ITEM: girl, 9, interests: swimming, playing with dolls, cartoons. Ideal holiday: Walt Disney World.

Item: girl, 13, interests: history, comedy, indie music, hanging out. Ideal holiday: camping with pals.

Item: girl, 16, interests: shopping, dancing, sport. Ideal holiday: California with own credit card.

Every next stage of my kids’ existence has been completely predictable and still comes as a complete surprise, with family holidays being the biggest example. Till three years ago it wasn’t so hard to please them all at the same time; today it seems impossible. The youngest still has the ability to make everything miserable by the primitive method of applied whingeing, but now the oldest has the nuclear weapon of simply refusing to come along. “I’ll go to Cornwall with Stella and Emily,” she threatens. And meet unsuitable boys from public schools and take drugs. Or drink.

Here’s the irreducible minimum for my teenagers. There has to be access to the internet. There has to be a TV. There has to be something interesting to see at just about every moment of every day. If there’s going to be museums then they’d better be close, exciting and be equipped with great shops and better cafés.

To try to accomplish all this, on the very day of the bomb scares last August, we flew to New York, where — a week earlier — it had been 100 degrees and as muggy as a Delhi sauna. The weather broke as we arrived, and manifested itself as a spectacular rainstorm, which we watched through the glass roof on the 45th floor (swimming pool level) of Le Parker Meridien hotel, on W 57th St just south of Central Park. That was entertainment of the most spontaneous kind.

And tick TV, swimming and internet access.

The best time to get a good hotel deal in New York tends to be exactly the times when it is most difficult elsewhere . . . when the business folk are on holidays. Even so, there was competition for places in the dining room for breakfast, where the pancakes were the kind we Brits always say we don’t like, because we can’t make them. The chef at Le Parker Meridien could. One gold star for New York.

The next day we learnt one big, positive lesson about city travel. You know those double-decker hop-on hop-off buses that tour the town centres, the kind you always feel too snobby to board? In New York they’re an indispensable way to map the intimate geography of the city. Sold to us on the sidewalk by a laughing, pushy Ghanaian and then narrated by a humorous Brooklyn woman, the tour was a wonder of looking upwards at the buildings and outwards towards the water. Broadway, 5th Avenue, Theatreland, Greenwich village, all in a couple of hours, getting us ready to visit each in detail. The oldest teenager was impressed. That’s where you shop, that’s where the show is that we’re going to see, that’s where the stars have dinner, that’s where Friends was filmed.

()Of course, everywhere in Manhattan is a film set, and this became one theme of the trip, from Kushner’s angel in Central Park to Nicole Kidman’s United Nations (an unexpected success, that tour was), from Woody Allen’s Brooklyn Bridge to the Lower East side, where an actress at the unmissable Tenement museum talked us through a two-room apartment that I recognised from The Godfather II. We ate at the When Harry Met Sally orgasm diner on Houston St and then went walking in Chinatown and Little Italy. It was hot, and we had to stop frequently for drinks, but this being New York, there were lots of drinks to be had, and there was something interesting at every turn of the head.

All this was pretty consensual, but some stuff was achieved by negotiation. We got them into the Metropolitan Museum and round the Egyptian temple (I’d run past it earlier that morning in a full circuit of Central Park, using a map supplied by the hotel), slightly more quickly round the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) and to the Museum of Natural History. The Guggenheim we skipped. We’d never have got agreement.

So we were feeling fairly smug, but what clinched it, and persuaded our 16-year-old that perhaps she might go on holiday again with us next year, were the shopping and the show. The hotel had tipped us off about Century 21, the discount store near Ground Zero. Three more gold stars for bargains and street cred. I hate shopping, but I loved buying shoes out of cardboard boxes at huge reductions from sassy Harlem girls. Meanwhile, Mum took the nine-year-old to The American Girl Place, a horror house for blokes, but paradise for little women. She emerged with something appalling, which she has played with ever since.

Then we took them to Hairspray on Broadway. The show was smart, funny, danced and sung with panache and snap, and all three of them adored it. It was made better by the un-British enthusiasm of the out-of-town audience who had come to enjoy themselves.

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()Just in case, we had built some insurance into the trip. After a week we got on the fast train up the coast and went to Boston, a city I like, and whose colonial history was easy to explain to the kids. In New York we had failed to get tickets to a baseball game, but the extraordinary concierge of the Lenox Hotel, where we were staying, managed somehow to magic up two seats for the evening Red Sox versus New York Yankees match at the Fenway Park stadium, just 20 minutes’ walk from the hotel. The match lasted from 8.30 to past midnight, and Rosa and I walked back with the crowds in something approaching bliss.

Failures? Far fewer than usual, but the worst was back in New York, going to the top of the Empire State Building. We went late, and getting up wasn’t so bad, the lines were OK and it took only half an hour. Getting back down was a nightmare, an hour’s queuing/shuffling down several flights of airless stairs because the lifts were full. By the time we made it to the sidewalk two of our party were fed up and rebellious, and one of those was my wife. She and the 13-year-old got into a yellow cab (it wouldn’t take five) and shot off hotelwards. It was the last cab anywhere to be seen. And then along came the Moroccan boy on the tricycle rickshaw, to pedal us hilariously through the silver and black of night-time Manhattan. “That was great!” said the 16-year-old. Which meant, of course, that it was far better than that.

Need to know

British Airways Holidays (0870 2433406, www.ba.com/holidays) offers three nights’ room only in New York at Le Parker Meridien and four in Boston at the Lenox from £970pp (March 2007 departures). The price includes flights and car hire, with one-way drop off.

Shopping: With the dollar hovering around 1.9 to the pound, the Big Apple is retail heaven, but remember only up to £145 worth of goods can be brought back duty free (details, www.hmrc.gov.uk).

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