Barbados is one of the best Caribbean islands to visit if you are travelling with children. The island has a very easy atmosphere, its beaches are safe, and many have calm water which is suitably shallow for small children, and there are plenty of sports suitable for them, including snorkelling, bouncy rides, parasailing and boogie-boarding. They will also enjoy the sailing trips. On land, facilities are not that extensive by comparison with what you are probably used to at home, but there are several hotels with children’s clubs and there is an excellent crop of villas if you wish to stay independently. There are also more playgrounds and ‘sites’ suitable for children than on most other islands. And of course, as an island that is already popular with children, yours will find plenty of others to team up with so they can run feral on the beach

In early 2006, James Henderson, the editor of Definitive Caribbean, was lucky enough to be joined for Half Term in Barbados by his two children - Thing 1 (6, a boy) and Thing 2 (4, a girl), oh, and their mother too (She who Knows). It was great to spend time in the islands with them, passing on the pleasure of the Caribbean to another generation.

For more information about the beaches they visited, see below.

Miami Beach, Mullins Beach, Dover Beach, Folkstone, Accra Beach, Worthing Beach, Harrismith Beach

BARBADOS BEACHES
With two children fresh from the European winter, who had barely seen sunlight in three months, the last thing we were going to do was to head off to the beach in the middle of the day. Instead we went before breakfast (enough to build up an appetite for their customary three and four bowls of cereal) and then again in the late afternoon, to catch the last hour or two before sunset. Then we would generally choose beaches with beach bars which we could head into for a children’s meal, so that we didn’t have to feed them when we got home.

We armed ourselves with a couple of buckets and spades and a boogie board, but in the event these were barely needed as the excitement of the water and waves kept Thing 1 and Thing 2 busy for hours. In fact they would be happy to spend all day in the water. Just so you know, Thing 1 can just about swim, and became much more confident during the week. Thing 2 needs arm-bands but was game for any waves. With the two of them buzzing around us like satellites, it was not exactly book-reading territory for us adults, this, but by playing tag, we parents were able to steal a few moments of peace under a tree or a parasol.

Miami Beach, Oistins, south coast
It's quite something to witness the excitement of children as they head for the beach for the first time on a holiday. And it’s quite something trying to keep them quiet in a house full of sleeping adults. Thing 1 and Thing 2 were awake by five am on their first morning after arrival, as the first light crept between the crack in the curtains. What do you do with two terminally excited children when there are three adults intent on a Sunday morning lie in. Tip toe, tip toe, Shhhh!

It was Dad’s turn. Well, I had been travelling for three weeks, and so I was down on credits. I hustled and shooshed them out of the house and we set off for Miami Beach, which is just outside Oistins, the main town on the south coast. As the car tyres splashed through puddles from the night showers that were quietly steaming in the first of the morning sun, I switched on the radio. Luciano. What more could you offer two children in the Caribbean than the lilt of easy reggae, palm trees and then a beach?

Miami Beach is a local beach. You reach it via the suburb just east of Oistins. There are two distinct sections, divided by a breakwater. The first, backed by huge casuarinas pines, is open to the south and so it sees bigger waves (they are not huge as it is relatively protected by the island’s southern point just a few hundred yards away to the east), but they are large enough. They break onto a broad stretch of mounded sand backed by casuarinas pines. A container ship was parked off-shore the morning that we arrived. The other section of the beach, behind the breakwater, is very shallow and calm. There is little sand on the beach itself, but that is not the point. The key feature is the shallow water. This is where the Bajans take their morning ‘sea bath’, some of them literally in their shower caps, sitting or kneeling in the thigh deep water, chatting and generally passing the time of day. When we eventually made our way around the breakwater, we found seventy or eighty people rising and falling gently on the swell.

You can imagine Thing 1 and Thing 2 as we arrived, though. They threw open the car doors and bolted for the sand - and then found themselves yelping as they discovered the small casuarinas pine cones on the hard ground. They hopped around wincing until Dad locked the car and carried them down onto the soft sand, one under each arm. We tried the open beach first, where other Bajans were taking a morning constitutional walk, jogging or power-walking the two hundred yards of sand. It’s hard to pick people properly in their swimming costumes, but I am pretty sure I recognised a politician among them.

