HOW TO ENJOY A CONVENTION WITH SMALL CHILDREN
We all love our hobbies – we each have different passions and interests that bring out the kid in all of us. When you have a child in your life, you want to share those experiences and knowledge with them. Nowadays, there are plenty of ways to share those experiences with your children – one of the biggest ways is a convention/event weekend.
Many people are hesitant to take younger children to these types of events because of the event size, destination cities you may not be familiar with, or large number of attendees among other reasons. Good planning, smart packing, and commonsense can take some of the stress out of attending a large event and will help make sure you and your child(ren) have a fantastic time.
For some initial background, my son was diagnosed four years ago with severe combination ADHD with sensory processing. He currently takes medication to help regulate his energy level and to help him focus to be more attentive during school and throughout the day. The following text describes my experiences and observations. Other people will/may have different experience and may have a difference of opinion. I do not have any medical degree and I do not claim to be a definitive resource on this type of topic. I purely wish to share my observations to hopefully help others that might find themselves in a similar situation.
My son and I recently attended Star Wars Celebration 2019 in Chicago, IL. This was my first convention of this size and his first convention overall. Now that I have attended Celebration with him, in my opinion, I believe that doing events like this with a small child can be very possible and enjoyable if you follow some basic guidelines to help plan your visit/trip. Long waits, large crowds, and sensory overload all play into everyone’s experience, and you need to make sure to account for them in any planning you do.
Knowing that my son can have some hurdles when experiencing large crowds and higher noise levels, I made sure to keep that in mind while scheduling our day at Celebration. We made sure to take breaks throughout the day, making sure he was never hungry and to help keep his energy up over the course of the day. We arrived just before the show opened at 10 AM and we stayed until show closed at 7 PM.; he lasted the entire day and enjoyed every minute of it. I approached each event and activity at Celebration with a few key questions/guidelines to determine if it would fit into our days adventure. As you continue to read, keep in mind that we attended on Saturday – probably the most crowded day of the five-day convention. The guidelines I tried to use are as follows:
CROWDS – When we could, we would avoid crowds and long lines… This can be hard to do at an event like Celebration but not impossible. We did NOT show up early to queue for ANYTHING. Waiting in a line for longer than 15 minutes can become problematic for any adult let alone a young child. Queuing early would stretch the time waiting to see an attraction or stage show and would affect my son’s focus and enjoyment of the activity. If something was longer than a 20 minute wait we would skip it and try again later (if possible). Most panels and stage shows only occurred once over the course of the convention so we did have to make our choices carefully. Any other attraction or experience was usually repeatable throughout the day. We did decide to attend the Disney Galaxies Edge panel that was presented in the attached stadium, Wintrust Arena, to the convention center. This special panel, just like any other, had a line outside waiting to enter the event space hours before the doors opened. Since this event had assigned sections that were determined by lottery we decided to miss the line and enjoy some of the rest of the convention before the panel started. Don’t get me wrong – there can be a benefit to arriving early. My friend and his family (with older children than my son) managed to get upgraded to the VIP section and were within arm’s length of Warwick Davis as he talked to the early arriving crowd. As cool as this would have been, there is no guarantee of something like this happening and is not worth the potential issues that could have affected my son if we had queued in the line before the panel.
With our assigned section in the Wintrust Arena already known we decided to see a few things before the panel started at 11am. Where we happened to park in McCormick Place was right next to a side entrance to the event. Instead of waiting in the main queue to enter the event floor we were able to walk straight through security, receive our lanyards for our event badges and started to look around some of the other side areas before they got too crowded. Since the event officially opened at 10am (which is when we arrived) we were able to be amongst the first ten people that made it into the Droid Builder club room. They had all manner of robots and droids on display that this club had painstakingly recreated from the movies. My son loves robots, and this was definitely on our to-do list for the day. It was amazing that we had this huge room all to ourselves since everyone else was waiting to get onto the main event floor.
When it was getting close to the start time of the panel we made our way to the nearest information station to ask event staff for the quickest way to the Wintrust Arena. We were pointed in the general direction which led us up near the main event floor. There was a mezzanine floor between the ground level of the convention center and the top level where the event floor was… we asked another security guard once on the mezzanine how to get to the stadium and he gave us the biggest gift we received on this trip… it was a side corridor that circumvented the main convention and took us straight to a side entrance of the Wintrust Arena. We ended up using this side route to avoid the large crowds through-out the day that were moving back and forth between the buildings.
