This is so cool!” said my six-year-old daughter, Sofia, skipping past a packed marquee reverberating to drum and bass. This was our first festival together — a far cry from other family holidays, such as the one spent on a working farm in Devon. My wife, Gillian, and I have long enjoyed festivals, both before Sofia’s birth and afterwards, our daughter spending the weekend with grandparents while we fleetingly rediscovered late nights and lie-ins. But last year we decided that she was ready to enjoy the experience, too. This would obviously mean curbing our excesses (Sunday-afternoon cider benders being among the more printable) but we thought it would be worth it.

The inaugural Camp Bestival, a spin-off event from the annual Bestival in the Isle of Wight, was held last July at Lulworth Castle, Dorset. Its main selling-point was that it was family-friendly — there was to be an entire kids’ field, packed with attractions such as face-painting, Punch-and-Judy shows, sandpits, space hoppers and storytelling.

Camp Bestival may have been the first to aim itself squarely at families, but an increasing number of festivals now bill themselves as family-friendly. And with good reason: of 5,500 festival-goers surveyed recently by Virtualfestivals.com, which monitors the UK market, 12.4 per cent of those with children said that they took their kids to a festival in 2008 — a figure that has more than doubled in the past three years.

Family-friendly festivals have been on the rise since the rave generation, of which we are part, finally began to settle down and have children. Many events, such as Lounge on the Farm, in Kent, have adapted accordingly. “We never set out to be a family festival,” says Matt Gough, the co-organiser, “but I think the appeal is that we’re quite small [it launched in 2006 with a capacity of 2,000 and now caters to 5,000] and there is a nic e, village fête atmosphere. People felt comfortable about bringing their kids. I think the rave generation are more into the idea of watching bands with their children — and you can’t really do that in town centres. So we have a whole area for families, full of tents and activities.”

Justin Madgwick, of Virtualfestivals.com, says that many families view festivals as “alternative” camping holidays. “It’s a relatively cost-effective and quick holiday, and you don’t have the hassle of airports and lugging all your stuff everywhere.”

Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? But our experience last year at Camp Bestival didn’t quite meet our expectations.

Things began to go wrong from the start. We had hired a reconditioned VW camper van to give us a weatherproof roof and spare us the hassle of trying to pitch a tent. After three hours on the road — the traffic jams started on the M25 and lasted pretty much all the way to Lulworth Castle — the van’s power died, stranding us on the hard shoulder. We got it restarted and after four more breakdowns and an SOS to the AA, the problem was eventually rectified (I’ll spare you the technicalities) but by then the AA man had called a tow truck. We gratefully accepted the tow anyway, arriving 11 hours after we had left home on a journey that should have taken no more than three hours. That night, I spoke to someone from Fife who had taken less time to drive to Dorset than we had taken from London.

We still had to pitch a tent, too. The camper came with an awning which, in our semiconscious state, became a giant conundrum. Our daughter, to her credit, had been a model of patience throughout our ordeal, amusing herself with felt-tips and her Nintendo DS (tip one: take a games console). The bickering and tantrums were mostly between me and Gillian. “Just peg it, for God’s sake. No, not there. Look, just leave it. I’ll peg it . . . no, I’m not having a go . . . just give me the mallet . . . what do you mean, you haven’t got it? I gave it to you two minutes ago.

By then it was raining. From across the site we could hear Friday’s closing act, Chuck Berry, belting out the blues. We felt his pain. The music sounded amazing but, by the time we had sated a more pressing urge for veggie-burgers, the show was over. Time for bed. I snored for England, apparently.

After that, the only way was up — although it transpired that we had conflicting agendas. Despite the drum and bass briefly captivating Sofia, the bands on the main stage held little interest for her compared with larking about in the kids’ field. But this, after all, was what we had signed up for, and when the sun came out on Saturday we began to relax and enjoy ourselves. Sofia threw herself into the activities — painting, hula-hooping, perusing the stalls that sold fancy-dress tat — while Gill and I wandered about in a warm, wine-induced bubble, happy to let her play while we kept an eye from a distance and, when the mood took us, to play, too. Even the toilets were clean, which had been a worry beforehand as we recalled festival Portaloos that would have made Gilbert and George gag.

Most fascinating of all for Sofia, though, was a secluded adventure playground in woods at one end of the site, and it was while she was entrenched here that Gill and I contrived to miss the few acts that we wanted to catch. Somewhere on the other side of Camp Bestival, Coldcut were DJ-ing — but our daughter wanted to go on the swings. Guess who won. Gill and I began to realise the downside of extensive children’s facilities: they can relegate everything else to an almost irrelevant sideshow, although I hadn’t helped our agenda when I balked at forking out £7 for a programme. “We can just wing it,” I insisted to Gillian, who was rightly unconvinced (tip two: buy a programme).

As a result, most of the music that we managed to hear didn’t appeal to any of us. When the headliners on Saturday, the Flaming Lips, were on stage, Sofia focused entirely on the huge balloons being pinged around the crowd, getting increasingly frustrated when none came her way.

What I particularly enjoy at festivals are the smaller dance tents and the after-parties — but with Sofia in tow, both of these were out of bounds: the former too crowded and loud; the latter too late. Gillian and I were invited to a party in a sponsor’s tent on Saturday night but it was strictly adults only. Neither one of us wanted to leave the other to babysit, so we all retired early for another restless night (tip three: go with other families to share babysitting duties — oh, and tip four: take earplugs).

On Sunday we continued to schlep about, largely unmoved by the music (see tip two), and inevitably ended up in either the kids’ field or the adventure playground — although admittedly the playground’s setting, in an “enchanted” forest that had been decorated like a fairytale theatre set, was a pleasant diversion, as was finding a tent where you could do clay modelling. For some reason my sculpture became that of a man silently screaming. Would we do it again? Maybe, but only if we could persuade another family to come, too — and as most of our friends with kids still prefer to go to festivals without them, this is easier said than done. Some festivals offer day passes — perhaps these would be easier to manage, not to mention cheaper, and we could stay in a B&B afterwards. Alternatively, many festivals offer “boutique” camping, where you simply “rent” a tent that has already been pitched. A yurt, or one of Camp Bestival’s “podpads”, sounds nice. Next time we’ll try one of those.

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