Where should you stay in Paris with kids? It's the question every parent asks before booking, and the honest answer is: probably not where the guides send you.
Every list recommends the 5th, the 6th, the Marais. They're beautiful. They're also expensive, crowded, built on cobbles and staircases, and designed for adults who don't need a nap at two in the afternoon.
I've lived here with two small children, and if you asked me which arrondissement to pick with a baby or a toddler, I'd tell you the 13th. Nobody says that. Let me explain why they're wrong.
The one step-free metro line runs through it
I've written before about how brutal the Paris metro is with a stroller. Sixteen lines, and exactly one of them is fully step-free: Line 14.
Line 14 runs through the 13th. That single fact should decide your accommodation, and most visitors don't know to look for it. Staying here means you can get across the city without carrying a stroller up a staircase, which sounds like a small thing until it's day four and your arms are finished.
Parc de Choisy is a real park, not a photo opportunity
It's big. Properly big. There's a playground, a sandpit, a carousel, a picnic area, water points, activities, and enough mature trees to survive a heatwave in the shade.
What I like most is that it's full of people who live here. Grandparents, childminders, families, teenagers doing nothing in particular. It's a neighbourhood park doing what a neighbourhood park should do, rather than a landscaped view with a fence around the grass.
The indoor secrets: a médiathèque and a ludothèque
Two places I recommend constantly, and that no guidebook mentions.
The Médiathèque Jean-Pierre Melville on rue Nationale was recently renovated, and it's a genuinely lovely building — big windows, comfortable sofas, a proper children's section, and clean toilets, which matters more than anyone admits when you have a toddler. It's air-conditioned, silent, and free, and nobody will ask you to buy anything.
Then there's the Ludothèque on square Dunois, which is the real find. It's a toy library: building blocks and figurines and puzzles for the little ones, a big playhouse, a sensory room, board games for older children, video games for teenagers. Annual membership is genuinely affordable, and the team is wonderful with children. On a rainy afternoon it will save your day. Be warned that it can get loud — it's popular, and there aren't many places like it.
The most cosmopolitan corner of Paris
The 13th holds Paris's Asian quarter — historically Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodian, Laotian — and it has become something broader than that: one of the most genuinely mixed parts of the city.
Go to the park on a Saturday and you'll hear five or six languages in twenty minutes. Mixed couples raising mixed children is simply what the neighbourhood looks like. Nobody performs diversity here, and nobody remarks on it. It just is.
For a visiting family, that has a very practical consequence: your children will not be the odd ones out. If your family is multilingual, or mixed, that's Tuesday here. Nobody looks twice. I've watched parents visibly relax after a few days in this neighbourhood, and I don't think they could always tell you why.
You will eat extraordinarily well, for very little
This is the part I'd move here for on its own.
The Asian restaurants in the 13th are the best in Paris and they cost a fraction of what you'd pay in the centre. Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Cambodian, Laotian — proper family restaurants where a table of four eats for what one main course costs near Saint-Germain. Bubble tea on practically every corner, which will buy you approximately forty minutes of toddler cooperation.
And then there's Tang Frères, the enormous Asian supermarket with two branches in the neighbourhood. If you're in an apartment and cooking for your family, this is where you shop: fresh produce, fruit you've never seen before, and prices that make central Paris look absurd. If you're visiting from a smaller town where none of this is available, it's genuinely a destination in itself. (The avenue d'Ivry branch is closed on Mondays.)
The Butte-aux-Cailles: a village on a hill
Up above the flat part of the arrondissement there's the Butte-aux-Cailles, which feels like a village that Paris grew around and then forgot to modernise. Low houses, cobbled streets, cafés with terraces.
And its swimming pool, which is an art deco building fed by an artesian spring. There's a big indoor pool and two outdoor ones, entry costs a few euros for adults and less for children, and on a hot day it's the best value in Paris. Two warnings: swimming caps are compulsory for everyone, and men must wear fitted trunks rather than loose shorts — they'll sell you both on site, but it's cheaper to arrive prepared. It gets crowded at peak times, so go early.
The riverside, and a very good ice cream at midnight
The eastern edge of the 13th, along the Seine, is the newest part of the arrondissement and worth an evening.
The Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand sits here — four enormous glass towers around a sunken forest, and one of the great pieces of modern Paris architecture. You don't need a reader's card to walk around the esplanade and look at it, and children tend to find the scale of it hilarious.
Just below, on avenue de France, there's an Amorino that stays open until nearly midnight, every day. This is our summer ritual: walk down after dinner when it's finally cooled off, eat ice cream outside at ten at night, walk back. It costs almost nothing and my children talk about it more than most museums.
And from there you're a few minutes from Cour Saint-Émilion, just across the river in the 12th — old cobbled wine warehouses turned into a pedestrian street of cafés and shops, with the Parc de Bercy attached. The park is large and calm, with ponds and bridges, and a small Japanese garden tucked inside it. It's one of the loveliest evening walks in Paris with a stroller, and almost entirely flat.
What the 13th is not, and why I don't mind
I'll be honest about the trade-offs, because I'd rather you arrive knowing.
It isn't the prettiest arrondissement. There are 1970s tower blocks. It isn't especially manicured either — like most of Paris outside the centre, it's kept less carefully than the postcard districts, and you'll notice.
What it isn't short of, though, is somewhere to go. Italie 2 is a proper shopping centre at Place d'Italie, with a cinema, restaurants and everything you'd need on a rainy afternoon. It's not glamorous, but it's genuinely useful with children, and it's five minutes from anywhere in the neighbourhood.
What you get instead of the postcard is a neighbourhood where people actually live, at prices among the gentlest in Paris.
And no, you don't have to choose
Here's the thing I want to be clearest about, because it's the objection everyone raises: staying in the 13th does not mean giving up central Paris.
Line 14 will put you at Châtelet, Saint-Lazare, Gare de Lyon, Madeleine or Opéra in about fifteen minutes, without a single staircase. You can have breakfast in your quiet neighbourhood, be at the Louvre by ten, and be back for a cheap extraordinary dinner and an ice cream by the river.
You're not choosing between the real Paris and the postcard one. You're choosing where to sleep, and where to spend your money. The centre is still right there — you just don't have to pay 400 euros a night to be inside it, or carry a stroller up four flights of stairs to get home.
So: which arrondissement should you actually pick?
If you're travelling with children, and what you actually need is a step-free metro line, a huge park, cheap excellent food, a library and a toy library for the rainy days, an evening walk along the river, and a neighbourhood where a loud multilingual family is completely unremarkable — then the 13th is where I'd tell you to stay. Every time.
And if you need a few hours off
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