As a DJ plays MJ Cole’s UK garage classic Crazy Love, adults across London’s Cross the Tracks festival lift up little children in brightly coloured ear-defenders to dance. A smile spreads across my baby son’s face as he bounces his body, finding something that looks like rhythm. Later that day, my daughter snuggles into my chest in her carrier as I dance to songs by Ezra Collective that she has heard in the car many times.

My mum took me to Reading festival when I was 16 and as I’ve grown up there have been new ones to match the seasons of my life. Then came motherhood: last year I became a single parent to a pair of delicious, curious, boisterous twin babies. But I don’t want to stop indulging my inner child alongside my actual children, and I’m determined to keep music festivals in my life.

It’s not just me: Camp Bestival, already firmly family friendly, had an 155% rise in weekend camping tickets for two- to four-year-olds this year. A Ticketmaster study of 2,000 people last month found that 42% of parents see festivals as a genuine alternative to a traditional family holiday, and 73% said festivals were better than other family trips in terms of introducing kids to new cultural experiences. International travel is expensive and daunting, but a festival – while not without its own costs and potential stresses – seems to me to be an enhanced staycation.

So, buoyed up by my one-day warmup at Cross the Tracks, I decided to embark on two weekend festivals in the countryside. Wilderness, in Oxfordshire, is often described as the poshest festival in Britain, which sounds awful, but the festival’s own promise of “wholesome hedonism” intrigues me. When I arrive, an impressive number of children are being carted around in trolleys filled with pillows and blankets, and lovingly decorated with fairy lights. The effect these kiddie chariots have on the landscape at night is mystical, alongside the light installations set up around the enormous trees.

Eloise and Fernand, both in their 30s, have come from south London with their two-year-old son and are staying in the family camping area. Eloise praises the “massive sense of community” with parents posting on a Facebook group for the kid supplies they’re missing, and Fernard calls it “a utopia – it’s almost disarming because everyone’s so nice”.

Call me the fairest of fair-weather campers, but I knew that if I was going to really enjoy these weekends and treat them as our holidays for the year, we’d have to be arriving at pre-erected accommodation. These options start at £623 while the furnished one I got hosted in would have set us back £1,600 – but regular family camping tickets cost £238 and kids under six go free.

I also brought a pop-up playpen, which saved my life. Hoodies and hats that covered their ears were useful when the temperatures dropped at night and also provided some light protection when the ear defenders weren’t going on. My biggest fear was that the babies would escape the tent, so having their mobility restricted with cosy baby sleep bags was reassuring. The best thing you can bring with you to a festival with little ones, though, is the right attitude. You’ve got to just surrender and adapt to what’s going on; you’re probably not going to make all the sets you might want but that’s not the point any more.

Clinical psychologist Dr Martha Deiros Collado is at the book tent on Sunday to speak about her book How to Be the Grown-Up. Like the rest of us, she’s let go of routine and nap times for the weekend. “Time is so restrictive of the choices that you make in day to day life,” she says. “But when you’re in a festival like this, responsibility kind of goes out of the window. Obviously you still have to keep an eye on your kids, but there is more freedom.”

Parents at festivals are the first to get up, alongside their children: who needs a cockerel when you’ve got two small humans in a hot tent? Early risers at Wilderness head to the Family Field, a thoughtful, sensory curation of performances, crafts, installations, and a soft play tent for the tiniest ones. It also hosts Mortimer Nannies, who work with Wilderness as well as Camp Bestival and others, and have their own dreamland nursery with fancy dress, crafts and more. “Most people don’t know that festival childcare exists,” says company founder Tanja Jelley. “Or when they do, they ask why you would go to a festival and dump your children. But it’s not like that: it’s two and a half hours where you can just go and breathe for a bit.”

At £75 for the four-hour evening sessions, it’s not cheap, but it’s a staff ratio of one-to-one or one-to-two children. There’s also a premium service of private nannies who go out to individual tents or accommodation for £45 an hour looking after up to three children. The food scene is a big thing at Wilderness, and can be similarly expensive: as I’m on the press guest list we are invited to a chef’s table dinner from Andy Beynon of Michelin-starred Hackney restaurant Behind, which is normally £160 a seat. I never spent money like that on food even before I became a single mum, so we enjoy ourselves and no one bats an eyelid when I start breastfeeding.

I didn’t want to like the very bougie Wilderness as much as I did – but it really had the wow factor. In future years I would rope in more people to help put tents up, as the best bits for me and the kids were included in the basic ticket: the twins were in awe of everything in the main areas, poking their heads out of the pushchair to get a better view.

A few weekends later we head to Green Man in Wales, where the setting in the valleys of Bannau Brycheiniog (formerly the Brecon Beacons) gives it the edge over every other festival that I’ve been to. The babies bliss out to the South African a cappella group the Joy as the sun shines down, and I take them to dip their little toes in a stream where lots of other kids are doing the same.

Little Folk, their version of Wilderness’s Family Field, caters to babies and children up to 12 years old, and there’s a separate area for children above that age. An adult weekend ticket for Green Man is £275 but a week-long “settlement pass” ticket for £350 (with a range of sub-£50 children’s ticket prices depending on age) allows you to turn the festival into a longer family holiday. (Be quick when they go on sale: last year all 25,000 tickets sold out in an hour, 11 months before the event.)

Fiona Stewart, the founder of Green Man and a single mother herself, says that across the British festival scene, potential brand partners “are keen on [sponsoring] children’s areas as they want to attract early adopters, and the children’s market is massive”. But Stewart says she dislikes “the way children are manipulated by the media. So Little Folk is a safe friendly space with play, performance, fun and discovery without any of those distractions” – like the whole festival, it’s free from heavy-handed corporate branding.

At both Wilderness and Green Man, the adult world comes more alive as we’re heading to bed, but Stewart explains that striking the balance between families and those who come child-free is about “investing equally in areas for both”. There are corners that cater more directly to the needs of different age groups which helps things feel more cohesive in the shared main spaces. One of my favourite memories of Green Man will be when my twins tottered into the fringes of the Chai Wallahs tent to some soulful house, and a group of adults having a good time started hyping up their dance moves.

I’m at an age where half of my peers are having kids and the other half are very much enjoying child-free lives, and it’s heartening to have festivals that don’t try to divide these groups. Someone told me this summer that being a mother is like being part-fairy, part-witch – and the most natural setting for a fairy-witch and her kids is always going to be somewhere we can suspend reality and enjoy the magic like this.