Burning Man With Kids: Guide to the Playa
This is our weekly guest-blog post from the moms behind Red Tricycle, a site that focuses on the "lighter side" of parenting. Every week, they'll be bringing us their picks of stuff to do around the Bay Area with kids. Below, they give us their tips for Burning Man with kids. Read the full article here.
Labor Day weekend is creeping up on us, which can mean only one thing (besides the start of the school year): Burning Man! When we first put feelers out to our network of Moms and Dads about the idea of writing an Insider’s Guide to Burning Man with Kids we got a lot of, “no ways”, “are you crazy” and “not in this lifetime” responses. While it’s clear that the majority of Burners opt for a week of adult playtime, there are actually quite a few Burner parents who wouldn’t have it any other way.
Long-time Burner Mom Harley K. Dubois (Harley) and newbie mom Cory Mervis (Lady Merv) graciously gave us their advice and insights on life on the playa with kids. So read on Burning Moms and Dads, in honor of this years Rights Of Passage theme, we’ve compiled a list of 10 Insider Tips to make your Burning Man 2011 a fun-filled success with your Burner Babes.
Click here to read ten tips to making Burning Man with kids a success!
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And Mr. Anonymous re: nudity. Bah, happy comfortable people in their birthday suits. Big deal. NO, I won't say a darn thing if you walk by my camp in your jockstrap & my kid sees you. (Presuming you're not waving an erection around, but again, that's hardly civil behavior even among adults.) We'd likely wave and wish you a nice afternoon.
Kids have been present at Burning Man since the very first one on Baker Beach in 1986. They are a part of our community. Children live in desert environments all over the world & their parents take care of them just fine, just like parents in BRC. The responsibility is mine and my kid thrives there.
As for "adult content" you'd be surprised how little a kid cares about seeing the occasional car shaped like a pair of breasts or a penis...and I don't go into camps that have content inappropriate for her, period. (It's not like we are screwing in the streets, for pete's sake; I'm a grownup and I don't want to see that either.) Anything I don't want my child to be exposed to there, I can avoid, just like in our hometown. There's plenty of incredible art and fun experiences to be had that are 100% innocent fun.
My burner kid is going on 4, a 4-time attendee, talks about it all year, has a magical time. She also loves camping in the Black Rock Desert at other times of the year. It's not for every kid just like it's not for every adult, but it's not up to others to tell me this experience hasn't enhanced her life enormously. We have a fabulous family time every year.
I'm not asking anyone else to take responsibility for my child there or alter their behavior - but she's a person with as much right to be there as you have, and she has a lot of friends who are very very glad she's a part of our camp.
The only thing selfish and immature is for adults to claim the event somehow belongs to them.
Next Up - From the Moms at Red Tricycle - "Taking Your Kids to the Adult Video Awards in Vegas!"
Next Up - the moms at Red Tricycle with "Taking your Children to the Adult Video Awards in Vegas!!"
Man... there are a lot of uptight people here. I just watched Star Wars with my kids, and we saw some dude get his hand cut off, and a planet with millions of people get blown up. God forbid my boys see a couple of boobs covered in glitter. We keep talking about Burning Man being a city, and yet you guys talk about a city without kids.
Yes, there is a lot of crazy sh!t that goes down, but most of it can be easily avoided. You wouldn't take your kids to a strip joint, so don't take your kids to one of the adult themed camps. Likewise, you wouldn't take your kids to a dance club, so don't take them to a danceclub at night on the playa.
But you can't tell me that taking your kids to a place where they can check out thousands of incredible art projects and everyone is friendly and actually talks to each other is a bad thing. To be sure, if it's going to work, you pretty much have to make the trip about your kids, and not yourself, but hey... you've already sacrificed so much for your kids, not being able to get blasted out of your skull and going to bed at 11pm at Burning Man doesn't seem like such a stretch.
Thanks for posting this. Hoping to return to the playa next year.
Please jail the moms at redtri.com, or leave them and their offspring to die in the desert. It'll be a win for humanity in the end.
Couldn't agree more. We're headed off to Burning Man and leaving the kids chained to the radiator with a couple of jars of peanut butter. They'll learn radical self-reliance much better that way!
Agree with pretty much everyone else here, kids really shouldn't be at BRC and this article is pretty out-of-place on 7x7.
Kids should NOT be allowed at BM. repeat: NOT ALLOWED. This isn't about some weekend trip to the mall and Chucky Cheese.
This is really adults only, celebrating AS ADULTS, music, art, life, being different, being NAKED, being free spirits. Are you gonna chastise me if I walk by your kids camp and I'm just wearing a jock strap and nothing else, just cause your little rug rats may see me??
Please, leave the little monkeys at home.
These comments are hilarious! Especially the first one. Also, the one about the drugs vs. body weight..lol
I've no desire to take child and expose them to the adult freak show. Anyone who does is a brain fart. You need to go to disneyland despite the fact you've saddle yourself with a 21 year prison sentence. Suggest you sack up, stay home and have fun with the playdough. Meanwhile we will be taking serious drugs, heading for the nearest freakshow and fucking anything vaguely female......
This may be the stupidest article to ever come out of 7x7, and that's saying something.
Kids have no business at Burning Man, period. It's selfish and immature for parents to even think about bringing them along.
BURNING MAN IS NOT A PLACE FOR CHILDREN!
Kids, fine (so long as YOU keep track of them and don’t leave them feral in someone else’s camp), but PLEASE leave the babies at home. They can't regulate their body temps yet, and every year we end up with near dead babies in the med tents. A couple years back we even had to fly one out to Reno it was so sick from the heat.
$1000.00 tickets on Craigs List (we never charged more than what we paid), sketchy cell phone service(we didn't want ANY cell phone service) and more kids, more planes, more corporate types...Burning Man died about 2003!
How about drugs? Should I base the dosage on body weight or age?
My parents dragged me there when I was 9 and 10 and I absolutely hated it. The environment is too hot and dusty for kids to enjoy themselves, there's dust on all your food, and by the end of the week I always had painful feet and my hair was so matted that I had to get very severe haircuts to get it functioning again. I begged my parents the second time to let me stay with my aunt, but they took me anyway. The third time they wanted me to go, I told them I would run away at the event and they'd have to spend their whole week looking for me.
No kids at Burning Man, how about that?
Dragging ones kids to this adult event should not be encouraged. It's okay to leave them at home once in a while.
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