Thing 1 and Thing 2 were straight off into the waves - and were royally dumped in a trice - so we soon gravitated to the shallow area, which proved to be much more suitable. The water is standing depth for a four-year-old and almost completely calm. So they screamed and jumped waves to their heart’s content. They were so loud I was almost worried that we might be had up for disturbing the peace at six in the morning (given that Oistins Police Station is right behind the beach), but nobody seemed to mind. In fact the bobbing Bajans seemed pleasantly surprised that we had come at all and they politely engaged me in conversation, in between forays to check that Thing 1 or Thing 2 was ok. It was slightly odd chatting to a woman in a bath cap in a public place. She was sitting on the sandy floor, occasionally bobbing with the swell of a wave, and then carrying on chatting.

Meanwhile Thing 1 and Thing 2 were happy playing in the shallows, squealing, running in and out with the waves or jumping the six inch breakers. Luckily it was to keep them occupied for over two hours, until nearly eight am. By which time I decided the adults in the house had had a decent lie in.

Mullins Beach, West Coast
You might think a beach is a beach is a beach. Sand that runs up to a section of shoreline. But they are remarkably different from one another. After a while, accompanying two children to the beach, you get to muse on these things. The amount of sand changes, sometimes seasonally. Many of the beaches in Barbados have offshore reefs, which glint in the distance. Some beaches are shallow for a long way out, others shelve more steeply into the water. The first have waves that break a long way out and rush, in a flurry of white water a couple of feet high, until they reach the coastline. At somewhere like Mullins (when we were there) the sand shelves quite steeply up out of the sea and so the waves appear suddenly, rise like a mountain, sweep up the beach, a huge volume of water that barely breaks into white water, and then slides out again, almost whole. Being caught in it is almost like a fairground ride. More fun for Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Mullins, which is just south of Speightstown on the west coast of Barbados, is a couple of hundred yards long and looks west to the sunset. It has an outcrop of low cliffs at its northern end and to the south it peters off into villa territory. It has a beach bar, Suga Suga, but this was closing up as we arrived at the end of the day in the rain. In fact, most people, including the attendants, had given up and gone home. The loungers and parasols had been packed away. With the rain, the only thing to do was to get into the water as quickly as possible and stay there.

More screeches of delight and we ran in. And then the fun began. Thing 1 could just stand, but of course when a three foot swell passed over him it went over his head if he didn’t jump to keep his head above water. Thing 2 just put on some water wings and bobbed. We sat there in a line and let ourselves be carried with the swell as it made its way up the beach fifteen feet - and then were carried down again, in my case scratching backside as I grounded on the way down.

Of course, as well as having their own distinct characteristics, beaches change. The sand shifts in and out and then up and down the coast. Next time we go, Mullins will probably be a completely different shape, with two foot waves chasing one another in for a hundred yards and no swell at all.

Dover Beach
It's a habit from visiting beaches in Australia, in fact it’s one of the best aspects of Australian beaches, taking an early morning dip and then walking off the sand into a café, where you get a bowl of cereal and a fruit smoothie. We looked and looked but couldn’t find a café like this anywhere in Barbados. There are a few beach bars and they’ll fix you a cup of coffee by mid morning if you’re lucky, but we looked in vain for the perfect breakfast place.

We pitched up on Dover Beach a bit later than the first couple of mornings (Thing 1 and Thing 2 were beginning to sleep in a bit by now), evident by the fact that other tourists had arrived. The sand at Dover is bright white as it is almost everywhere in Barbados, about thirty yards deep and it shelved off gently into a pretty calm sea (it is tucked in along the south coast a little further west than Miami and it is slightly better protected). It was already hot by nine am, so we had to go through the procedure of persuading Thing 1 and Thing 2 to put on some sun cream. I sat in the shade under a tree. They ran off squealing into the water. Jumping waves is Thing 2's favourite game.

