Why do public libraries offer so few children’s activities on weekends?

December 14, 2019 9:39 AM

I live in the metro-NYC area and have been looking at multiple library event calendars (in both Rockland and Westchester Counties) for story time and other activities to do with my three year old. There is a wealth of Tuesday at 10AM options but almost nothing on Saturday or Sunday. Or even outside of 9-5 on weekdays. Given that the majority of kids have working parents and that most libraries are open on weekends and many evenings, why aren’t there activities in these hours? Is there less demand than I think there is? Is it hard to schedule staff on the weekends?

Note: I’m not criticizing libraries, I’m genuinely curious why this doesn’t exist.

I should also note that I run a story hour at my place of work (public garden) and it is deliberately on a Sunday morning.

posted by sciencegeek to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (12 answers total)

Staffing levels on weekends in libraries are often lower because the hourly rate of pay for working on weekends is higher.

So 4 staff on a Wednesday often cost less than 4 staff on a Saturday.
posted by Murderbot at 9:44 AM on December 14, 2019 [5 favorites]

There could be a variety of reasons why they don't have activities on weekends- one I can think of is that more people are using the library on the weekends so there might be space concerns. Another reason could be there wasn't turn out in the past. Or it could be that they don't have a person working on weekends who does programming. I think a lot of daytime programing that does happen is for daycares and nannies, and there is less of a demand on weekends because working families use that time to get things done.

I would go in and ask someone about it, and express and interest in having some. The best libraries respond to patron requests. I wouldn't mention that your organization does a story hour too- just because librarians can be weird about that (I say this as a school librarian who works with public librarians). If the library has a Friends of The Library group, you might join and find out more about why the library does things the way they do.
posted by momochan at 9:57 AM on December 14, 2019 [2 favorites]

Ask your library why. It could easily be the way it's always been done or we tried it but it was poorly attended. Then ask them to try some weekend programming. I lived in Colorado springs for a while, the library was open until 9 pm several nights, it was great.
posted by theora55 at 10:01 AM on December 14, 2019 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Note: this isn’t just one library. This is multiple libraries in two counties.
posted by sciencegeek at 10:09 AM on December 14, 2019

Public librarian here. No one really wants to work on weekends, including library staff, so libraries tend to have minimum staffing levels on weekends. That means fewer people free to run programs. Union rules can also contribute to this, as only certain classifications may be permitted to do programming.

And they do tend to have lower attendance than weekday mornings, I think because working parents have a lot of other things they are trying to fit in that time. (It seems like every kids activity is on Saturday mornings! I would totally take my toddler to a 4pm Saturday storytime, but no one ever offers that!)
posted by wsquared at 10:18 AM on December 14, 2019 [24 favorites]

Another public librarian chiming in to say the same - staffing is always limited on Saturdays. If you want more programming/more hours at your library, talk to higher up city officials about funding!
posted by tangosnail at 10:23 AM on December 14, 2019 [9 favorites]

With our local libraries, the Rhymetime sessions etc are specifically to get more people through the doors at quieter times, ie weekday mornings. There are already plenty of people there on the weekends.

And then there’s also the “societal good” factor of trying to offer support/company for SAHMs who might otherwise be isolated or struggling with PND, and for deprived families to get out of the house into a warm dry fun environment, for free. Our local children’s centres also have free stay&play sessions most mornings, for similar reasons. It’s not really aimed at dual-income middle class families, hence not timed with them in mind. We do live in a pretty deprived borough though, so I realise those kinds of considerations may not be relevant in leafy suburban areas.
posted by tinkletown at 3:24 PM on December 14, 2019 [3 favorites]

Because we are freakin' slammed and don't have the staff to dedicate to it. There are 200 people at any given time in my children's room and I'd love to offer additional programs, but I'm working the desk. Volunteers handle some other stuff but they get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of families and children who are coming in. It's a pity because I think a second showing for story time would go well, but we're fortunate to have an auditorium that gets booked pretty much every weekend with a performance or something. This is what going to a large branch gets you.

We're also not staffed like retail-- our union prevents us from making anyone work more than 2 Saturdays in a row. Sundays in NYC are also voluntary overtime, and we have a hard time offering them at all, let alone six-day service, when the budget gets cut. Having worked retail, the benefits to being scheduled like this are clear and compelling. i think we should be a little more reactive in staffing to traffic patterns, but I get why it's like this.

Our schedules are very humane, but we aren't funded well enough to add any more salaried professionals to take up the slack. Adding part-timers is fraught, to say the least, and also not a good long-term solution (part time weekend crowd person is essentially a dead-end job; consider that we all have masters' and corresponding debt loads.)

tl;dr hassle your neighbors about voting for the taxes that fund a society
posted by blnkfrnk at 4:40 PM on December 14, 2019 [10 favorites]

Small public library director here, and wsquared is right on for us. There are still plenty of parents, grandparents, and nannies coming to the weekday programs. We definitely are getting requests for more evening/weekend kids’ stuff, and make sure to do bigger special events at those times, but for story times it seems like it takes a weekly event to build an audience, and it’s hard to get staffing to cover that - it would mean one of our two youth services librarians coming in in addition to their monthly Saturday shift, or finding extra funding to hire someone just to do the Saturday story time. (Now that I’m thinking about it, it would be great to have a children’s librarian working Tues-Sat as their regular schedule, but I think that would be unusual for a library job in our area.)

I live in a town of 20,000, and they do have a Saturday morning story time monthly. As a working parent, I was really glad to see that they offered it! The times we’ve gone there have been two to four families there - and then we signed my preschooler up for a weekly gymnastics class that conflicted and haven’t been back. Turnout has been similar for a monthly weekday evening PJ story time in the smaller town where I work. So I can see why places might say “we tried that, but the attendance was too low to be worth it.”
posted by songs about trains at 4:40 AM on December 15, 2019 [2 favorites]

The demand does not meet the effort/cost required to set up weekend programming. If it takes, say, 4 hours of staff time to set up an hour long craft and story event, you get more return on that investment during the week than on weekends due to competing demands on kids and parents' time. I've put a lot of work into Saturday morning programming that was attended by one kid and simply cannot justify that on the regular.

It is also a lot easier to target a specific age group (pre-K) on weekdays. On weekends, if families actually show up, you need to have programming that can engage kids from pre-K all the way up to tweens. This requires still more staff resources and again for fewer people.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:43 AM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

It's the same way in my area, and not just with libraries -- every organization that offers kid programming does it at 10am on Tuesday. People have spoken to the funding/staffing reasons for libraries, but I'd also add that actually, there are a lot of people caretaking children (e.g. grandparents, nannies, people who don't have to work paid jobs) who don't work M-F 9-5--the demand for weekday programming is quite high. It does suck for those of us who would like to those opportunities but actually have to work during the week, but it's not like those programs are empty. Go sometime on a day off and you will see.
posted by epanalepsis at 5:42 AM on December 16, 2019

Another public librarian here--in our town at least there isn't a large demand for children's programs on the weekend. I'm guessing that families want to have a slower pace on weekend mornings, and in the afternoon they're at soccer games, doing errands, etc.
We do provide a simple family activity on Saturday mornings anyway, but staffing is also an issue--we are open six days and all full-time workers need to have two days off in a row, so that means we're always a bit low on staff on Mondays and Saturdays.
posted by exceptinsects at 10:22 AM on December 16, 2019