To be a parent who spends any time on the internet in 2025 is a stressful experience.
Far too often I run into posts that condemn babies crying on airplanes or toddlers watching iPads in restaurants or children simply existing in society. It makes parenting in public feel extra daunting because one wrong move and me and my children could be the subject of a Reddit thread. This anxiety is layered on top of the pre-existing stresses of wanting to raise polite and well-behaved children, and needing them to have experiences out in the wild to refine those skills.
So I am grateful for public spaces that we all understand are for the kids, and where the kids are in charge. Playgrounds and splash pads and any fast-food play place. They feel like reprieves from the aforementioned pressures. But I wouldn’t call any of those places fun for the whole family. And that’s fine. I don’t mind occasionally supervising from the sidelines even if five minutes at a play place feels like two hours in the real world.
But there is one place that my entire family can have a genuinely good time at, free from the typical worries of public parenting, though it is a public space. Any screening of a children’s movie.
I personally believe that the best time to take your kids to a kid’s movie is a weekend matinee, where you can all but guarantee that every other viewer in the theater is a child or the parent of a child.
During these screenings there is an unwritten rule that all typical movie-going etiquette can, and will be, disregarded.
Normally I’m a stickler for proper movie-attendance rules. And I’ve been known to hiss “put your phone away” at companions checking their texts during the previews. I’ll give a stern side-eye to anyone talking above a whisper. But during kids’ movies, I don’t care who has their phone out or who is having a lengthy conversation at full volume. Babies can be screaming and no one cares.
A screening of “Dog Man” earlier this year was one of the rowdiest and most fun events I’ve ever attended. Children were bellowing with laughter at lines that weren’t even intended to be jokes. Kids and adults were constantly coming and going. Toddlers were standing in their seats. At the movie’s conclusion every child there went to the front of the theater just below the screen and danced.
I had a great time because 1. I had popcorn and a large Diet Coke which is about as close as a human can get to tasting heaven, and 2. Everything that happened was hilarious. The children all dancing was the most hilarious, but the whole event was a riot.
So I was hoping for a similar vibe when I took my kids to see “A Minecraft Movie” the other night. And I have to say, I was a little disappointed by how well behaved everyone was. My mistake, I believe, was opting, for a 6:30 show time which excluded families with younger children who needed to be home for bedtime.
There were still phones out and babies crying and every child said a line they had learned from the trailer in unison. It just wasn’t the chaos I’ve come to enjoy from other kid movie screenings. I wanted at least one kid to get up and dance or throw a whole bucket of popcorn.
We still had a great time as a family, some of us because we had popcorn and Diet Coke and some of us mesmerized by our favorite video game brought to life.
But the next time we see a movie made for kids, we’ll be seeing it on a Saturday afternoon when we’ll get the most entertainment and feel the safest from becoming the subject of an internet debate.