Kids Party Venues in St. Louis: 9 Great Spots

The default answer in St. Louis for anyone under about eight. Three floors of hands-on exhibits in Kirkwood, built entirely for small children, and a birthday programme that splits three ways: a themed party with activities and your own host, a private party that hands your group one of the exhibits for a while, and a Celebrate Littles option in a playroom made for the youngest guests.

All three pair an hour in a private party room with all-day museum admission, which is what makes the format work — the room takes the cake and the presents, the museum takes everything else. The Magic House also runs parties at MADE for Kids, its maker-space satellite on Delmar, which is the better call once your guest list has aged past dressing up as a firefighter.

Forest Park's science museum, and the venue that gives you most for least fuss: the McDonnell Planetarium, an OMNIMAX theater, flight simulators, a makerspace, and a Discovery Room built for children from six months to six years. The Science Center's own line is that entry is always free, so the guests you did not budget for are not a problem.

A party books a private room for an hour with a food and beverage attendant, pizzas and drinks, table covers and five parking passes. Read the decoration rules before you shop: candles, helium balloons, confetti, glitter and piñatas are all prohibited, and everything must be free-standing or table-top. Parties have to be booked at least three weeks ahead and paid in full at booking.

A 600,000 square foot former shoe warehouse that the artist Bob Cassilly turned into a climbing frame in 1997: hidden tunnels, towering slides, secret passages, an outdoor village and a Ferris wheel. Calling it a museum undersells it badly. For a child of about seven upward this is the venue here they will still be describing at Christmas.

The Birthday in the City package books a two-hour party area with tables, a pizza meal with drinks, and general admission for the day, so nobody has to leave when the cake is finished. The catch is lead time: the museum asks for 28 business days' notice, with the reservation and a deposit due 28 days out. Everyone should arrive in clothes they can crawl in.

The aquarium built into St. Louis Union Station, and the least stressful downtown party here to actually reach — parking comes with the booking. Ambassador animals, a stingray feeding and a mascot called Shark Twain do the entertaining, so nobody in your family has to plan a single game.

There are two shapes to choose between. The simpler one is admission for your group with a scavenger hunt, crowns and a gift for the birthday child, run any time the aquarium is open, on a ratio of one free chaperone per six children. The bigger one adds ninety minutes in a private party space plus the animal encounter and the stingray feeding, and it goes at 9:30am, midday or 3pm — so the aquarium picks your start time, not you. Payments are nonrefundable.

West county's quiet option, and the right one when the birthday child would rather look at something than bounce on it. An 8,000 square foot glass conservatory in Faust Park with more than a thousand tropical butterflies flying free around your guests, an insect zoo of things with too many legs, and a seasonal native butterfly garden outside.

It is run by the Missouri Botanical Garden and has classrooms and a theater space alongside the conservatory, so a party has somewhere to sit that is not the floor. Our honest read is that it suits the under-eights: the conservatory is warm, humid and deliberately slow, and a pack of ten-year-olds will have walked it in a quarter of an hour.