Your children play happily amid the weirdness and wondrousness of a blissed-out rock festival in beautiful countryside on a hot summer’s day: a thought to gladden the heart. You think of the thrill their darling little taste buds are going to experience as, meal by meal, they munch their way through the flavours of the world, from jerk chicken to falafel to tartiflette. You think how intense and magical it is going to be when they see, live on stage, their favourite band, one they’ve only ever heard on the stereo. You think of the adventure of nights under canvas, the smell of wood smoke, the canopy of stars, the new friends, the bizarre sights and the invigorating effect of the open air.

Except it’s never quite like that, is it? What you’ve forgotten — and you only remember once you’re stuck in a muddy field with your miserable kids, when it’s far too late to do anything sensible, like farm them out to the grandparents — is all the ghastly stuff from last year that you’d blanked from your memory.

What kind of things? Start with the compulsory 5am wake-up call, no matter how exhausted or hungover you are, or how late you went to bed. Then there’s your children’s sudden adamantine refusal to experiment with any cuisine more exotic than BSE-burger and fries. Their utter failure to grasp the idea that walking long distances is part of the festival fun. Their sudden bout of terminal boredom, after just one song, with the headlining band you came especially to see. The time wasted on horror toilet stops.

The constant, nagging worry as to whether your kids are too cold/hot/wet, and having to lug round all the necessary extra kit in a rucksack. Only being allowed sneaky drags when they’re not looking, because they don’t realise you smoke.

Does that mean that a festival plus children equals no fun? Not according to the DJ and Bestival organiser Rob da Bank, who this year is staging a new event aimed mainly at people like himself — long-standing ravers who have recently spawned, but don’t want to give up on the pleasures of their lost youth. “It isn’t purely kid-oriented, but it’s definitely more suited to parents’ lifestyles,” he says of Camp Bestival, a 10,000-capacity event to be held at Lulworth Castle, on the Dorset coast, in July. “We don’t want to lose that party feel you get at Bestival. At the same time, it’s not going to be a blaring mad rave-up.”

As a “hardened camper”, da Bank is all too aware of the pitfalls of mixing children and tents. He and his wife, Josie, now have two young children, Arlo, 2, and an as yet unnamed two-week-old baby. When Arlo was six months old, they had a disastrous camper-van trip to Cornwall. “Kids like a familiar environment and they like to sleep in a dark, quiet room,” he says. “Not a van with light coming through the windows and the kids from the next-door pitch kicking footballs against the side.”

With 2,000 children already booked in for Camp Bestival, da Bank has been thinking hard about their requirements. His Kids’ Garden Area includes a dedicated breast-feeding tent (“Breastival”, as it is inevitably called), a bouncy castle, an insect circus and a Punch and Judy stall. “One of the most depressing sights at festivals is knackered parents who overdid it on Friday trying to get through Saturday with hyper kids who haven’t had enough sleep,” he says. “Our plan is to give children so many things to do that they’ll be too exhausted not to sleep.”

It has affected the booking policy, too: “We’ve got Kate Nash headlining, and lots of reggae, folk, Balearic and dub, but no techno DJs.” Perhaps he has in mind the terrible experience of some friends of his who took their nanny to a festival, especially so they could enjoy a proper all-nighter in the dance tent. At 7am, they staggered back to the posh cabin they’d hired, ready for a welcome crash-out, only to be greeted by an irate nanny. Because of the throbbing dance music, she hadn’t slept a wink. “Here,” she said, handing back their child. “I’m far too tired to look after him. He’s all yours.” And with that, she retired to her tent.

Da Bank would never admit this, of course, but for parents, the best rock festivals for kids are the ones with the dullest line-ups. I’m sure this helps to explain the popularity of the delightful and hugely oversubscribed Larmer Tree festival. Yes, it’s small, and in a gorgeous location, with lots of kiddie-friendly activities. But the clincher, surely, is that with headliners such as the Levellers and Jools Holland, no parent is ever going to feel too miffed if they have to forego the pleasures of the main stage for an evening’s baby-sitting in the camping area.

Of course, you can always take a nanny, or travel with a big gang of mates and take turns to be the responsible one. The best option, however, according to the artist Deborah Curtis, is to learn to stop treating your kids as an impediment and try to get into the same groove as them. She and her other half, Gavin Turk, did this with enormous success at Port Eliot Lit Fest last year, in the children’s area they curated as the House of Fairy Tales.

On entering, you were given a passport — “because it was a parallel world”, Curtis explains — that you could have stamped only once you’d completed certain tasks. One involved learning lines of poetry; another entailed going to find Gretel (aka Curtis, who spent the whole festival acting in character) and asking her to tell the story of how she escaped from the witch.

The House of Fairy Tales (houseoffairytales.org) will bring a similar show to this year’s Big Chill before curating its own three-day art happening — the Festival of the Creative Act — at Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire, in August. “The problem with some music festivals is that they’re all about the adult experience,” Curtis says. “This is our way of addressing some of those issues and helping grown-ups to be as happy playing as their children.”

Curtis believes that festivals are generally great environments for children. “What’s so exciting is that they break down the structures of city life, so that everyone’s in an off-duty mind-set,” she says.

“If your kids get lost, as they always do for a time, you know you’re surrounded by people in a caring, nurturing mood who’ll look after them. It’s something we’ve almost lost in the West, but it is still common in Africa and Asia — this system where the population looks out for your child. It’s one of the things that makes festivals so brilliant.”

She’s dead right. As a loving post-rave parent, I simply can’t wait to take my children to festivals this summer — at which point I shall be doing my best to lose them at every opportunity.

Camp Bestival is at Lulworth Castle, Dorset, July 18-20; campbestival.net. Tickets cost £120 (ages 13-15 £60, under-13s free), from lastminute.com, ticketline.co.uk or 0844 888 4410 (24hr)

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