It was then that I noticed a sign saying CAFE, quite neatly painted on a brightly coloured building. It looked done with a certain amount of style. An arrow was pointing down an alley. Worth a try, I thought. After a dip I found my way to the courtyard of a building. Ah, an art gallery. Perfect, I thought. Must have a café. I tripped upstairs thinking we were in luck.

It's not that often that people look at me as though I have two heads. But these three people, two staff and a customer, I suspect, did. Their faces hovered somewhere between bemusement and horror (well, I was in orange swimming trunks and I was dripping on their floor). I looked around at the room. Less of an art gallery, more of a bric a brac and trinkets shop. And not many tourist customers by the look of it. Apparently the café had moved out a long time ago. Oh well, back to the drawing board. Back for four bowls of cereal.

Folkstone
Folkstone, just north of Holetown on the West Coast, is not the best beach on Barbados by any means, but it does have some things to write home about. There is a reef right offshore and behind the (small) strip of sand, there are trees that provide good shade, with tables and benches where you can settle yourself and your beach kit. Folkstone is also the departure point for some of the boat trips that take you off snorkelling and turtle watching. This is what Thing 1, Thing 2 and She Who Knows did, while I headed off to see a couple of the managers of the West Coast hotels.

On the return from their trip, the three of them spent a bit of time on the beach. The reef starts close to the shoreline and runs just below the surface for 100 yards offshore. She Who Knows asked the security staff to watch Thing 1 and Thing 2 for a few minutes until I returned. She got fifteen minutes snorkelling and saw some parrot fish, blue tang and a queen angelfish. The verdict was a thumbs up.

Another advantage of Folkstone is that there is a playground at the back. It is not large and it is a little tired, but it is good for 15 or 20 minutes. There are a couple of slides, swings and a climbing frame. The best thing was one of those talking pipes - just a mouthpiece that leads into a pipe underground, which then reappears ten yards away. Thing 1 and Thing 2 spent ten minutes broadcasting surreal messages to one another, in imitation of their literary heroes, Harry Potter and Hermione Granger. ‘Stupefy! Wingardium Leviosa! Look out! Look out! There's a dementor behind you' (For dementor, read Daddy.) Expecto Patronum!

The final advantage of Folkstone turned out to be the security guards. Thing 1 left his new sandals behind as we left. We had reached home after a drive around the island and were bundling everything out of the car in a shower of sand when there was a :

‘WAAAAAAH! My new sandals!’

Dad looks around. Thinks, where on earth can they be?

‘But Waaaah!’

‘So, where exactly did you last see them?’

‘I don’t know...’

‘Ah, yes, Folkstone, they must be there. All right, all right, we’ll ring and see’.

It was after 5pm, so there was no answer, but next morning we rang again, in a panic. A pause, all too relaxed for the importance of the moment, and then:

‘Oh, yes, they’re here, sitting in the office.’

Phew! Later that day we picked them up, just in time to get on the plane back to England. Oh well, they’ll fit Thing 2 next year.

Accra Beach
Accra Beach Barbados is where we broke all our rules. Instead of going for sundown or in the early morning, we pitched up at Accra Beach in the heat of the day. (Actually we had already been once early in the day, but we decided this place was nice enough to come back for a late lunch on our second last day).

The beach itself is excellent. The main section is three hundred yards long, with superb, mounded white sand behind which there is a large car park with some stalls (sadly no breakfast available) set under huge trees, and behind that the main South Coast Road and some hotels. Accra beach is one of the ‘Windows on the Sea’ of the South Coast. At the western end there are some hotels and the beach tapers off a bit. At the other is a beach bar set in a pretty white and blue building. We based ourselves there, first in the covered section, then out on the tiled terrace area under the palm trees.

At the western end of the beach, a shallow section that is protected by a breakwater, the waves are very small. The day was a bit cloudy, but we went through the rigmarole of persuading Thing 1 and Thing 2 to put on suncream again. Once that was done they were free to chase off and jump in the shallows. Dad and She Who Knows sat in the shade and monitored from afar, only occasionally heading out to join in the fun.