When we arrived at the entrance to the Wintrust Arena we were able to walk right into the venue… not a single person in front of us at the security line. We went and found our seats in the assigned section and waited for the panel to begin. We were in our seats with about 10 minutes to spare before it started -we were high up in the venue but had great sight lines and plenty of space to stretch out. After the panel was done we sat and waited for about 10 minutes to let the initial rush of people exit the building. We spent this time talking about what we had seen during the panel and what he wanted to see the next time we went down to Disney World. Once we exited the area we retraced our steps through our side passage to get back to the security checkpoint where we had met the guard. We walked right through security again, with no wait, and proceeded up a set of escalators. It turned out that the escalators brought you right up to the entrance of the main event floor and we again were able to walk right in. Now, door to door it was probably about an 8-minute walk from the time we left the arena until we stepped into the main convention floor. Outside, if we had followed everyone else when exiting the Wintrust Arena, we would have been snaking our way through a huge queue under a large tent and then through a large security checkpoint (easily taking 20+ minutes with the number of people that had just exited the arena).
We continued this trend throughout the day, avoiding lines or returning to areas when they were more manageable and less crowded. We managed to see the Disney Galaxies’ Edge exhibit with only waiting in line for 5 minutes and we only waited 10 minutes to get into the Celebration Show store (the vendor space that was selling the Celebration specific merchandise). Earlier in the day the Show store had a line an hour long.
PLANNING – I had done some research on who and what was going to be at the convention. I had access to maps ahead of time as well as stage schedules and panel times. I made some choices ahead of time (like entering the lottery for the Galaxies’ Edge panel) but I didn’t go crazy trying to schedule every second of our day. What I found worked best was working together with my son to decide what we were going to do. Attending this convention was a surprise for him so we didn’t take much time before the event to look at maps together to plan our day. What we did instead was walk the floor together just taking it all in. As we walked we looked at what was available and where it was. We made a list of everything I wanted to do and everything that he wanted to do. Once we had walked the entire floor it was lunch time and we took time to plan what we wanted to do first. On the topic of lunch… we packed one. There were food vendors that at the event but like everything else in a venue like this it was overpriced and sub-par. Since the event did not prohibit outside food and drink we packed our own lunch and snacks (which was inexpensive and substantial). We also were carrying Camelback back packs with built in water bladders, so we weren’t messing around with water bottles. They were easily filled at any of the water fountains found around the venue.
Something else we noticed while walking around the event was that there was a natural movement to the crowd. In the earlier hours before lunch the main floor was relatively crowded but began to thin as more and more panels and stage shows were occurring. Just like at an amusement park or car traffic on a highway, there were natural gaps in the crowd as it moved from area to area at the event. Again, we went on Saturday which is a pretty busy day, but the crowd was manageable and we never really felt like we were crammed into the space. We also tried to pay attention to when a large panel was occurring at the Wintrust Arena because that meant that about 7,000 less people would be on the main exhibit floor. We would take these times to try and hit some of the areas that usually had larger crowds since the crowd was now elsewhere on the properly. This again led to short or non-existent lines for photo-ops with clubs, speaking with cosplayers or one of the many costume clubs in attendance, or hitting up a vendor that might be doing something interactive which now had a shorter line.
One thing we chose to avoid was the celebrity photos and autographs. Despite being available to us, we decided not to do any autographs or celebrity photo opportunities. The lines for these were extraordinarily long all day and would have set my son up for failure. As nice as those would have been, they were not worth the hassle. We can see how he is doing in a few years and possibly try then.
BEING OK WITH NOT SEEING EVERYTHING – This can be hard especially with some of the costs that can be associated with a convention like this… between tickets, parking, food, purchases, and donations a convention can cost quite a bit even for just one day. My son can self-regulate with the help of medication and can recognize when he is having sensory overload. I as a Star Wars fan and, as a parent, had to put my own fandom aside sometimes to make sure that I was listening to my son’s needs and wants. I needed to make sure that we took breaks when he asked for them instead of trying to push him through a line to see an attraction or experience. I would ask him his opinion and input to make sure that he felt he was in just as much control as I was. Sometimes I would compromise for him and sometimes he would compromise for me and, sometimes we would just sit against a wall and people-watch… He was more than happy sitting there watching event goers pass by and had fun identifying the different costumes and armor as people passed. Occasionally a droid or two would go rolling by and sometimes even stop to interact with us. Were there things that I wanted to see… sure. But was it worth my son having a bad time? No, it wasn’t.
CONCULSION
Long story short… If you plan correctly, take your time, and listen to each other everyone will get what they want out of the event.
Even though I personally did not get to do everything I wanted to… I absolutely got my money’s worth out of the event because my son had a great time and I got to share it with him. I woke up the next day not regretting anything… I did not regret the things I missed at the convention and I certainly did not regret doing the things that my son chose. An event like this is about everyone’s enjoyment and there must be a compromise when you attend with other people.
I hope this was informative and helps someone in their travels.
