Best For
Curious kids aged six and up, art and history, families who like walking
Recommended Nights
4-5
Getting There
CDG or Orly, plus the Eurostar from London in 2 hours 15
Known For
The Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, parks on every other corner, bakeries that ruin bread for you forever
Why Paris Works With Kids, And Where It Does Not
Paris is the sort of place you imagine stepping into and falling in love with all over again. Then you get a whiff of urine on a metro staircase and that changes a few things.
Both are true at once. Parts of this city are genuinely exquisite. Parts of it are dirty and a bit sketchy. Every major metropolis made famous by the movies falls a little short of the movie, and Paris falls further than most because the movie was so good. Knowing that before you land is most of the battle. The families who struggle here are the ones who arrived expecting a film set and got a working capital of two million people instead.
What Paris does have, and what makes it work with children, is density. You are never more than a few minutes from a park, a bakery, a carousel, or a bench. The city is walkable when the weather cooperates and the Metro is easy, clean and cheap when it does not. Some of our best Paris moments came from walking with no destination at all, which is a strategy I now recommend on purpose rather than by accident.
Who It Suits
Families with kids who are old enough to look at things. Somewhere around six is where museums start landing. Kids who like drawing, building, stories, or anything with a knight or a king in it will find Paris very easy to love. It also suits parents who want a city break that is not exhausting to get around, because you genuinely can do this on foot and on one Metro line.
Who Should Skip It
Families with toddlers who need naps on a schedule, unless you are willing to build the whole day around going back to the apartment at one o clock. Families who want a beach or pool day in the middle of the week, because Paris has no such thing. And anyone whose whole reason for going is Disneyland Paris. That is a separate trip decision, not a Paris day trip, and I will explain why further down.
Getting Around
Times are honest, not optimistic. Metro is almost always faster than a taxi.
Pick Your Arrondissement Before You Pick Your Hotel
The 5th and 6th, Left Bank
My default answer for families. The Latin Quarter and Saint Germain put you inside walking distance of Notre Dame, the Jardin du Luxembourg and a hundred creperies, and the streets are narrow enough that they feel like a neighbourhood rather than a boulevard. Not the cheapest, but the one where you will use your feet instead of the Metro.
The 3rd and 4th, Le Marais
Flat, dense, full of playgrounds and falafel and small squares. Good for younger kids because everything is close together and the pavements are wide by Paris standards. Weekends get very busy and it is loud at night on the main streets, so ask for a room off the street.
The 12th, 14th or 15th
Where I send families who want to spend their money on food instead of square metres. These are residential arrondissements with real supermarkets, real parks, and apartments that fit five people without a connecting door. You will take the Metro more. You will pay a lot less.
A family apartment, not a hotel
Paris hotel rooms are small, and rooms that legally sleep four or five are rare and expensive. An apartment with a kitchen changes the maths completely, because the grocery stores here are a highlight rather than a compromise.
A connecting-room hotel near a park
If you want daily housekeeping and a lobby, look for hotels that publish connecting rooms and sit within two blocks of a green space. That combination is worth more than any amount of lobby marble when a child melts down at four in the afternoon.
Just outside zone 1
Basing a stop or two beyond the tourist core buys you space and drops the nightly rate hard. I have done the version of this where you park well outside Paris and take the train in, and it worked. Just check the walk from the station at night before you book.
The Museum Question, Answered Honestly
The Louvre is enormous. It is not a museum you finish. It is a museum you sample, and families who do not accept that in advance have a miserable afternoon.
Pick what matters to you before you go and head straight there. The Mona Lisa is smaller than you think and surrounded by people photographing their phones photographing the Mona Lisa. The rest of the museum is far more impressive and far less crowded, which is the single most useful thing I can tell you about the Louvre. Choose one wing. Do it properly. Leave.
The free day is the first Sunday of the month from October through March. If you are travelling on a budget that is your day, and it is how we did it, because we could not afford to pay. It is also, predictably, the busiest the building gets. The crowds dull the shine on the pieces. You still get to stand in front of them.
Not every museum here holds children equally, and pretending otherwise wastes your days. The ones that reliably work are the Cite des Sciences at La Villette, which is a proper hands-on science museum with a whole under-twelve zone, the Musee de la Chasse for the sheer strangeness of it, and the Orangerie, because it is small, it is two rooms of enormous water lilies, and you are out in forty minutes. The ones that do not work are the Musee d Orsay for under-eights, which is beautiful and completely lost on them, and the Pompidou for anyone who is not already interested in modern art.
How Long Kids Actually Last
Measured from walking in to the first serious complaint.
The Three That Earn Their Time
The Eiffel Tower
Here is the honest truth about it. The monument is covered in people trying to sell you things. Keychains. Selfie sticks. Little metal towers. Relentless, all the way around it, the same way it is at the pyramids in Egypt and at every famous landmark that has been loved by tourists for a hundred years. Go anyway. Stand in front of it. Take the photo. It is still magnificent. Just know what is coming so nobody in your family is rattled by it. Book summit tickets the morning they release or accept that you are seeing it from the Champ de Mars, which is honestly the better view of the thing itself.
The Louvre, one wing only
Timed entry, go at opening or go at five, and pick a single wing. Denon for the famous things and the Italian paintings. Richelieu for the French sculpture courtyards, which are covered, cool and half empty, and which children like far more than anyone predicts. The Code of Hammurabi is in Sully and it stopped me cold. Two hours is a good trip. Four hours is a bad one.
