That's because you don't have kids, and I don't either but can admit that probably 90% of all adults who attend zoos bring their kids along. Those little rugrats are the backbone of every zoo on the planet.
Children's Zoo are very important to a zoo....this is usually where guests (not always children) are allowed to interact with animals. Often children's zoo has shows designed for children. They also tend to house the education animals (these animals are considered seperate from the rest of the zoo's collection because they sometimes leave the zoo's property and could bring back disease to the rest of the collection). Many zoos now are ecologically or geographically themed. The children's zoo is allowed to break these molds and exhibits animals in a different perspective (ie behavior, adaptations, diet, etc).
What is incredibly fascinating to me is that the excellent Oklahoma City Zoo (what I consider to be one of America's better zoos) had zero monkeys before the opening of the new Children's Zoo in early 2010. Now there are squirrel and spider monkeys in the kids zone, but before 2010 the zoo had all sorts of big cats, pinnipeds, marine creatures, birds, reptiles, hoofstock, canids, great apes, pachyderms, bears and seemingly everything else but not a single monkey. Extraordinary, but at least that has now been rectified with the addition of two species.
