After 10 years of operation, the owners of Kids Unplugged, a children’s play gym in Belfast, are looking to sell the business.
The owners of the gym, Lee Parent and Brittany Tarbox, aren’t in a rush to sell, Parent said. But they want to pursue other projects. And their children, some of whom were in diapers when the gym opened, have mostly “aged out” of the space, Parent said.
“My hope is that we could find the right people to run this place and love it,” Parent said, watching a toddler tiptoe across a room-sized indoor sand box.
So far, about 10 people have contacted her to talk about buying the business, Parent said. She and her business partner are open to different scenarios including having a co-op or group take over and working out a long transition to ensure continuity.
The gym, located in an industrial space on Airport Road, has one large room of gymnastics equipment including a trampoline, balance beams and tumbling mats. A second room is outfitted with a climbing wall, a multi-level play structure, slides and swings. There is also an art lab and a birthday party room.
Parent said she set out to make the place she needed while raising young kids – a space where kids and parents can relax and play together without digital distractions. She encourages grown-ups not to let the children have all the fun: “They can hang on everything, make forts, jump on the trampoline,” she says.
“We say that we run on love and duct tape,” Parent said. “We’re a little rough around the edges, but it’s kind of what makes us sweet, because nothing can really get broken.”
Covid and its aftermath was hard on the business, said Parent, noting that the gym had to close down for more than a year and take out loans and turn to crowdfunding to survive. But she said it is now growing again — business was up 60% in December 2025 compared with the same month a year earlier.
The business model has changed some over the years, Parent said. In its current form, the gym is open for drop-in play throughout the day. It also offers weekly gymnastics classes, a kindergarten readiness program, birthday parties and drop-off care two mornings a week, so parents can run errands or get work done.
The idea of creating an open-ended play space for children came to Parent one day when she was babysitting her nephews. All they wanted to do was play video games.
To Parent, who grew up playing in the woods in Searsmont, it was “jarring”. One day, she told them they were going to play real life video games — they would pretend they were characters and make obstacle courses in the living room.
“From that day on, whenever I came over, that was all they ever wanted to do,” she said, as kids bounced and flopped onto mats around her. “And it hit me super-hard. I was like, ‘This is an awesome idea.’”
