Isolation among families is usually discussed as a feeling. This conversation puts it somewhere more

concrete: in what a community has built and kept.

Laura Huerta Migus is Director of Fellowship Alumni Engagement and National Activation & Impact at

Ascend at the Aspen Institute. Before that she spent more than a decade leading the Association of

Children’s Museums. In this episode of Thrive Dispatches she joins Dr. Matt Biel to talk about the places

families have left.

She works from a simple taxonomy. First spaces are homes. Second spaces are the ones we have to go

to, like hospitals and schools. Third spaces are the ones we choose. Those are the ones going away.

She is specific about how. Across much of the country, people get from place to place in a vehicle and

alone. There are no sidewalks. Getting to a third space is not tenable, or the space was developed out

during the urban design process.

We tend to read the result as a set of private choices. She does not. A parent’s options are limited by

what their community is able to offer them, and that comes down to investment.

Then there is the evidence from lockdown. Zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens had some of their

best attendance years, because they were outdoors and open. Take away nearly every option and

people did not stay home. They went to the one that was left.

Children’s museums are her counterexample. She calls them one of the only spaces in most

communities “designed for children on their terms.” A pediatrician’s office is not. Neither is a child

welfare office. Neither is a classroom, at least not through a child’s own agency, and neither are most

playgrounds.