Inside the dimly lit lobby of Ragtag Cinema and Uprise Bakery in downtown Columbia, moviegoing parents make their way into one of two theaters to watch “The Social Reckoning” or “Sense and Sensibility.” But their kids are next door.
In addition to the cost of their tickets, these cinephiles paid $20 per child for supervised care for three and a half hours at a school next door to the theater.
For parents, going out to a movie can require more planning than just picking a showtime. It often means arranging childcare and coordinating schedules. Ragtag (a financial supporter of KBIA) hosted a Parents Night Out event with supervised child care available through Escuelita Alegría, a school adjacent to the theater.
Ragtag Executive Director Andrea Luque Káram said the idea came from her own experience as a parent, and considering what it takes for parents to attend events without their children.
“I was really interested in finding the gaps in our audiences that I could help fill, and Parents Night Out was a great idea to bring the parents back to the movies,” Luque Káram said.
In addition to the cost of their movie tickets, parents paid $20 per child for three and a half hours of care. Luque Káram said she and cinema director Tim Pilcher, who are the only parents in the organization, considered several scenarios of what rate to charge before opening registration.
She said they chose the fee to keep it as affordable as possible without causing cost to Ragtag or to the Spanish immersion preschool.
“Because a babysitter charges anywhere between $15, $22 per hour, it feels like a great deal to be doing $20 per kid for three, three and a half hours,” Luque Káram said.
More expensive for a movie, but cheaper for child care
Various websites offering to connect parents with local sitters in Columbia say the typical cost is around $15-$20 per child per hour. Luque Káram said the goal of the event was not to generate revenue for Ragtag, but to provide a space for parents to spend an evening in the community.
For Alejandro Figueroa and his partner, the event offered a chance to go out together while supporting two local organizations. Figueroa has two daughters, ages 5 and 8, and said he and his partner try to go out without them about once a month, though it can be difficult with their schedules.
“We're both working parents, and we do have an amazing babysitter, but kind of lining up our three schedules gets kind of complicated, and definitely, the cost is also something we need to take into account,” Figueroa said.
He also said they found their babysitter through a camp their daughter attended several summers ago, and she’s been able to stay with the family for years, which he said is incredibly rare.
Apart from personal connections and recommendations, Figueroa said he can’t really imagine how parents would find a sitter they could depend on.
“That is kind of a common theme of being a parent these days is trouble finding people that are reliable, they are good, and they are also affordable,” Figueroa said.
Other families have different arrangements. Haille Norris and her partner have 5-and a half-year-old twins and two sets of grandparents nearby to help with childcare. But because they already rely on them for other kinds of help, they don’t often ask their parents to babysit just so they can go out.
“A lot of times we don't get to actually ask for a date night like this,” Norris said. “I think we don't really, we don't typically even go out of our way to like seek out childcare for a date night specifically like this.”
Luque Káram said they received multiple requests for registration the day before the event, but had already hit capacity, with 12 children registered the night before the event.
There are currently no plans to hold a similar event again, but childcare remains a struggle for Missouri. Nearly two-thirds of the state’s counties have been labeled “child care deserts,” meaning childcare is either too expensive, too far away or not plentiful enough.