New York is a better city for children than its reputation suggests. It is dense, so distances between things are short. It has an enormous amount of free green space. The food is fast, informal and available at any hour. And the sheer visual noise of the place does a lot of the entertaining for you.
What it is not is a city where you can run an adult itinerary with children attached. The constraints are real: the subway has stairs and very few lifts, the pavements are crowded, public toilets barely exist, and a day that would be brisk for two adults will break a seven-year-old by two in the afternoon.
Plan short days, keep the walking under four miles, and build in a park every afternoon.
Day one: Midtown and the park
Morning. Grand Central Terminal — the whispering gallery is a genuinely good trick and children love it. Then Bryant Park, which has a carousel, free games, and space to run.
Midday. Top of the Rock, booked for late morning. Going up a very tall building is the single most reliably successful thing you can do with children in New York. The lift ride at One World Observatory is a better ride, if you would rather do that one.
Afternoon. Central Park from the south end: the Pond, the Carousel, Heckscher Playground — the largest in the park — and the Zoo, which is small and good for under-eights. Rowing boats on the Lake in season.
Evening. Early dinner, somewhere with a counter. Nobody in New York minds children in restaurants before seven.
Day two: the Natural History Museum and the west side
Morning. The American Museum of Natural History, at opening. This is the best thing in New York for children by a wide margin — the blue whale, the dinosaurs, the dioramas, the butterfly vivarium in the Gilder Center. Add a planetarium show if the timing works.
Use the 81st Street subway entrance, which opens straight into the museum’s lower level and skips the steps and the queue outside.
Afternoon. Straight into Central Park from the museum’s back door. Belvedere Castle, the Turtle Pond, and the Ramble if the children like getting lost, which most do.
Or, if the weather is bad, stay in the museum. Four hours in there is entirely normal.
Day three: downtown and the water
Morning. Staten Island Ferry from Whitehall. Free, twenty-five minutes, a real boat, past the Statue of Liberty. Children get more out of this than they do out of the Liberty Island trip, which is mostly queueing.
Then The Battery: Castle Clinton, and the SeaGlass Carousel, which is a genuinely strange and lovely ride inside a glass nautilus.
Midday. Walk or take the subway to the Oculus — a spectacular room and, usefully, indoors with toilets and food.
The 9/11 Museum is recommended for ten and up. The plaza is fine at any age, and explaining the two voids to a child is a conversation worth having.
Afternoon. Ferry or subway to Brooklyn Bridge Park. Jane’s Carousel, the Pier 6 playground with the sandpit and the water play, the beach at Pier 4, and the skyline from the Granite Prospect.
Walk back over the Brooklyn Bridge if the children are good for another mile. Otherwise the F train from York Street.
Day four: pick one
Depending on age and weather:
Coney Island — forty minutes on the D, F, N or Q. The Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel, the beach, the aquarium, and hot dogs. A full day and a proper one.
The Bronx Zoo — 265 acres, the Congo Gorilla Forest, the monorail. Pay-what-you-wish on Wednesdays and busy for it.
The Intrepid — an aircraft carrier with a Space Shuttle, a Concorde and a submarine you walk through. Ages seven and up, roughly.
A Yankees or Mets game — three hours, cheap midweek tickets, and the food is part of it.
The practical problems
Toilets. There is no public network worth relying on. The answer is: museums, department stores, Bryant Park (which has genuinely good ones), hotel lobbies, and chain coffee shops. Go when you see one, not when you need one.
Subway lifts. Only about a quarter of stations have them and they are frequently out of service. Check the MTA’s accessible station map if you are travelling with a pushchair, or plan to carry it up stairs, which is what most New York parents do. Buses all kneel and have ramps, and are a better option than the subway with a pushchair, if slower.
Distances. Twenty blocks north–south is a mile. Crosstown blocks are three times longer than they look on a map.
Food. Diners, delis, pizza by the slice and Shake Shack solve almost every problem. Chinatown, the Lower East Side and Hell’s Kitchen all feed a family for far less than Midtown.
Timing. Museums at opening, parks in the afternoon, dinner at six. Reverse that and the day falls apart.
What to skip
Times Square with small children after dark is loud, crowded, and full of costumed characters who want money. Broadway shows under about age six are a gamble even for the family-friendly titles. And a second observation deck is money that would be better spent on the aquarium.