Kids at festivals? Debate flares up again on Beeb

Celebrity mum Gail Porter is taking her seven year old daughter Honey to Bestival this year – big deal!

Now, Family Festivals gives a thumbs up to the former lads’ mag pinup, for showing there is life after being a rock wife and losing all your hair to alopecia.

But is it really national news that a hip thirtysomething media babe takes her school-aged daughter to Bestival?

Poor Gail was run through the mill on air twice before 9am today by some nonentity of a (presumably) childless music journo they’d scraped up from Radio 6 (I didn’t catch his name, but it’s irrelevant).

Festivals are no place for children, he whined. If you’ve been up all night partying the last thing you want is being woken up at dawn by screaming kids. (Well, DUH, that’s what family camping fields are for!)

“Honey doesn’t scream,” was Gail’s retort, and she did her best to point out that a festival is actually a great environment to take children, and she would only take her daughter to one that she thought suitable.

Mr Music Journo grudgingly admitted that some festivals did have what he called ‘child-friendly’ areas, but that children were likely to be exposed to people drinking and they should be kept away.

It wasn’t even 8am on a Bank Holiday Sunday and Family Festivals was still in bed and bleary-eyed, but I could not resist shouting back at the screen – there’s a difference between child-friendly and absolutely aimed at children, and most festivals worth their salt will actually spend quite a bit of money on entertainment and activities specifically aimed at kids. And yes, people do drink, but no more so than at family parties I remember from my childhood.

I totally empathise with Gail Porter, because I have been in an almost identical situation. A year ago, I was invited onto Women’s Hour on Radio Four to talk about the same subject. I was pitted against the most ignorant, curmudgeonly old music writer they could find – Mr David Quantick. Another man with no children, he berated me for taking my son to festivals, for a variety of invalid reasons, which boiled down to him just not liking kids. I did suggest that perhaps the presence of young people made him self-conscious about his ‘dad dancing’, but my attempts to lighten the debate fell flat. What a twat.

And on both occasions, the presenters in the middle of the discussion let these men get away with the most glaring of misinformation about the children’s festival experience.

It seems crazy to me that such a debate is even happening in 2009. I’ve been to some festivals this year where you needed to be accompanied by small people to make the most of the event, and Peltor Kid’s Ear Defenders were the fashion accessory of choice. I’ve spent whole days in kids’ fields – and I’ve also carefully avoided the festivals where I didn’t think the children would totally enjoy themselves.

Apparently there were calls recently on the NME discussion board to ban baby buggies from festivals. But the festival scene is large and diverse enough to accommodate all sorts of people. As a parent, I rely on festivals to get my annual dose of live music – it’s impossible to get to gigs otherwise.

Buggies, babies and families add a lot to festivals’ atmosphere – it stops them feeling like any other gig. And if we don’t stand up to the haters, who will they turn on next – the wheelchair users perhaps?