“He’s fast! He’s courageous! He’s a ninja dinosaur!” As big beats and a tiny voice emerge from the stereo, a minor riot unfolds on the living-room carpet. With one hand on their hip and the other pushing away a large imaginary dog, my five-year-old daughter Dora and her friend Maddie are attempting to adapt a move learned from Madonna’s Hung Up video. Dizzy from twirling, Dora’s three-year-old sister Eavie has given up trying to stand and is beside the patio door imitating a dying fly. Ninja dinosaurs — is there anything they can’t do? Apparently not. This isn’t some soul-sapping kidsploitation CD that my children are dancing to. This is the revered electronica sound of Four Tet, whose Go Go Ninja Dinosaur opens Colours are Brighter, a wonderful new album of original children’s songs by the likes of Jonathan Richman, the Kooks and Franz Ferdinand.

“I think it’s really brought out the best in all the artists who got involved,” enthuses the trumpeter Mick Cooke, of Belle & Sebastian, who compiled the album. “I don’t think there’s another album like it.”

He’s right. If there was, I would know about it by now. As a music fan fighting to ensure that my children have a modicum of taste, Colours are Brighter comes as valuable ammunition against the tween-pop tyranny of Hi-5 and the soon-to-be-everywhere High School Musical soundtrack.

In the past five years I’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that I can take pride in the songs my kids like. At times I’ve created fictional back-stories to records, with a view to tickling Dora and Eavie’s curiosity. Hence, in their world, the Beatles’ Help! was inspired by the time John Beatle ate too many pies and got stuck in a manhole. I enlivened Neil Young’s Helpless by convincing them that the line, “Big birds flying across the sky” actually referred to Big Bird from Sesame Street.

But possibly my greatest achievement happened just a month ago, when I convinced Dora and Eavie to come to the Big Chill festival on the basis that Vashti Bunyan — fairy godmother to the nu-folk vanguard — would be performing.

For this one, of course, I didn’t need to make up a back-story. Months before I had told them about how Bunyan’s legendary “lost” album Just Another Diamond Day came to be made; about her two-year odyssey by horse-drawn caravan to a commune in the Outer Hebrides; about the subsequent album that chronicled her journey; about its abject commercial failure, which effectively put paid to Bunyan’s musical dreams; and about its subsequent reappraisal 30 years later, which lured the singer out of retirement. When Bunyan performed her afternoon set at Big Chill my daughters sat through it gazing on adoringly.

Quite whose interests I had at heart here is something I have yet to work out. There’s a fine line between giving your children a musical education and brainwashing them into liking all your favourite records. In my defence, though, I would argue that I’m less guilty of this than the late composer and guitarist Freddie Phillips. Best known for his lovely theme tunes to the TV series Camberwick Green and Trumpton, Phillips was a staunch advocate of modern classical music. His own children were raised not to some gentle guitar meditation such as might accompany the sound of Windy Miller turning his mill, but to the music of Igor Stravinsky and Pierre Boulez. “Children have no preconceptions about music,” Phillips once told me. “Play Boulez to an adult and they’re faced with the challenge of unlearning all the things they’ve been taught to regard as ‘proper’ music.”

If that really is the case, I fear I’ve already instilled in my children an orthodoxy that they may never be able to shake off. To confirm this I play them two songs by Scott Walker from opposite ends of the singer’s solo career. Recently described by one reviewer as “an exploration of the shell game as existential metaphor coupled with the motif of dermatological malady”, Psoriatic is one of the more challenging sound-collages from Walker’s recent album, The Drift. His version of Jacques Brel’s Jackie, on the other hand, is a breathlessly gleeful thing whose protagonist longs to be “cute — in a stupid-ass way”.

The former lasts approximately one minute before Eavie attempts to “make that silly man stop”. The latter has both girls galloping around the room like horses. And, if they were really honest with themselves, every Walker apologist in the offices of the furrow-browed music monthly The Wire would probably do the same.

This, of course, is the wonderful thing about playing one’s records to small children. Broadly speaking, tiny people have no concept of cool. And as long as my youngest continues to wet her pants roughly once a week, I suspect that this will continue to be the case. That’s what makes them such excellent guinea-pigs.

Children are no less adept at exposing the shallowness of a mass critical backlash. Right now, it’s easier to find someone who will own up to being a Gary Glitter fan than a lover of Travis. But, during Eavie’s first year, no CD would pull her out of a tantrum and into a serene reverie faster than Travis’s The Man Who (1999).

Phillips might not have approved, but even he would have plumped for Travis over the bafflingly popular Punk Rock Baby series of CDs, which is designed to bridge the gap between your baby’s apparent needs and the sensibilities of the post-punk dad. The outspoken Phillips rightly described ambient plinky-plonky versions of Smells Like Teen Spirit as the equivalent of puréed mush.

But, for the parent eager to find music for children, it’s a market that remains sparsely populated. The world is full of children and parents, so why are there so few decent records aimed at them? Charlie Leach is the managing director of Whatmusic, a brand consultancy firm that sells compilations ideas to record labels and chainstores. “Children don’t have a disposable income,” he says, “so everyone is marketing to the mums, selling them what they think the mums will think their kids will want.

Explore Music

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette