Bluemystique
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2022
I'll try to take a shot at this having just come back from GS with 3 kids. I'll admit on my trip, I was a parent with a kid that had a meltdown. DS3 did not like being separated from DH and DS11 who were off on their own story lines and cried very loudly in the atrium during a major story point taking place there. I tried consoling him to no avail and looked for the nearest place I could duck into with him. A cast member spotted me eyeing the empty bridge and offered to let me stay in there with him to let him cry it out. At least that way it wouldn't ruin the experience for everyone else in the atrium. After a few minutes, I told him we would go find DH and DS11 and that calmed him down enough that he had no further meltdowns once I found DH.I would pay obscene amounts of money for Adult Only Days at WDW or the GS.
Kids being kids isn't my issue but the parent reaction to their kids being kids. Do they try to soothe or manage the situation or just allow the meltdown ignoring the looks from others?
Also, since each participant on the GS is provided a datapad to interact with and choose their own story there is the possibility that parents/kids storylines will not align. A choice will need to be made to stay together or allow the kid to be on their own. At $145 an hour that is an expensive babysitter. I think this would work **IF** each parent is honest about their childs ability to be on their own, and I am referring to all ages of kids. I would have an issue if there was an unsupervised kid in one of my group activities that deterred from the experience because they were "just being a kid".
DS11 was "mature" enough to be trusted on his own and he had a blast running off with other kids. Eventually I found out he chose the opposite storyline from me so we ended up having different experiences. Honestly me finding out he hid that from me for 24 hours was a "why you little traitor" moment.
DS3 and DS7 wanted nothing to do with the data pad. I tried furthering their story for them to match mine but I pretty much gave up juggling 3 data pads after the first night. It seemed not to be a problem in the end because I toted them along with me to my experiences and the CMs manually punched them in along with me even though they never got past the basic first day dialogues.
DH got pulled along into a random LARPing group at one point, so I ended up playing babysitter for a good chunk of the trip, which was frustrating at times. We've pretty much decided that if we ever come back to this experience it'll be when all the boys are older, much to DS11's dismay because he wants to come back as early as next year lol and we told him not until he's 18.