The Benefits of Arts and Culture for Children: Why Experiences Matter

It is easy to think about a child's development primarily through education: what they are learning at school, how they are progressing academically, which activities they do and what skills they are acquiring.

But some of the experiences that have stayed with my son most have happened outside a classroom. A museum we have returned to repeatedly. A performance he has talked about afterwards. A historic building that made something he had learned suddenly feel real. Even simply being somewhere unfamiliar and having to look, listen and work out what was going on.

I have become increasingly interested not in how many experiences we can give our children, but in what different kinds of experiences allow them to encounter. The benefits of arts and culture are particularly interesting because they expose children to ideas, stories, histories and ways of seeing the world that they may not otherwise meet in their everyday lives.

The Benefits of Arts and Culture for Children Go Beyond What They Learn

Children today have extraordinary access to information. They can look up almost anything, watch an explanation of something they don't understand and find an answer to a question almost immediately.

But knowing something and encountering it are different.

Standing in front of an enormous painting, watching actors interpret a story on stage or walking through a building hundreds of years older than you are asks something different of a child. There may not be a single correct answer. They can notice, interpret, wonder and sometimes sit with something they don't immediately understand.

I don't take my son to museums because I expect him to remember every artist, date or historical fact. Often he won't.

What interests me is the encounter itself: seeing something he hasn't seen before, asking a question I wasn't expecting, making a connection with something he already knows or discovering that something I find fascinating leaves him completely unmoved.

All of those responses tell him something about the world and, gradually, about himself.

Why We Return to the Same Museums

When my son was about one, I started taking him to the Science Museum in London. One of our favourite places was The Garden, its interactive space for younger children, and at that age he was often one of the smallest children there.

He played with the water and the enormous foam building blocks. He wasn't learning about science in any formal sense. There was colour, movement, water, things to touch and things to construct.

As he got older, the experience changed.

He could manipulate more, understand more and engage with things that had previously been little more than movement and noise.

We kept going back.

And this is something I think parents sometimes underestimate about museums and cultural places. We can unconsciously treat them like a list.

Natural History Museum? Done.

Science Museum? Done.

Kensington Palace? Done.

Then we start searching for somewhere new.

But the museum may be the same while the child experiencing it is completely different.

A three-year-old, six-year-old and ten-year-old don't walk into the same museum. Their knowledge has changed. Their interests have changed. Their ability to concentrate has changed. They notice different things and ask different questions.

Returning allows children to encounter something familiar from a new developmental position.

There is value in novelty. But there is value in depth too.

Children Don't Always Notice What We Expect Them To

One of the things I enjoy most about experiencing museums and galleries with children is that they don't necessarily pay attention to what adults have decided is important.

We know which painting is famous. Which historical object matters. Which exhibit everybody has come to see.

A child may be fascinated by something sitting beside it.

And I think we can sometimes interfere with that without meaning to.

Look at this.

Read that.

Did you know…?

Come over here.

When we've deliberately chosen somewhere because we think it will be good for our children, there is a temptation to make sure they extract the appropriate value from it.

But culture doesn't always work like that.

Part of encountering art, theatre, music or history is developing your own response to it.

Children need some space to decide what interests them.

Arts and Culture Can Expand What Feels Normal

A child's everyday world is necessarily quite small at first.

Their family, school, friends, neighbourhood and routines establish much of what they understand to be normal.

Arts and culture can quietly complicate that.

A painting can show a life completely unlike theirs. A museum can place an object from another civilisation directly in front of them. Theatre can ask them to follow a story from somebody else's point of view. A historic building can make the distance between their life and another period suddenly tangible.

None of that guarantees that a child becomes more empathetic, cultured or open-minded. I am wary of making those kinds of claims.

But it does give them something beyond their immediate experience against which to think.

For children growing up with considerable access and opportunity, I think this can be particularly valuable. Their own environment should not quietly become the measure against which every other way of living is understood.

It Doesn't Have to Become an Educational Exercise

This is perhaps the part I feel most strongly about.

Not every cultural experience needs to become a lesson.

We don't need to interrogate children after a museum visit, explain the developmental value of a concert on the way home or turn every theatre trip into an exercise in personal growth.

Sometimes they should simply enjoy it.

They might love the enormous dinosaur rather than understand evolution. They may remember the theatre ice cream more vividly than the plot. They might be fascinated by the staircase in a museum and completely ignore the exhibition we actually went there to see.

That's fine.

Pleasure matters.

Beauty matters.

Wonder matters.

And sometimes the thing that stays with a child isn't the thing we intended them to learn.

Don't Try to Do the Whole Museum

Returning to the same places has also changed the practical way I approach cultural visits.

Some of London's museums are enormous. Trying to "do" the Natural History Museum, the V&A or the Science Museum with a child in one visit can turn something enjoyable into an endurance exercise.

If you know you can return, you don't have to.

We can spend longer in one gallery. Go back to something my son remembers. Choose one exhibition because it connects to something he is interested in now. Or spend an hour somewhere and leave while we're still enjoying ourselves.

There is no prize for completing a museum.

And I increasingly think depth can be more interesting than coverage.

A Different Way to Approach Your Next Visit

The next time you return to a museum, gallery or cultural place your child already knows, try not to recreate the previous visit.

Before you go, ask them what they remember.

What would you like to see again?

Then choose one familiar thing and one thing you haven't explored before.

Once you're there, allow some of the visit to follow their attention rather than your itinerary. If something catches their interest, stay. If something doesn't, move on.

And afterwards, rather than asking What did you learn?, try:

What did you notice this time?

That small change in question leaves room for a completely different answer.

Cultural Experiences Don't Need to Produce a Particular Kind of Child

I think this is important because it is very easy for modern parenting to turn experiences into another form of optimisation. Museums become good for creativity. Music becomes good for the brain. Theatre develops empathy. Travel builds resilience.

Suddenly we have another list of things our children ought to be doing. That isn't how I think about it.

I don't believe that taking my son to enough museums will produce a particular set of characteristics.

What I can do is give him opportunities to encounter things outside his existing world: art he doesn't understand, histories he hasn't heard, people whose lives look nothing like his own, buildings that have existed far longer than either of us and ideas he might never have come across otherwise.

What he eventually makes of those encounters belongs to him.

Why These Experiences Matter to Me

Academic education matters enormously to me. But school is only one of the places in which a child's understanding of the world develops.

There are books and conversations. Museums and galleries. Music and theatre. Historic places and architecture. The cultures of the places we live in and those we visit.

Some encounters will stay with our children. Many won't. And perhaps we don't always need to know which is which.

That first Science Museum visit with my one-year-old wasn't less worthwhile because he couldn't understand the science. It was simply one version of the experience. When we returned, he brought a slightly different child with him. The ability to encounter something unfamiliar, consider it and form your own response also connects to a much wider question about judgement, which I explore in Raising Children in the Age of AI.

And that, increasingly, is why I value arts and culture in childhood: not because every experience needs to teach something, but because each one gives a child another opportunity to encounter a world larger than the one they already know.

Shanti

The Kensington Diary