It was here that the nice side of being a parent with kids came into its own. On the beach Thing 1 and Thing 2 found it incredibly easy to make friends with other children. Today they hitched up with Sally, an eight-year old English girl whose mother had come to Barbados to work. They had been there only a few days and were still going to the beach regularly before Mum started work. We parents said only a few words to one another, but the children shuttled between us quite happily, having an ice cream with one parent and a biscuit at the other.

Worthing Beach (and the Carib Beach Bar)
It is well known that beaches increase and decrease in size according to tidal movement, if some building takes places along the coast, or occasionally as the result of a hurricane - either the whole lot gets ripped out, or unbelievable amounts of sand are dredged up from the sea floor miles away and dumped where you don’t want them - but the beach that has varied more than any that I have seen is Worthing Beach in, well Worthing, on the south coast of Barbados.

When I first visited Barbados in the mid 1980s I remember it being small. Then a few years later I remember it absolutely huge. Sand had filled in the whole of the shallow area out to the reef two or three hundred yards offshore. The Carib Beach Bar was marooned so far inland that it hardly qualified as a beach bar any more. So imagine my surprise to come back and find that the sea had encroached again to the point where the beach bar was almost on the rocks of the shoreline. The palm trees were being undermined, their roots exposed and trunks tipping into the water.

Unfortunately it means that at the moment Worthing Beach is not as good as it has been. It is wide enough at one point to play volleyball, but there is not that much space otherwise. It was also stony underfoot, which makes it a bit uncomfortable to walk in and out.

It does have its advantages, though. We arrived in late afternoon, so it was feeding time for Thing 1 and Thing 2. And kids love the Carib Beach Bar - it understands things like chips and tomato ketchup. It is also quite a popular stopover on the way home from the office. Which makes for an interesting mix, a whole lot of families at the tables on the deck and a bunch of girls and blokes, in trousers and once-pressed shirts, at the bar.

Then in the middle of plain pasta and a sausage sandwich, a two-piece band started up on the empty dance floor. Elevator music. Thing 1 and Thing 2 walked forward and gazed in awe at the singer, who launched into a slightly warbled version ‘The Lady in Red’. Dad and She Who Knows sat cringing in the background. Back to the beach.

Harrismith Beach, or is that Bottom Bay?
Every time you visit to Barbados you should really include a visit to one of the beaches cut into the cliffs in the South-east. And so we did. They are spectacular, these beaches. The sand is as bright and white as anywhere on the island and backed by cliffs and a tangled network of tall palms. They have the bluest sea in Barbados, a surreal turquoise flecked with whitecaps as the wind off the Atlantic meets the tidal movement around the island. They are also wilder than most beaches on Barbados. The waves can be big, so there is good boogie boarding in some bays. You cannot swim in all of them, but they are ideal for a picnic if the day is not too windy.

The trouble about visiting them is that I can never actually find them. Or I can never guarantee to find a particular one. I am not even sure that I ever get the same beach from one visit to the next, except for one thing, an old plantation style house, which has lost its roof now and is near derelict, but is a classic sight.

Ah, I found it again. We parked next door to it and made our way down the steps to the beach. The sun was glancing off the rough water, making it so bright it was hard to focus. The waves were barrelling in and breaking, smashing more like, on a reef of shoreside rocks, and then spraying forty feet into the air in a cockscomb of froth. Not a place to swim. Not today at least.

We collected sponges, played hopscotch on a grid drawn into the sand, which lasted two turns before it was invisible under scuffed footmarks, and then just walked up and down the sand, leaving the only footprints there that day. People do recommend picnics here, but on this day the lettuce would have shot away as fast as a tracer bullet. Whichever this beach was, it was better to walk along the sand and to enjoy the wild weather.

We hope you have enjoyed these reviews on the Beaches of Barbados. If you would like to discover more useful hints about what to do with your children in Barbados this summer and autumn, or to see other reviews and stories about family visits by Thing 1 and Thing 2, please see Restaurants in Barbados (which includes visits to the Lone Star and the Oistins Fish Fry) and Barbados Sites and Activities, with reviews of Harrison’s Cave and the Barbados Wildlife Reserve.

Please also see information about Child-friendly developments in other Caribbean islands and for general information about children in Barbados, please see the section in our Barbados island guide, Children in Barbados.