Ile de la Cite
Notre Dame and Sainte Chapelle sit five minutes apart on the same island. Notre Dame reopened and needs a reservation slot, which is free and goes quickly. Sainte Chapelle is the one I would fight for. It is one upstairs room of stained glass and it does something to children that no amount of explaining a cathedral ever manages. Half an hour, and they remember it for years.
Parks Are The Secret Weapon
Every hard day in Paris got easier the moment we stopped trying to fill it with monuments and let the kids loose in a park instead. Parisians do this well. Watch them and copy them.
Downtime Pick
The Jardin du Luxembourg, in the afternoon. We parked ourselves there for lunch and watched Paris get on with its weekend, and it remains one of the clearest memories I have of the city. There is a playground, a pond with rentable sailboats, chairs you can drag anywhere you like, and enough shade to survive August. Buy the bread and the cheese on the way in.
Five Things Worth Building A Day Around
Croissant au beurre
Jambon beurre
Crepe au chocolat
Macarons
Steak fritesNicole’s Perspective
We did Paris broke, and it was perfect
We went to France before we had kids. Adam and me, an RV, a very small budget and absolutely no idea how good it was going to be. We parked the RV outside of Paris and took the train in. We hit the Louvre on the free day of the month because we could not afford to pay. We ate croissants every single morning. We went to the grocery store more than any restaurant, because that is what you do when you are young and broke and in love and in France.
I have been to sixty plus countries since. France is still one of the places I think about most, and Paris is a smaller part of that than you would guess. What I remember is the park bench, the men in the berets, and the hour we spent doing nothing at all on the Left Bank. Not the queue for the Mona Lisa.
So when clients ask me how to do Paris with children, my answer is a lot less ambitious than they expect. Two big things. A lot of walking. A park every afternoon. Everything else is optional. If you want me to build it around your dates and your kids’ ages, that is what I do.
Versailles Is A Half Day That Eats A Full Day
Versailles, and how to not hate it
Everybody sells Versailles as a half day. It is not. The train is an hour each way, the security queue is real, the Hall of Mirrors is a slow shuffle through a crowd, and by the time you are out of the palace it is two o clock and everyone is finished. Budget the whole day or do not go.
The trick, and it is a big one, is to reverse the order. Go straight past the palace to the gardens first, rent bikes or the little train or just walk, let the kids run for two hours, eat, and then do the palace interiors in the late afternoon when the tour groups have gone. The gardens are the part children actually enjoy and almost every family does them last, exhausted.
If your kids are under seven, I would skip Versailles entirely and spend that day in Paris. Nobody under seven cares about Louis the Fourteenth, and you will have spent two hours on trains to prove it.
If You Are Going To Spend, Spend It On The View
A room with rooftops in it
Paris is a city where the expensive thing and the memorable thing are not always the same purchase. A three star Michelin dinner with three children is a bad idea and an enormous bill. A room high enough to see zinc rooftops and a slice of the Eiffel Tower from the window, on the other hand, gives you something the whole family looks at every morning and every night, and it turns the hotel into part of the trip rather than the place you sleep. If you are going to break the budget once in Paris, break it on the room, on the top floor, facing out. The second best version of the same idea costs nothing: go up the Arc de Triomphe at dusk.
Things I Would Tell A Friend Before They Booked
Go Deeper
The posts underneath this guide, written at the time rather than in hindsight.
Questions I Get About Paris
How many days do we need in Paris with kids?
Four nights. That gives you three full days plus arrival and departure, which is enough for the Eiffel Tower, one wing of the Louvre, Ile de la Cite, two parks and a boat. Add a fifth night if you want Versailles. Three nights works if you are ruthless about it and accept you will see less.
What is the best age to take kids to Paris?
Six and up is where it starts to click, and eight to thirteen is the sweet spot. Younger than six and you are managing naps and buggies on Metro stairs while paying peak city prices for museums nobody in the pram remembers.
Is the Louvre worth it with children?
Yes, for ninety minutes, in one wing, booked in advance. No, as a whole day. The building is enormous and treating it like a checklist is how families end up hating it. Pick your wing before you walk in.
Is Paris safe for families?
Yes, with normal city sense. Violent crime is not the issue. Pickpocketing and distraction scams around the big monuments and on the busiest Metro lines absolutely are, and they work on tired tourists with open bags. Zip everything, keep phones out of hands on escalators, and you will almost certainly have no problem at all.
Should we do Disneyland Paris on the same trip?
Only if you add nights for it. It is forty five minutes from the city and it is a two day park, so bolting it onto a four night Paris trip means both halves get squeezed. If Disneyland is the reason you are going, base out there and treat Paris as the add on rather than the other way round.
Do we need to speak French?
No, but you need to open with bonjour and try one sentence before switching to English. The reputation Paris has for rudeness is mostly a reputation for expecting that. Get that bit right and people are helpful.
Ready To Put Paris On The Calendar
Send me your dates and your kids’ ages and I will tell you which four days to book, which single wing of the Louvre to walk into, whether Versailles is worth a day for your family, and where to stay so that nobody is climbing Metro stairs with a stroller at bedtime.
Plan Your Paris Trip