My wife, my two youngest daughters, Eva (13) and Louise (eight), and I visited Banksy’s Dismaland “bemusement park” in Weston-super-Mare last week. We had previously enjoyed the occasional day in the town, taking donkey rides, eating candyfloss, paddling in the freezing sea. But Dismaland was a different kind of ocean – one of irony, cynicism and disillusion.

It was an experience like no other. The grim reaper dancing to Staying Alive on a dodgem car. The sulky attendants with their Mickey Mouse ears replying monosyllabically to inquiries. The stuffed unicorn. The photo galleries where you stick your head through a hole and take a picture of yourself as a terrorist. The drive-your-own model boats full of desperate migrants.

This isn’t a review of Dismaland, though. Instead, it concerns the growing level of discomfort I felt as I led Louise through the increasingly dour (but extremely funny) installations.

Pocket Money Loans, available only to children, was one of the more inspired items; you can borrow £5, so long as you pay back £50 by the end of the month. We tried to suppress our grins throughout (the attendants who ushered us in sternly instructed “no smiling”), which was hard – although more so for us adults than Louise, who seemed increasing doleful about the experience as the day progressed. “This isn’t very nice,” she observed, plaintively. She was too young to grasp that “niceness” was the very thing it stood against and purported, in many cases, to expose – ripping back the carcass of modern commercial and familial myths to expose the decaying core within.

My unease grew at the post-apocalyptic “Disney castle”, which features a video loop of the end of Cinderella as you enter – the bit where the prince and Cinders go off to live happily ever after. Then you walk through to the punchline – a giant pumpkin coach, crashed, with the legs of the dead princess sticking out. We were offered, and took, the opportunity to have our photograph taken next to the crash scene. Louise looked positively downcast.

By now, I was beginning to wonder if this whole artwork/satire was appropriate for someone who, at a pinch, still believes in magic and princesses and unicorns. She was having her illusions slowly torched, leaving her stranded in a world unencumbered by illusion, leaving only decay, exploitation and all that is rotten in human nature. By the time we got to the next exhibit, which included a video of chickens being beheaded on a production line, I began to feel guilty about bringing her.

Take a look around Banksy’s ‘bemusement park’ Guardian

Doubtless I was being oversensitive. Louise said she enjoyed herself, and carried her “I am an imbecile” balloon with pride. Yet, she had been subjected to a crash course in postmodern despair, and no doubt some of it stuck. I suppose that is what is meant to happen, but I wonder if the insistence of art on emphasising the decadent is really any more suitable for children than an 18-rated film.

We cannot wait to disabuse ourselves of the myths that society foists on us. To do so makes us laugh, makes us feel clever, convinces us that we are trenchant, knowing critics of the world in which we live. But perhaps we have nowhere to live but myths, whether it is the myth of decadence or the myth of niceness and happy endings. The only question, really, is which myth is bearable.

I know Louise lives in a far more rich and beautiful world than I do, because she does not – yet – see below the surface of things to the stark reality underneath. Do I really have the right to sully her imaginings and substitute such a vision? It will happen soon enough without my help, or Banksy’s. In the end, I’m glad we went – but I wonder if it should have been me carrying the imbecile balloon, rather than Louise.

@timlottwriter