Nashville With Kids: Family-Friendly Things to Do in Music City
- Briley Bell
- 24 hours ago
- 8 min read
By Briley Bell
Broadway is built for bachelorette parties, not bedtimes. It's neon, it's noisy, and there's a honky-tonk on every corner, fantastic at twenty-five, a much rougher ride when you've got a kid who'd rather be anywhere else. Step off the strip, though, and you'll find a Nashville that's just as real, and a lot more fun for the whole family. Planning Nashville with kids gets a lot simpler once you know where to look. Here are the best family-friendly stops in Nashville that'll make your time here memorable and fun for everyone!
Museums That Don't Feel Like Homework
The National Museum of African American Music
The National Museum of African American Music, on Broadway itself, is the one I send families to first. Kids get a wristband when they walk in, and every gallery lets them build their own playlist as they go, so by the time they leave they've got a personal soundtrack waiting on their phone. There's a gospel choir room where you can step in and sing along, and it's a real production, you stand in front of a green screen as Dr. Bobby Jones and the Nashville Super Choir appear around you. The rap booth is even more of a draw for kids. You can pick a song and rap along karaoke-style, or grab a beat and freestyle your own lyrics, and yes, you can challenge a sibling or a friend to a rap battle head to head. Everything you record in either room saves straight to your wristband, so families leave with an actual video of them singing and rapping!
The Country Music Hall of Fame
The Country Music Hall of Fame is the one everyone already knows about, and it's worth it. The Hall of Fame Rotunda is full of the kind of artifacts that make history click for a kid, whether it's a stage costume, a handwritten lyric sheet, or an old guitar that turns out to be attached to a song they love. A lot of kids especially gravitate toward the Taylor Swift Education Center, tucked inside the Country Music Hall of Fame, where you can see actual stage costumes, props, and instruments from her career. Kids can even sit down and try writing their own song, guided by interactive prompts built into the exhibit.
The Frist Art Museum
The Frist Art Museum is another one I steer families toward, and it surprises people every time. It's a real, world class art museum with rotating exhibitions, housed in a gorgeous 1930s Art Deco building that used to be Nashville's main post office. The part that wins kids over is the Martin ArtQuest Gallery upstairs, thirty interactive stations where they can paint, print, animate, and build their own pieces. Guests eighteen and under always get in free, which makes it one of the easier "yes" decisions of the whole trip.
Adventure Science Center
For the science-minded kid, the Adventure Science Center has over 175 hands-on exhibits, a planetarium, and a stunning view of the skyline. Some of the best exhibits for kids include:
BodyQuest- where you can crawl through the ventricles of a giant beating heart and take the infamous Colorectal Slide
Space Chase- which has a Moonwalker exhibit that simulates weightlessness,
Adventure Tower- which includes seven levels with a piano you play with your feet, a bike- powered elevator, and a walk-in globe at the very top.
Where the City Slows Down and Opens Up
Cheekwood Estate and Gardens
Cheekwood Estate and Gardens is 55 acres of botanical gardens built around a 1930s mansion. Even before you reach the kids' areas, the gardens themselves are worth slowing down for, sweeping lawns, seasonal blooms, and quiet paths that make the whole visit feel unhurried. The Bracken Foundation Children's Garden is designed specifically for kids, with most kids loving the outdoor TRAINS! exhibit where model trains wind through miniature Nashville landmarks.
Centennial Park
Closer to downtown, Centennial Park gives you a beautiful park to hang out in and a full-scale replica of the Parthenon, complete with a 42-foot statue of Athena and an entire art collection inside. It sounds like a strange thing to put in the middle of Tennessee, and honestly I can't say it isn't. It was built in 1897 for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition and just never left. Overall, this is the perfect spot for a chill day of hanging
around outside, with a bonus of seeing a random yet
incredibly cool art collection.
High-Energy Stops: All Gas, No Breaks
Great Big Game Show
Right around the corner, inside Opry Mills mall, Great Big Game Show puts your family on an actual game show stage, complete with buzzers, a spinning wheel, and a live host running you through team challenges. It's built for ages six and up and it's the rare activity where losing is still fun, mostly because nobody's actually watching from home.
The Adventure Park at Nashville
If you'd rather get them outside, The Adventure Park at Nashville, just west of downtown, is a self-guided treetop course with more than 160 platforms and over 30 ziplines strung through the trees. They also have a separate Adventure Playground built for kids three to six who aren't ready for the big ziplines yet.
Escape Experience: Nashville Escape Games (Downtown)
If your kids are a little older and lean more toward solving puzzles, Escape Experience is worth a stop. It's built for ages ten and up, groups of two to eight, and it's a great icebreaker for a family trip, especially the first day when everyone's still finding their footing with the city. You've got about an hour to work a room together, no screens involved, which is a nice change of pace.
