Who's Actually Holding the Handbag? Designing Play Sessions for the Grown-Up Who Isn't Mum or Dad

Here's a number we didn't expect when we started properly logging who walks through the door at our sessions: roughly a third of the adults accompanying children to a Pop Up & Play Co. event are not the child's parent.

They're grandmothers on the Tuesday school run. Registered childminders with three under-fives in tow. Nannies who've been up since six and will be doing the tea-time handover at half five. And until recently, we designed for them by accident.

So we stopped, grabbed a notebook, and spent a fortnight interviewing the other grown-ups across three towns — a leisure centre foyer in Stockport, a village hall in Somerset and a church hall in Gateshead. What they told us was humbling.

The Sightline Is the Seat

"I don't sit," Margaret, 71, told us in Stockport, "but I need somewhere to put my bag and my knee." She's not being difficult. Arthritis means she can't get down onto the low soft seating we'd smugly installed, and standing for ninety minutes isn't an option either.

What she wanted — and what several grandparents echoed — was a proper-height chair, positioned at the edge of the play space, facing in. Not a bench shoved against a wall. Not a corner facing the tea urn. A chair with a sightline.

Nannies, meanwhile, wanted the opposite problem solved: somewhere to perch with the children, because they're often managing a baby on their hip and a toddler on the wobble bridge. Mixed-height seating — some adult chairs, some soft blocks — beat any single solution we tried.

The Toilet Test Nobody Sets

If you want to hear a childminder get animated, mention the toilets.

"I've got three children I can't leave alone for ten seconds," said Priya, a registered childminder in Somerset. "If the changing facilities are down a corridor and through two fire doors, we're not coming back."

She's right, and she's representative. Childminders operate under Ofsted ratios and a duty of care that means a distant toilet isn't an inconvenience — it's a dealbreaker. Accessible facilities, baby changing that isn't inside a disabled loot that's already occupied, and a route that doesn't involve abandoning the other children: these are booking factors, not nice-to-haves.

We now walk our venue checklist with a childminder's day in mind before we sign anything.

Midweek Is Their Weekend

Here's the commercial bit that surprised our bookings team: the non-parent grown-ups are overwhelmingly midweek customers.

Grandparents doing childcare on Mondays and Tuesdays. Childminders who structure their week around outings because the weekend belongs to the parents. Nannies whose charges' parents book them into activities on Wednesdays.

Yet most family event programming clusters at weekends, chasing the parent market. The midweek sessions we run are routinely quieter and more loyal — the same faces, week after week, because options are thin on the ground.

A Tuesday morning session with proper seating and sensible toilets isn't a compromise slot. It's an underserved market with a built-in habit of showing up.

Design for the Person Paying Attention

The common thread in every conversation was this: the other grown-ups are watching more closely. A parent at a session is often half-distracted, phone in pocket, catching up with a mate. A grandparent or childminder is there to observe, engage and get home safely by three.

They notice the sharp corner. They clock the missing gate on the soft play frame. They appreciate a staff member who learns their name rather than defaulting to "Mum" — a small thing that came up more than once, and stung more than we expected.

Designing for them doesn't cost more. It costs attention: a chair with a view, a toilet within sight, a midweek slot, a name remembered.

If you run family events, here's our challenge: look at your next session and count the adults who aren't the parent. Then ask whether a single thing in the room was built with them in mind. Ours wasn't, once. Now it's the first question we ask.