Why I took my toddler to the nostalgic Children’s Museum

Here’s a fact! I’m a millennial mom. I’m part of the generation who experienced childhood outdoors until it drastically transitioned to indoors. Thanks to the massive influx of gaming consoles and access to the Internet.

Learning for children today is more URL than IRL.

Today, parents won’t have to worry about children not getting their edutainment because everything they need is just a search away. And if toys get too boring at home I could always bring her to an indoor play area. However, I noticed that none of these educational play resembles the Filipino heritage. With Kidzoona you get Japanese inspired playtime, the interactive playground that we recently visited gave us a Korean fun vibe and the theme parks we went to were all about the western ingenuity. As a Filipino millennial parent, I find it hard to introduce our own culture to my kid.  Fortunately, there is still a place where I could show her a glimpse of our culture and traditions, the Children’s Museum.

The go-to place for field trips since forever

I can’t exactly remember how many times I’ve been to the Children’s Museum when I was little but I could still recall that my grade school class would visit the old museum almost every year. It was just a staple place to go for a field trip. If not a newspaper publisher or Nayong Pambata, I’m not sure where else the school would take the children of the 90s. But today, it felt like it’s the perfect place to show my daughter. There were all sorts of old items that you could find there. Whenever I say “olden days” my daughter kind of gets it. Everything she saw in the museum was part of the olden days.

An outdated appeal

It was surprising how everything felt so old in the Children’s Museum, and I’m not even referring to the displays or the attractions there. I guess after being able to see quite a lot of museums, indoor play areas and science museums, the striking difference was just hard to ignore. There were at least ten themes on each room with science, marine life, mini-town, literature, arts and culture as its focus. Some of this room were connected while some were somewhat isolated – ideal for large groups.

A private tour for only 150 Pesos (if you’re lucky)

We went there on a weekday, and we had the place to ourselves because no one seems to go there anymore. So, with just 150 Pesos you could have a private tour on a regular weekday or 200 Pesos on weekends. What’s right about this is that you could give your child a thorough tour of the museum without the need to wait in line.

The bottom line

The museum is a place to interact with objects and artefacts from the past and no matter how many fancy online videos we stream, nothing beats the experience of seeing them in real life. I know our museum experience was a little bit on the downside because they didn’t innovate over the years. But it looks and feels the same even today now that I have a toddler of my own. And for that, I think they did a great job preserving the experience for the sake of the younger generation.