How Children Change the Pace of a Day
Children at a wedding are, photographically, one of the best things that can happen. They are the only guests entirely unbothered by being looked at, they produce genuine expressions without being asked, and they give the adults around them something to react to. They also change the rhythm of the day, and a schedule built for adults will not survive contact with them. Knowing that in advance is most of the work.
Children run on their own clock
A wedding schedule is a series of adult agreements. People wait politely, sit through things, and hold on until the next thing. Children have no such contract. They are hungry when they are hungry, and they reach the end of their patience at whatever point they reach it, usually about twenty minutes before anybody planned.
What this means practically is that anything you want children in should happen early. Not because they behave better earlier, though they usually do, but because a child who has been sitting still through a ceremony and an hour of drinks has already spent their willingness. Asking them for a formal photograph after that is asking for something they no longer have.
The processional is a gamble worth taking
Sending small children down an aisle is genuinely unpredictable. They may walk perfectly. They may stop halfway and sit down. They may spot their mother and abandon the entire enterprise.
Every one of those outcomes photographs well, which is why it is worth doing anyway. The frames people treasure from a processional are almost never the ones where a flower girl performed correctly. They are the ones where something went sideways and the whole congregation laughed. A child refusing to move, and a room of guests delighted by it, is a better photograph than a child walking neatly.
The only real preparation is to decide in advance that whatever happens is fine, and to let the officiant and the wedding party know that too. A processional where the adults are visibly anxious about a child is the one version that does not photograph nicely.
Family photographs: children first, always
If there is one piece of ordering advice worth following, it is this. Any group photograph that includes children should be done at the very start of the family session, and those children should then be released.
The usual approach works down a list in order of formality, which puts the youngest people in the group somewhere in the middle, by which time they have been standing on grass in uncomfortable clothes for a while. Reversing it costs nothing and changes the whole session. The children are fresh, the photographs are quick, and everybody else is more relaxed for the rest of it because nobody is managing a toddler.
The long middle of the day
The stretch between the ceremony and the meal is the hardest part of a wedding for children. Adults are drinking and talking, there is nothing structured happening, and it goes on for a while. This is when things unravel.
It is also when the incidental photographs of children are at their best, if they have something to do. Children who are occupied are wonderful to photograph. Children who are bored are simply having a bad time, and that is what shows.
- Somewhere to be. A corner with a rug, some space to run, something to play with. It does not need to be elaborate.
- Somebody watching them who is not a parent. This is as much a gift to your guests as to you; parents who are on duty all evening do not get to enjoy the wedding, and it shows in every photograph of them.
- Food before the adults eat. A hungry child at a long dinner is a whole separate event.
- Permission to leave. Making it clear that families are welcome to slip away after dinner takes the pressure off everyone.
What children give you that adults cannot
The photographs that make people stop when they look through a wedding gallery are frequently the ones with children in them. There are reasons for that beyond sentimentality.
Children are unselfconscious in front of a camera, so the frames are honest in a way that adult photographs have to work for. They also change the adults around them: a grandfather who is stiff in every posed photograph will forget himself entirely while lifting a grandchild. And they provide scale and story, a sense that this is a family across generations rather than a set of guests at an event.
They also do the thing nobody plans for, which is to be completely absorbed in something irrelevant during a solemn moment. A child inspecting a flower during the vows is not a distraction from the photograph. It very often is the photograph.
If you have decided on an adults-only wedding
That is an entirely reasonable choice and plenty of couples make it. It changes the gallery, in that the day will read as more formal and more contained, and that may be exactly the day you want.
The one thing worth doing is deciding early and communicating it clearly and kindly, because ambiguity here causes more upset than the decision itself. And if a small number of children are exceptions, be specific about who, so that nobody arrives having guessed wrongly.
Weddings with children move in fits and starts, run slightly behind, and contain at least one small crisis involving a spilled drink. They also tend to produce the warmest galleries. If children are part of your day, build the schedule around their tempo rather than fighting it, and let the rest happen.
