If you are not from or are not raising a large family, you might not realize that some activities are cost-prohibitive for large families, while other activities are perfectly affordable.
Mini-golf places, for instance, typically charge per golfer. Campgrounds, on the other hand, charge per site.
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An amusement park will charge per head, making a family of eight twice as expensive as a family of four. Great Wolf Lodge, an indoor water park-and-hotel, includes a water park pass for everyone in the room, making a family of eight only about 25% more expensive.
Family pricing isn’t always possible — at a restaurant, for example, it might be hard — but at a museum or a park that doesn’t have massive crowding issues, family pricing ought to be the norm.
Bethany Mandel, a mother of six, wrote about this last year after finding a local children’s museum was very expensive for large families: “Family-friendly institutions that make their mission to serve children are quietly discouraging large families from walking through the door.”
Mandel, like me, is a conservative. But it’s not only conservatives banging the drum for more family pricing.
Left-leaning Middlebury professor Gary Winslett wrote an article this week calling for more family pricing: “Encouraging more businesses and institutions to adopt family pricing would be a useful boost to affordability for those families and would be a positive signal about how much we as a society value families of all sizes.”
Winslett suggests the federal government provide a tax credit to institutions that provide family pricing: “At the federal level, the most straightforward mechanism is a tax incentive for businesses that adopt certified family pricing tiers. The model already exists in other contexts like energy efficiency where the government effectively says: we won’t make you do this, but we’ll make it easier for you if you choose to do it.”
I don’t know if I would make a family-pricing tax credit a priority, but I totally endorse the general approach: If we can do it for climate or the environment, we can do it for families. We are facing an unprecedented Baby Bust and an epidemic of childhood anxiety. This is the biggest story of the next 30 years. Let’s find as many tools as we can to send the signal that we want more families and bigger families.
The most obvious change is this: State and local governments, whenever possible, should have family pricing as aggressive as possible.
Ideal family pricing is simple: Your children are free. Two adults pay the same to get in, whether they bring kids or not.
Sometimes, though, kids add a significant marginal cost, or create acute crowding problems. In such cases, kids should be heavily discounted — say, 25% the cost of an adult. That would make a family of six cost the same as three adults. Also, as part of family pricing, babies should be free, and probably toddlers, too.
Then, governments should say that every non-profit (such as a museum) that gets government support should adopt full-family pricing, or, in cases where that’s unfeasible, at least 75% discounts for children.
Finally, as a culture, we should apply pressure to businesses and other organizations to offer family pricing.
This is the sort of undertaking that could get serious momentum and become a national norm within a year. Let it start this summer.
