concerned with identifying the memory and identity work that visitors undertake when they visit sites and museums. Children were not the primary focus of the interviews; however, they are represented in four ways within this body of data. First, by parents who identified that their reason for visiting such places was ‘taking the children’. Second, by the way visitors, both with and without children, invoked the image of ‘the child’ in relation to the heritage site or museum. Third, by the way that some visitors saw themselves as ‘visiting’, remembering and reflecting on their own childhoods in certain museums or sites and, finally, by the small number of children interviewed in the course of the survey work. The chapter argues that the agency of the child, both as a person and as an imagined ideal sustained by parents and other visitors, is as significant as it is political.
