Childcare options for guests who have to travel?

First of all, it is NOT necessary for you to help figure out other people's childcare, so don't stress! HOWEVER, I am also wanting to help out my friends with kids! We are going to offer a babysitter in a hotel room next to our venue, with an experienced child care professional to watch the kids. They will watch movies and have food and snacks, and I'm sure they will fall asleep! I work in a preschool, so we are using one of my coworkers, but there are resources like care.com that you can find people that could do this.

I find with families that have young children and the wedding is adult only, of there isn’t childcare available, one person will attend or both will send regrets.
If plane travel is involved, they may decide to not attend or have one parent attend even if kids are invited - plane fare is expensive!
Everyone has different comfort levels with babysitters for a number of reasons.It’s just one of the parts of having a big event, some people won’t be able to make it for various obligations.

I don't feel like it's anyone's obligation to find childcare other than the parents. Or change their 'no children' preference in order to accommodate someone with a child, for that matter. Same for any event or outing - if I invite you to dinner, I expect that you'll arrange your own childcare for the night or decline my invitation. I've seen a lot of brides on WW who are having an on site sitter, and that's extremely sweet and thoughtful, but not a requirement to have an adult only wedding.

Personally, we accepted that children will be at our wedding. We are asking guests to travel (because none of our family lives near us) so we won’t dictate if they bring their children or leave them at home with friends. Since we know there will be a number of children we are going to provide coloring pages, fish food (provided by our venue for the koi ponds), hot wheels cars, and our already planned yard games.

View Quoted Comment Since my own kids are grown, I’m getting stupid excited about personalized goody bags for the kids LOL
The event planner at the wedding suggested coloring books and crayons and I said I didn’t want to risk any drawing on the wall and she said “crayola washes off no problem, we do it all the time” so now I’m thinking the kids’ tables will be covered with butcher block paper.

I have been stressing about this, too. All of our guests are local save for two - my sisters. One is childless, but the other has one daughter. She is a major drama queen, and I already know she is going to make it my problem that I'm not welcoming children. (I'm afraid to even do the "we've reserved 2 seats in your honor" thing because I think she would assume that second seat is for her child and leave her husband at home! Yes, I am dead serious!) Worse, I fear my mom will side with her and I'll get a bunch of "I can't believe you won't invite L...." because this is her treasured only grandchild. I'm just dreading this entire scenario.

I personally think childcare is up to the parents to figure out, but I might have a different opinion if my guest list had a lot of families with young children! Out of our 150 guests (adults only), we only have 4 families with children young enough to require childcare, and only 2 of them are far enough away to require a hotel stay.

We hired a babysitter to be at our venue for the night. The venue provided space for the kids to be if needed.

In the end, she was more of an extra set of hands for the families, than someone handling the kiddos full time.

Our venue offers childcare during the reception for an extra fee (only like $15/hr), so we're doing that since we really don't want kids at the reception. It's definitely not necessary, but we do have some wedding party members with kids and wanted to have options available for them. The cost was within our budget, or else we would have just had to say no kids at all.

View Quoted Comment

This sounds like a good compromise

View Quoted Comment

Great idea!

You know I just had this conversation with one of my bridesmaids. Ma

Um.. ignore the previous message. so I was saying I was having this conversation with one of my bridesmaids. Her husband is the one not happy with the no child rule. They live out of state. So I am happy you posted this cause though I'm not responsible for their child care it's rather hard to arrange care for out if state.

View Quoted Comment That’s just weird. If she is this much lacking in social norms, you probably will have to explain the wedding invite is for her and her husband. Does she often not get things like that?

View Quoted Comment

Oh, she gets it. She just also thinks rules don't apply to her, and she loves her daughter a million times more than her husband (it's... quite a situation.) She takes her daughter with literally everywhere. I won't get into specifics since this is a public forum and not my thread, but it's definitely a unique situation and I fear it will be a battle. Of course, she also could completely surprise me by not even questioning that it's an adults-only event and I might be stressed for nothing. The problem is that she is insanely unpredictable, so I have to prepare for the worst.

View Quoted Comment Wow, she sounds ...intense LOL
I get being into your kids, I took mine everywhere with me but I didn’t go to do adults things LOL