Pins Mechanical Company
Right downtown, Pins Mechanical Company is duckpin bowling with a twist, smaller balls, three tries a frame, and it moves fast enough that even kids with a short attention span stay locked in. Beyond the lanes, there's a full arcade of pinball machines and classic games, giant lawn games, and oversized Jenga. There's also a full slide that drops you from the upstairs level straight down to the patio. Monday through Saturday, all ages are welcome until 8pm, then it's strictly 21+ with no exceptions. But every sunday, it stays open to all ages and kids bowl for free!
The Nashville Zoo
No family list is complete without it. The Nashville Zoo was built around the grounds of a historic 1810s farmstead, and it's grown into one of the better zoos in the Southeast. There's a petting zoo with farm animals, a jungle gym that doubles as one of the better playgrounds in the city, and a classic carousel. Beyond the play areas, the zoo houses more than 6,000 animals across immersive habitats and has the Soaring Eagle zip line, which lets older kids and adults soar right over parts of the zoo. Some of the animal habitats include: kangaroos, red pandas, komoto dragons, koalas, and more! Plan for a full day here rather than a quick stop, there's a lot to see!
When Nashville Gets Too Hot to Function
Nashville Shores:
Summer here gets brutal by July, and that's when Nashville Shores earns its keep. It's a full-scale water resort out in Hermitage, about fifteen miles east of downtown, with a wave pool, a lazy river, eight water slides, and a floating obstacle course out on the water!
SoundWaves at Gaylord Opryland Resort:
If you'd rather stay indoors year-round, SoundWaves at Gaylord Opryland Resort is worth knowing about. It's an upscale indoor water attraction kept at a steady 84 degrees, so it works just as well on a gray February afternoon as it does in the middle of a heat wave. There's a lazy river, a wave pool, and a kids' play area called Quarter Note Cove with sprinklers and a small slide built for the toddler set. However, you need to book the SoundWaves Experience Package, either as an overnight stay or a standalone party room reservation, so it's worth planning ahead rather than showing up and hoping to walk in.
Catch a Game & Cheer On Our Home Teams
Nashville Sounds (Baseball)
The Nashville Sounds, the Triple-A affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers, play at First Horizon Park in Germantown, at 19 Junior Gilliam Way. It opened in 2015 and it's built for exactly this kind of outing, with a guitar-shaped scoreboard, a mascot named Booster who works the crowd, and a birthday shoutout on the big screen if you plan ahead and book one. The season runs spring through early fall, tickets are cheap by pro sports standards, and there's something truly relaxing about a minor league game that a big league stadium can't replicate.
Nashville Predators (Ice Hockey)
Come fall and winter, the Nashville Predators take over Bridgestone Arena downtown, right at the head of Broadway near 5th Avenue. It's an NHL arena, so it's a bigger production than the ballpark, loud, fast, and definetly one of the more electric buildings in the league on game night. Families get a Mother's Lounge with nursing chairs, changing tables throughout the building, and a concourse floor literally designed to look like a guitar fretboard, because this is still Nashville even inside a hockey rink. If your kids have never seen live hockey, the speed of it tends to win them over in about five minutes, even the ones who came in skeptical.
Save the Evening for a Ghost Tour
Nashville Adventures Walking Tours
Here's the thing about kids and ghost stories. They don't scare them off, they draw them in. Every single tour I've ever led, it's the eight to twelve year olds asking the sharpest follow up questions. Our Nashville Haunted Ghost Tour is built to work for families. It starts at Church Street Park and winds its way through downtown toward Printers Alley, mixing real history with the legends that have grown up around it along the way. Nobody's trying to give your kid nightmares. The goal is that specific kind of spooked but grinning feeling, the same one you get around a campfire when the story gets good. It runs about ninety minutes, and it's the kind of thing that turns a regular evening into the story your kids tell their friends when they get home. If ghost stories aren't your family's thing, or you'd rather do something in daylight, we've also got the History, Highlights, and Hacks Tour built the same way, family-friendly and an hour and a half long. And if you're looking for a night out without the kids, we run adults-only options too,
including a cemetery tour, a whiskey and moonshine walk through downtown, and more!
The Family Friendly Nashville They'll Actually Remember
Every one of these places tells you something true about this city that Broadway never will. Nashville raised the National Museum of African American Music and a botanical garden inside the same twenty square miles it built its honky-tonks in, and that's the version of the city I want families to leave with. If you want it all tied together with a story, that's what Nashville Adventures Walking Tours are for! Come find us on the sidewalk and book your tour at Nashville Adventures.
Briley Bell is the kind of person Nashville produces once in a while. By night, she leads Nashville Adventures' ghost tours through the city's haunted corners, spinning stories of Civil War soldiers, restless spirits, and the kind of history that doesn't stay buried. By day, she's a musician and audio engineer with a sound that's all her own. Her music has the same quality as her storytelling: it pulls you in, holds you still, and leaves you thinking about it longer than you expected.
Give her music a listen and follow her socials: Click Here
