This year’s Festival program, Youth and the Future of Culture, highlighted youth-centered and youth-led projects and organizations, but nowhere else were children’s individual and collective folklore celebrated more than in the Family Activities area.

Amid the sounds of youth poet laureates, the Stax Music Academy, Bolivian hip-hop artists, mariachis, laughter, and conversations across the National Mall sat the Family Activities tent. Each year, the tent serves as an anchor for children and families to engage in activities created specifically with them in mind. From coloring sheets inspired by Myaamia daily life, cardboard building blocks inspired by the building trades, and daily collaborative murals, each activity this year connected with a different program area to serve as a saturated experience for children to have fun and learn about the Festival firsthand.

My fellow intern, Morgan Joiner, and I spent the months leading up to the Festival coordinating these family-friendly activities rooted in the cultural heritage. We believed that we had thought of every scenario but were quickly surprised to find that children gravitated toward the beach balls and dance hoops scattered in the grass. Our meticulously curated games and crafts were sometimes overshadowed by the joy of play!

Our tent was adjacent to the Learning Together program area, which emphasized the theme of intergenerational learning: skills passed down from one generation to the next. Each child or young adult in the families represented are exceptionally talented in their craft. In this context, surrounded by families of ranchers, weavers, and luthiers, Family Activities tent served as an equalizer for families of all ages to engage with play through freely available, simple materials and toys.

Each child, parent, and group became a culture bearer in the realm of beach balls and dance hoops, teaching new games and ways of playing with these toys. Simply swinging the hoop in circles around their hips, playing volleyball, playing “don’t let the ball touch the ground,” trying to throw the beach balls through the hoops, or creating hopscotch games with the hoops on the ground—we were amazed by the endless options for iterations of a seemingly simple game. Visitors who spent time in Family Activities shifted from spectators to participants through play.

Family Activities has not always looked the same. The long history of children’s programming at the Festival ties back to one woman. Kate Hughes Rinzler—an artist, dancer, educator, and wife of Festival co-founder Ralph Rinzler—organized the first Children’s Program in 1974. Her work as an artist, dancer, and mother inspired her to study the way children move and transform their energies. She developed and ran the Children’s Area from 1974 to 1979, inviting tradition bearers, storytellers, and musicians and encouraging children to share their folklore in tandem.

Prior to Kate’s involvement, the Festival’s programming and activities for children were developed by adults. Kate innovated methods to empower children in deciding what to play and what to share. By creating a space with an ease of materials and the ability for children to improvise and manipulate games, she encouraged children’s active participation in expressing their own folklore and practices.

As the 1975 program book notes, “the Children’s Area was created to celebrate children’s folklife—those things that children teach each other and pass from one generation to the next through friends and siblings.” Kate studied the evolution and variations of children’s games in disparate settings and climates. She noticed stability despite different upbringings in activities such as marbles, kites, hopscotch, drawings, and rhyme games, and brought those traditions to the National Mall.

Kate was an innovator in understanding that children have their own play and their own approach to culture, without adult intervention, although she found opportunities for intergenerational learning as well. “Sometimes grownups teach the traditional games and play parties that they remember so lovingly from their own childhoods,” the 1976 program book explains. Kate’s work transformed visiting families’ participation within the Festival, combining the role of spectator and participant.

Before and after Kate’s revolutionary children’s programs, children have been in Festivals as parts of groups and families, but her programs made them primary participants rather than supporting characters. She recognized the agency of children through her research and personal experience. Since then, the children and family areas at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival owe its existence to the pioneering research done by Kate Rinzler.

In developing family-friendly programming in 2025, it takes a village. Longtime Festival staff members like Betty Belanus and Arlene Reiniger—assisted by generations of interns and volunteers—have spent years doing just that. They always find that magic lies in the creative process of play and how children can reinterpret and manipulate games to tell their own unique stories.

As Betty advised us this year, “You have to think like a kid and give them the materials to see what they do.”

Shannon Perry is a program intern at the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival and a master’s student in museum studies at the George Washington University.