Young at art

A FEW WEEKS before I had my first child, a friend who had already taken the plunge told me, bleakly, that I would never read a book again. She advised me to spend the final weeks of my pregnancy cramming as much culture as I could into my life. Motherhood, she warned, spelled the end of all intellectual activity. For someone whose profession and chief pleasure is the arts, this was chilling.

As fate would have it, my baby arrived three weeks early and I never got the chance to tick off all the items on the list I had duly written. But as I lay in the antenatal ward, waiting for labour to begin, I found myself reading the last pages of Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Winterson grew up as the adopted daughter of evangelical Christians who believed the Bible was the only book worth reading. When her mother discovered the library the young Winterson had accumulated beneath her mattress she built a bonfire of the books and took special pleasure in watching them burn.

My friend was being wildly dramatic in her proclamation, of course, but as Winterson narrated the consequences of her emotionally and intellectually deprived childhood I was reminded of why cultural experiences were so important to my life. I promised to make them central to my newborn son’s life, too.

The arts are one of the fundamental tools through which young children learn about the world. Early-childhood educators acknowledge this by using role play, art and music to help form social skills as well as to impart knowledge. Exposure at a young age is crucial to later appreciation of the arts, and in Ireland most major arts organisations have taken this on board, providing outreach and educational activity programmes for children at weekends and during school holidays.

Catering for babies is entirely different. Babies don’t really do “participation” or “process”, the buzz words in arts experiences for children, yet they are hugely stimulated by exposure to myriad media. A variety of cultural institutions have begun tapping into this, providing cultural opportunities for babies and their parents.

Cinema

Perhaps the most popular and best-known cultural amenity for new parents and their charges is the baby-friendly cinema programme at multiplexes and art-house cinemas around the country. Originally, the screenings were limited to PG films, but films for adults are now regularly included: newborns are not too fussy about narrative content. Most of the cinemas restrict the screenings to babies of pre-crawling age; the younger the babies the better the experience, as their heavy sleeping schedules ensure they don’t get bored or overstimulated by the environment.

The cinemas turn the sound down, for tiny ears, brighten the lighting a little, to facilitate feeding – IMC Dún Laoghaire even has a bottle warmer just inside the screening room’s door – and the babies often find the experience soothing. A newborn’s eyes are stimulated more by sharp contrasts of colour, so the black-and-white visual landscape of The Artist was particularly attractive to my son; the ambient soundtrack and dusky images of Shame were also pleasantly soporific.

The Muppets was the least satisfactory of our cinema excursions. The sudden explosions of colour and noise proved unsettling for very little ones. (This was the screening with the most crying babies and the most parents pacing the aisles.)

Visual art

Going to an art gallery with a new baby is even better than going alone, especially if you take the New Parents’ Tour at the National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin. Held on the third Wednesday of each month, the tour takes a buggy-friendly path through the exhibition spaces, introducing new parents and babies to several works of art. As one of the guides, Jenny Traynor, says, the tour is “baby-led” so the experience is flexible.

Between stopping for feeds on viewing benches, the tour usually encompasses three or four paintings. The guides occasionally focus on paintings with babies in them, Traynor says, but with the limited hanging required by the gallery’s ongoing renovations, current selections for the New Parents’ Tour are more general.

Even so, we spot one in the four paintings we see: a baby falling off a cliff as the world cracks open in The Opening of the Sixth Seal by Francis Danby. This huge canvas is also the most attractive to my baby. He may not be able to engage with the history of British slavery that the painting narrates, but the contrast between its large scale and dark colours and the brightly lit space of the gallery's modern wing is visually arresting within the still-limited scope of his vision. See nationalgallery.iefor more dates and times.

Also worth a look is Babies on Board. The National Museum of Ireland has recently added a museum tour adapted for parents with babies and toddlers at its Museum for Decorative Arts and History, at Collins Barracks in Dublin. Taking place on the last Thursday of each month, the tour is structured around a workshop. It is perhaps better for older babies rather than newborns, but it is a great way to meet other parents with shared interests. With luck the initiative will take off at the museum's other centres nationwide. See museum.ie.

An initiative at the Lab on Foley Street in Dublin also shares the Baby on Board moniker. Held on the third Friday of each month, the informal coffee morning, which takes place in the gallery space, offers a chance to catch an exhibition while meeting other parents interested in art. The current hanging features solo shows by Maggie Madden, Neill Carroll and Nicki Whynnychuck.

Art galleries – the National Gallery, the RHA, Imma, the Chester Beatty – also offer some of the best changing facilities and most buggy-friendly cafes in Dublin.

Music

The relationship between music and the developing brain is the most researched area in childhood arts. Rebecca Maybin, the leader of a Mini Music programme workshop at the National Concert Hall, says that the easy rhyming songs and eurythmic approach are aimed at developing the musical intelligence of infants rather than boosting their IQs.

The classes cater for babies from three months upwards and, at 30 minutes long, are perfectly matched to the babies’ attention spans. Action-led melodies are designed to engage babies’ motor skills – it is all about moving in time with the beat – while babies are given the chance to explore percussive instruments before a short interlude of classical music: wind-down time.

Essentially, it is a group singalong, but the original compositions encourage the use of particular muscle groups and keeping time, while the babies also get a lot from looking at each other. Full listings at nch.ie.

Theatre and storytelling

The Ark children’s cultural centre, in Temple Bar, also has a theatre, at which babies are welcome, but nothing was showing during my maternity leave, and none of the theatres I contacted was able to facilitate babies.

We showed up unannounced at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire to see Louis Lovett perform James Joyce’s children’s story The Cat and the Devil on Bloomsday (for ages six and older) and were allowed in. We took an edge seat, so we could make a quick getaway if we needed, but my charge was stimulated as much by the audience’s faces as by the storytelling session, and remained engaged and well-behaved for the whole hour. Anyway, in Elizabethan England actors had to cope with far greater (and more deliberate) disruption than crying babies.

If reading is one of the easiest pleasures to share with young babies, it was disappointing that the Tall Tiny Tales exhibition at the Ark, Ireland’s only dedicated children’s cultural space, excluded under-twos from its remit. The Ark is a child-led institution, its director Eina McHugh says, and as the building was not designed with babies in mind it would be unfair to compromise that philosophy just to extend the programme.

But babies of all ages are welcome to attend Ark events, and the centre’s current exhibition, Awakening Curiosity, has much to stimulate the young mind. Inga Hamilton’s Evolutionary Tweak and Natzaret Sindreu’s Lichen are tactile crocheted reefs and giant lichens; a multitude of textures and shapes to stimulate tiny hands and feet.

Phillip Artus's laser projection "snail trail" provides a quiet cocoon to rest awhile on beanbags, and upstairs in the workshop a large indoor garden has a lawn where babies can wriggle about as bigger children make butterfly wings. See ark.ie.