For the last few years, the Ridge Theare has been offering Movies 4 Mommies, a special daytime, weekday showing featuring reduced sound, a changing area and stroller parking. Andrea points out that Cineplex and Famous Players have followed suit.
Of course, cinemas have been sensitive to parents for years. In the fifties and sixties, crying rooms were commonplace in theatres. I believe the Ridge, coincidentally, features the last one in Vancouver. I imagine newer theatres don’t have crying rooms because it’s, relative speaking (in terms of revenue per square foot), wasted space. Additionally, with the rise of the video store and the DVD, far fewer parents go out to the movies.
Now, if only the movie theatres would offer a Complete and Utter Silence showing, wherein the tiniest murmur was punished with 50 lashes, I’d be there every week.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Thanks for the link, Darren. Do fewer parents go to movies? I thought the video revolution simply gave parents another at-home option for their Friday nights. Although Faith Popcorn calls it “cocooning”, many demographers say parents have been staying at home for decades. I’m not sure videos have cut into the parents-with-kids movie market. It probably wasn’t very big before — crying rooms went out of fashion 40 years ago.
Amen to a “silent audience” showing.
You have some company in the quest for a “silent audience” theater…
See the discussion at the talk section of MetaFilter.
The Ridge rocks. It’s easily my favourite theatre in Vancouver. Sure you don’t always get all the new release movies you want, but they deliver with the foreign and short-run gems. They also often pair up movies of a kind in logical or oddly compelling pairs for the double bill. Lastly, they have the best popcorn in Vancouver, as I’ve exhaustively documented in my blog post, Popcorns of Vancouver Theatres.