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.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.”
