from the Sundays: should you take your kids to a music festival?

By alice | May 11, 2008

Well, how insane are you feeling?

You can’t really enjoy anything with kids unless the kids are enjoying it first, and this article is quite right about the sort of activity tent the very young find enjoyable at an outdoor music festival- specialist kidstuff:

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.

In other words, there is approximately no overlap at all between what a sane child and a sane adult would want to do at one of these events, which means that taking young kids is going to be extremely hard work indeed. I don’t think that’s immoral, but it is extraordinary how many parents are perpetually amazed when their unrealistic expectations fall flat. Kids don’t like techno music, drugs or walking across twenty miles of mud to the nearest portaloo!

(Actually, mine enjoyed the one festival they went to, with their dad. The organic hand-made recyclably-packaged french fry stall helped a lot.)

Tags: , ,

1 Comment »

One Response to “from the Sundays: should you take your kids to a music festival?”

Jackie Danicki » Mother’s Day quote of the day Says:
May 11th, 2008 at 2:56 pm

[...] one of the most hard-working, impressive moms I know, Alice Bachini-Smith: You can’t really enjoy anything with kids unless the kids are enjoying it [...]