Sam Wolfson, editor of Noisey

I’m writing this from a tipi at Glastonbury. Just round the corner is a bashed-up old van, converted into a bedroom with a mattresses and some hanging flags. A mum, probably in her 60s, is sharing box wine with her two adult children, all dancing around to tinny reggae – I can hear a bit of Desmond Dekker wafting over now.

Maybe some will balk at that high watermark of liberal parenting and sarong-wearing, but I find it deeply comforting. Getting families together is a slog at the best of times – sometimes the only thing that can tempt it is a weekend of drunken hedonism in which you can all partake. It’s not that you can’t wander off to see different things – mum and dad swaying their working hips to George Clinton while the kids shoot gun fingers at Skepta – but it’s nice to have a shared base, somewhere you get to swap stories from the night before, over questionable homemade chai tea.

There are, of course, different kinds of festivals. I’m not saying you should be dragging your parents along to your first post A-level blowout at Reading festival, taking mum to see Enter Shikari. But there are loads of festivals that are richer for their generational intermingling, and I don’t see what you could have against planning the occasional family holiday to Womad instead of Wales.

Laura Snapes, contributing editor, Pitchfork

As someone who swore off family holidays at 15, I’d rather fall down a Glastonbury toilet again than swap festival morning-after stories with my parents. Festivals are becoming increasingly middle class, but at their best they let you ditch your workaday persona to explore untapped dimensions. Having dad call you Tinkerbell while mum pesters you with after-sun is going to blow the illusion pretty quickly.

Concealing Green Fields misdemeanours aside, don’t you think that the apron strings between kids and parents are long enough already? More and more of us live at home with our parents into our 30s, forced to depend on the very generation that stuffed us.

Also, if the Daily Mail thinks that partying with your parents is now cool, surely that actually makes it the least cool thing in the world? With Florence and the Machine, Mumford & Sons, Sam Smith and Adele among the most popular home-grown acts, it feels like music no longer benefits from the tension of a generational divide. How does culture ever move on if young people don’t reject what came before?

SW I agree that youth are losing their place within popular culture at the moment, as a tranche of acts who appeal to children and older people are topping the charts. But I think festivals can be the solution to that problem.

I went to my first festival aged eight months, and have been to one every year since. I found those early experiences – rather than being coddled by the over-reaching bosom of my family – to be incredibly emancipatory. To roam around in what felt at the time like a city – a place brimming with opportunity that regular life never provided. I would volunteer my services for the craft stalls, talk my way into endless freebies, end up on stage as part of some fancy-dress procession. If nothing else I learnt the lifelong skill of blagging.

I liked festivals not just for their debauchery but because of the mates you made in the Lunched Out Lizards Chai Shop, up past your bedtime, living in what felt like a magical community. Maybe that’s a bit wet now, in this era of pod pads and the Wireless festival sponsored by New Look, but I think there is something to be said for decamping to some random piece of Glastonbury and learning how to combine your relationships, between your friends, family and strangers.

Generational warfare may not be the answer. Perhaps it’s more effective to take your mum to the dance tent and show her that Sam Smith isn’t half as good as Hercules & Love Affair.

LS Maybe I’m thinking too much about going with my own parents and having a festival experience akin to watching Jools Holland for three days straight. (No disrespect, guys!) Though I did just ring my mum – mid-40s, never been to a festival before – for research. Would she mind being made to stay up dancing until 6am? “Why not! I never did it before and I don’t have young children now.” The thought of the showers and toilets, however, was a dealbreaker.

I totally see what you’re saying about the freedom aspect – some of my favourite recent festival experiences have been with a group of friends and their kids. They’re between two and six years old, and they’ve all been to End of the Road every year of their tiny lives. The oldest one starts asking in January when it’ll be time to go to the festival again. Last year, her eyes widened as she watched Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus jump around with two dancers dressed as giant eyeballs. I’m not going to pretend it was as delightful as the Stone Circle at 5am, but it was pretty wonderful to see, and I love how much more they get out of it each year.

SW Laura, shall we drop the pretence and I’ll just extend the invite I can tell you’re angling after: come with the family Wolfson to Womad. You’ll have a blast. It’ll be all drum circles and Jimmy Cliff. As long as you can put up with my dad’s impromptu poetry and don’t mind washing up the melamine cups, you’ll have a great time. You can bring your mum too, I sense your and her ideas of a good time might be more similar than you think. And then when they’re all walking back from Mahotella Queens, I’ll introduce you to my hippy mates and we can all go to the onsite Whirl-y-gig. Are you in?

LS Yes! Though in return, you are cordially invited to Green Man with me, my folks and my two younger brothers. Prepare for every band you love to be torn apart by my dad talking about how they just rip off the Beat/Grace Jones/U2/Norah Jones, and for my mum to send tipsy winks your way while spilling wine to Jamie xx and his “groovy” tunes. You’ll probably have a great time trying to keep up with my middle brother’s “tearaway nature” and love of two-bit indie bands, while St Vincent, Courtney Barnett and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield can disprove the 16-year-old’s weird belief that women “can’t play guitar”.

Meanwhile, it’ll be much like my first festival experience: I will be 15 again, only instead of spilling ketchup down my box-fresh Libertines military jacket, I’ll be hiding inside my hood, refusing to enjoy myself and defeating the point of going in the first place. Happy festival season!