My oldest daughter has a pretty nifty job working with kids. As she gears up to plan summer programming, one of her ideas is a daytime club for kids—full of crafts, games, snacks, and sunshine (the last one is debatable, though. After all, we live in the PNW).
“Mom,” she texted, “we’re calling it Kids Club. Should it have an apostrophe?”
Great question.
Apostrophes are meant to show possession, right? So, you might think it should be Kid’s Club (for one kid) or Kids’ Club (for many kids). That’s certainly the traditional grammar rule. But then you hit a gray area—what if “kids” isn’t meant to be possessive at all but simply descriptive?
This is where English gets a little sketchy.
Take farmers markets, for example. I personally prefer them without the apostrophe: farmers market, not farmers’ market. Why? Because I don’t see it as a market owned by farmers. I see it as a type of market. Just like a craft fair or flower market, it tells us what kind of market it is, not who possesses it.
In grammatical terms, these are attributive nouns—nouns that act like adjectives to describe another noun. So “kids” describes the type of club. “Farmers” describes the type of market. This usage has become common enough that style guides like the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook often drop the apostrophe entirely in these cases.
Of course, in more formal or academic settings, you might still opt for the traditional possessive: Kids’ Club or Farmers’ Market. And if you’re aiming for maximum clarity in a grant proposal, for instance, it might be worth including the apostrophe just to show grammatical care.
But when it comes to branding, signage, and general use, either form can be correct, depending on how you interpret the relationship between the words.
Language is always evolving and so is our punctuation. Sometimes, knowing the rules gives us enough confidence to break them.
(Btw, I am ultra proud of this Kids Club planner. She is not only mature, fun, and smart, but she’s also sweet and thoughtful. And I love getting any kind of text from her.)