I’m personally pro-small-children-at-holiday events. However, there are a few types of child-friendly events that serve different purposes.
There’s community events for everyone, in which the purpose of small children attending is so they can actually participate, learn, etc. This requires content that kids can actually engage with.
Then there’s community events for adults, in which the purpose of accomodating small children is to make sure all the parents can come. This requires making sure there’s a place for the kids where they don’t disrupt the ceremony.
I’m personally more excited by the former, although I think both styles of events are worth doing. The thing that stuck out was that last weekend’s event felt explicitly like a serious-for-adults event, without actually giving the kids a thing to do or a place to be, so the kids runnin around stuck out more for me than they would have if the event was more lively.
I agree. I feel like there’s a lot of competing access needs stuff going on which is really driving me to think we should have two events clustered around “serious, in-group” and “fun, welcoming”.
My own take is that I very much want a “serious” event that is also fun and jovial (i.e. Act I is fun, Act II is serious/sad, Act III is serious/transcendant), where it is ingroupy but still the sort of thing you can invite your older non-rationalist parents and non-rationalist friends to so long as those people are reasonably tolerant, and understand that they’re going to a weird ritual for a community that isn’t fully theirs. (This is basically how NYC Solstice is run)
Thoughts on small children:
I’m personally pro-small-children-at-holiday events. However, there are a few types of child-friendly events that serve different purposes.
There’s community events for everyone, in which the purpose of small children attending is so they can actually participate, learn, etc. This requires content that kids can actually engage with.
Then there’s community events for adults, in which the purpose of accomodating small children is to make sure all the parents can come. This requires making sure there’s a place for the kids where they don’t disrupt the ceremony.
I’m personally more excited by the former, although I think both styles of events are worth doing. The thing that stuck out was that last weekend’s event felt explicitly like a serious-for-adults event, without actually giving the kids a thing to do or a place to be, so the kids runnin around stuck out more for me than they would have if the event was more lively.
I agree. I feel like there’s a lot of competing access needs stuff going on which is really driving me to think we should have two events clustered around “serious, in-group” and “fun, welcoming”.
My own take is that I very much want a “serious” event that is also fun and jovial (i.e. Act I is fun, Act II is serious/sad, Act III is serious/transcendant), where it is ingroupy but still the sort of thing you can invite your older non-rationalist parents and non-rationalist friends to so long as those people are reasonably tolerant, and understand that they’re going to a weird ritual for a community that isn’t fully theirs. (This is basically how NYC Solstice is run)