Have buggy, will rock

Swamped by beer-swilling noisy revellers, or cushioned by creches and massage tents - how do families cope at music festivals? Brian O'Connellfinds out.

It used to be that music festivals were all about flagons, free love and falling over, with music something that happened in the background to facilitate a mass groping session. Ah yes, the good old bad old days. Not any more, it seems. At today's festivals you are more likely to find baby-changing facilities, massage tents, children's workshops and parenting clinics, as you are any wholesale hedonistic behaviour. Music festivals have gone all PG on us, it seems, and are more interested in creating family friendly environments than tearing up the rulebooks.

Recently I decided to test the theory and took my young son, who is almost eight, to a festival - the Midlands Music Festival - for his first proper festival outing. In the lead-up to the event, organisers were keen to highlight its family friendly nature, allowing all children under 12 free admission and incorporating a specially designed kids area in the site.

The line-up was always going to attract an older audience and the hope was that there would be more children than last year, when 500 attended. So how did it all work?

Arriving at the festival site we made our way to the camping area. Here we encountered a major oversight by festival organisers, who neglected to provide a separate family camping area. Therefore, families were having to bed down beside guitar-strumming, beer-swilling revellers, for whom marshmallow toasting and inventing ghost stories was not of paramount importance.

According to psychologist Marie Murray, "There is a need to consider the age appropriateness of the event and simply accommodating or providing a playground for children is not sufficient if the content or what the child sees is age inappropriate." She warned: "The impact of witnessing alcohol or drug abuse is significant for children. It can confuse the emotions the child has about the event. There is a great deal of research about the blurring of boundaries between childhood and adulthood and the commercialisation of childhood where vested interests are determined to capture young, market early and imprint their product emotionally on the child."

Thinking about this I could feel the parent of the year title slowly ebbing away.

Setting up camp towards the back of the designated field, away from the more obvious party-goers, we took solace in the fact that there was, at least, a large number of families about. Leaving the campsite, things began to get better.

At the soul and body area, a full programme of events for children was in place from early morning until late evening, from circus and yoga workshops, to arts and crafts activities and frequent performances from the Lambert Puppet Theatre. Each adult was required to register and sign their child in, and no one was allowed enter or leave the kids' area without having done so.

Clowns were on hand to make balloons or impart juggling skills, while couches and daily newspapers were provided in a "parents chill-out" area.

ORGANISED BY AVRILStanley and her company Nyubu, the body and soul area has also become a major hit at the Electric Picnic festival. Stanley first happened upon the idea of incorporating more children's events into festivals when she went to the Burning Man festival near San Francisco about 13 years ago. There, she saw how events could become more community affairs rather than cater solely for the individual. Returning to Ireland, she has played a large part in getting festival organisers to shift the focus and offer a more holistic, family based approach.

"A lot of festivals of the past 20 years seemed to focus on big bands and large outdoor stages," she says. "There seems to be a huge gap in the market for events that everyone from the baby to the 70-year-old can attend. Perhaps we have been slow to catch on here because of our climate, but we are changing."

Practically every kids' event at the Midlands Music Festival was oversubscribed, and with upwards of 1,000 children expected to have attended, organisers have vowed to build on the family experience for next year. The atmosphere was relaxed and friendly, and the facilitators did a fine job in ensuring my eight-year-old, at least, was constantly occupied for most of the day.

"Our approach to the Midlands Festival was to plant a seed and see how it took off and see what people liked and didn't like," says Stanley. "If we are to do it next year, then yes, camping is one area that needs to be addressed. For now we are preparing for the Electric Picnic, where we will have our biggest kids' area to date with baby-changing facilities and also pregnant mums' areas, so it's not only about the kids, but about those about to have them as well who are catered for."

As far as the musicians are concerned, looking out at an audience interspersed with teens and toddlers seems to make little difference to performing. Liam Ó Maonlaí argues that festivals in Ireland have always revolved around the community, and it is only in recent times that large outdoor music events have somehow changed our perception of festivals.

"A festival to my mind is always a family occasion, even going back to pre-Christian times," he says. "More recently, Glastonbury, for example, has always had families - it's the one time when kids get a chance to see parents acting like kids."

In terms of some of the more anarchic antics that take place at festivals, Ó Maonlaí says common sense needs to prevail. "Kids have always been at festivals and I hope that will increase. Of course it's not okay for parents to get out of their heads and neglect the children for three days. That's not what a festival is about. It's a time when the whole community or parish can show their wares and flaunt what they've got and maybe kids get a chance to get in on the act also."

From a performing perspective, Ó Maonlaí has no hang-ups about playing to a younger audience either. "When you look out from the stage and see kids, it doesn't change your set in any way. It's great watching kids at a gig because they haven't any expectations, and are mainly just in awe of something going on. For performers it can really alleviate a lot of nerves to just watch them."

ALL IN ALL, my experience taking the young fella to the Midlands festival was a positive one. He hasn't woken up any morning since demanding a can of cider, and appears no more rebellious than usual. His highlights were getting a balloon hat made and learning how to juggle. The music, he says, wasn't bad either. As Marie Murray affirmed, "Don't forget, the rock concert you accompany them to today is the one in a mere few years they will want to go to alone with their teen friends. If what you bring them to as children determines what they are interested in as adults, then we need to be sure that it's something that we are happy for them to engage with in the future."

For those about to (pre) rock then, we salute you.

Festivals take note

DO

• Create a space for children, which is nurturing, colourful and creative.

• Provide a family camping area with its own dedicated security team and plenty of open and secure spaces for children to play in.

• Locate the kids' play area away from the main arena. It should be self-contained and have its own independent set of rules and regulations separate from the main festival.

• Have a baby-changing area both in the campsite and in the festival arena. It should have hot and cold water, along with clean surfaces and disposable units for nappies.

• Have an area where parents can relax and have refreshment while keeping an eye on the children.

DON'T:

• Over promise or hype the family friendly nature of your event.

• Have a kids' area that is unsupervised.

• Operate a creche where kids can be left unattended by a family member.

• Employ anyone that doesn't have the right kind of qualification for their given service or have a proven record of working with children.

• Introduce games and toys that could be harmful to small children.

• Be mindful of inappropriate advertising that may be within sight of the kids' areas.