The Cat's Meow: Children at Castle Hill
Looking at Ways to Make Historic Sites More Friendly to Families with Small Kids
My last two posts have found me veering straight into all the research I poured into my job at Castle Hill on the Crane Estate. It got me to thinking that maybe it was time to step back into that research and write a bit of a brief historical overview of the Crane Estate in Ipswich. Of course, much of what I could write about the Cranes is essentially what you might get on a tour of the Great House and grounds. I did work as a tour guide and then was put in charge of the tour program there, a position I held for 3 years, including through the pandemic.
So if anything, I want to entice you to go visit Castle Hill on the Crane Estate. I want you to see the Great House designed by architect, David Adler. I want you to go on a tour up to the Cupola. I want you to walk the Grand Allée. I want you to experience the property that was used as a Russian estate in The Equalizer, a playboy mansion in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and a Parisian backdrop in Little Women (2019). It was also the background for this fantastic photoshoot for the Downton Abbey movie and interview for Town & Country Magazine.
For all the research I have done, there are several aspects of the work that are continuing since I left that I am very proud of. One of them is the children’s tour. I did not write the original tour. It was a tour I learned, and honed, and gave during my time at Castle Hill. I got the tour onto our schedule during vacation weeks to get more children at the estate. We tweaked and prodded that tour to make it the best and most child friendly tour we could envision. And earlier this week, a video of that tour made it to social media. But it gets at the heart of something I have been struggling with since my child was born.
We need to make historic sites more accessible for families.
The most “child-friendly” tours we have come across in the last 3 years have all been self-guided tours. We spend a lot of time looking for houses with historic grounds that our child can run around. We have found some children’s tour, but a lot of them are designed for older children. One example is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Graycliff, which has a children’s tour advertised as being for kids from 5-9.
This gets tricky fast, because there are ways to make a tour “child-friendly” that don’t actually make it engaging. A tour guide’s job first and foremost is to meet the guests, which in this case are the children, where they are at. When we tried the children’s tour at Graycliff (which, yes, we knew we were likely going to be pushing it bringing our three-year-old on a tour designed for five and up), the tour guide got our child on board with pretending to drive a car up the drive. Our kid loves cars. This was an instant win. But the tour guide lost our kid once we were inside the house, and she started talking more to the adults than the kids.
The easiest way to bring a child through a historic house is to engage the child. Get them moving. Get them involved. Keep the tour moving from one room to the next without lingering. You shouldn’t spend more than five minutes in a single location. And be prepared for kids younger than the recommended ages, whether its ambitious parents (like us) or siblings of the kids it’s intended for. Also keep the tour short and snappy. The biggest difference between Castle Hill and Graycliff that I noted was the length of the tour. Graycliff’s tour was 60-75 minutes, which was way too long, and the tour guide tried to drag it out to give the parents their money’s worth by talking to the parents instead of the kids. Castle Hill’s “Cat’s Meow” tour is 30-45 minutes, and the tour guides are instructed to make it about the kids. If the tour is small and runs faster because that’s where the kids are at, that is your job!
It’s a mistake that some properties make that you can make a children’s tour by handing the kids a scavenger hunt and a pencil and then giving a shortened version of the adult tour. There is far more to it than that. And an organization that wants families to visit really needs to spend more time on thinking about what exactly a children’s tour means and how to achieve that goal. A scavenger hunt is a good tool for an older child who happens to be on an adult tour. It can be a good jumping off point for a children’s tour, but it has to be well executed and not just a crutch.
The bones of the children’s tour is there at Graycliff. It’s a good first try. But there is definitely room for improvement. Not every child will be the same. Not every group will be the same. The biggest thing with children is that they are the most honest critics of a tour you will ever have. If you are not engaging them, they will make it far more obvious than any group of adults you ever give a tour to.
