There’s a boy lunging for a girl in the corner, a sign saying, “No gear on the dancefloor”, kids going mad for it in front of the DJ booth and clubbers running round high on the (organic) energy. It’s the Clapham Grand nightclub, it’s the weekend and the place is kicking off. Only it’s not Saturday night, it’s Sunday afternoon, and of the 300 or so regulars, half are under seven. Welcome to the world of kiddie clubbing, or Baby Loves Disco, an organisation that landed in Manchester and London in September and is taking off across the UK as quickly as it did in the United States.

I’m here with my one-year-old son, Sam, and to be honest, I didn’t think I was going to like it. An afternoon dance party for kids aged from six months to seven years, it sounded like a yummy-mummy proposition of the worst degree. But you know what? I was completely wrong. By some genius alchemy, Sam and I walk out two hours later having had the time of our lives. He had bubble machines, laser lights, glitter balls, egg shakers, dance scarves and a Gymboree chill-out area that was crawling with people his size; I had top 1980s tunes (played at a volume totally tolerable to tots), a bunch of like-minded parents and an opportunity to dance again, which I haven’t had since, well, way before he was born.

It made me realise that all the time Sam and I spend together, I am either doing something for him that I am tolerating (Rhyme Time, the playground, kids’ parties), or he is doing something for me that he is (barely) tolerating, (lunch in the pub, shopping or visiting friends’ houses). Unlike other child-friendly weekend activities, you don’t turn up, dump your kids in a bin full of balls and wait for them to exhaust themselves while you catch up with the papers; nor are the kids forced to run around a restaurant getting bored, while you spend time with your friends.

Baby Loves Disco was started in America by a dancer, Heather Murphy, 35, who got depressed at all the children’s activities, which were either “depressingly commercial” or left her feeling “out of the loop”. While moonlighting as a waitress, she persuaded the owner of the restaurant to host the event in the upstairs room. She was staggered by the response. Within a month, she had persuaded a local nightclub to take it on, and when the music producer Andy Hurwitz turned up with his kid and had a rocking time, the two teamed up and took it to New York. Chris Rock, Michael Jordan and Jerry Seinfeld have all attended – even Madonna is rumoured to have been. Whatever, Baby Loves Disco now takes place in 22 cities across the States. Three years on and Naomi Timperley, 36, was living in Cheshire with her daughters Olivia, 5, and Elizabeth, 2, and working as a part-time face-painter since the birth of the girls. When a client asked her to put on a children’s party with dancing, she stumbled across Baby Loves Disco on YouTube. The enterprise works as a franchise business and is operated by local mums within their communities, so it didn’t take Timperley long to persuade Hurwitz and Murphy that the idea should cross the pond. Pure, at The Printworks in Manchester, was all too keen to host the first party (not every venue is prepared to meet the super-stringent cleanliness and health and safety standards required for bringing toddlers into nightclubs – shades of Sadie Frost’s daughter at Soho House do cross your mind); the Clapham Grand followed the same month, and there are plans to hold events in Birmingham, Nottingham, Glasgow and Stirling in the spring.

For Timperley, like Murphy, it was an instant success. “My mum used to listen to Motown when I was a child; you get good memories from music,” she says. “Frankly, kids will dance to anything. I used to go clubbing when I was younger – lots of places in London such as the Ministry of Sound, thought it’s all a bit hazy.” It’s the classic “momtrepreneur” story – great female minds put out to pasture when children come along, but not gone to seed. Give them an idea they can marry with their life as a mother, and they can be successful in business once again. And their kids, of course, are always on the guest list.

Aside from the astonishing sight of seeing the dancefloor of your (misspent) youth crowded out with little tinies, there are also the unlikely juxtapositions of a breast-feeding mum next to a bass bin, and balloons and play tunnels in the area you once collapsed in halfway through the night. Inevitably, there is the requisite quota of dads with one hand on the the mobile frantically texting for football results. But for every one of those, there are 10 more dads with their babies hoisted on their shoulders teaching them the two classic male dance manoeuvres: the nodding head and the fist-in-the-air salute.

Also provided is a healthy snack bar for the kids and a licensed bar for us: Sam had a packet of Organix apple rice cakes, I had a pint and together we hit the dancefloor.

The next Baby Loves Disco events are on Sunday, January 13, at Pure at The Printworks, Manchester, and Saturday, January 19, at the Clapham Grand, SW11; tickets cost £8 (nonwalking babies free) and must be prebooked on www.babylovesdisco.co.uk

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