Whichever tent gets you out camping is the best tent for you and yours. That said, I really don’t like those stand-up-inside multiple-room monstrosities. Perhaps there is a place for them (in the dumpster?) but in my opinion they are too cumbersome to set up, and too weak to provide a robust shelter. They will collapse flat in the slightest breeze. And they take forever to set up.
If you’re going to go out camping, be ready for hard rain and significant wind. You want to be confident in your shelter; you want to be able to tell your kids that it doesn’t matter how crazy the weather gets, we’ll just hang out in the tent and play. It is extremely satisfying to sleep comfortably through rain and wind, totally dry and unconcerned that your tent will blow away. My favorite camping nights are the ones where it rains hard all night, no lie.
Aside: I’m giving the honest scoop on gear I know about; that said, if you’re going to buy something (anything) on amazon, please start by clicking through the links on our website to get to amazon, as we can get a small kick-back, no matter what you end up buying, which would be awesome.
We have two tents, a four-person and a two-person. I use the four-person whenever I have two or more boys and Karen with me, which is most of the time. I use the two-person when I’m off on adult-only trips by myself, or if I’m taking just one of the boys with me.
Our 4-person tent is the Marmot Limelight. The also offer a 2-person, 3-person and 6-person version as well. I chose this tent because it is surprisingly inexpensive for what it offers. It is robust, per my requirements discussed above—it will survive windstorms and keep you bone
dry. It is plenty big enough for our family camping requirements. When Karen and I only had Bodie, we were able to fit his whole pack-and-play inside the tent with us. With myself and three boys, I can still bring one full-size action packer into the tent and keep it at the bottom of the boys feet. Two camp-chairs will fit inside side-by-side for rainy days (with little else).
The vestibule is large enough to run the camp stove; I boil water for morning hot-chocolate for the boys with my venerable backpacking stove, after our quick overnights (I don’t do breakfast on those quick overnights, so I figure at least I can do hot chocolate).
If you are in a real windstorm, there are four extra tabs along the stake edges, to which you can tie some extra paracord and lead it to trees or stakes. My only complaint with the Limelight is the zipper—with our powdery dry sandy environment, I managed to wear out the zipper after six hard years of regular use, and had to send it back to get repaired. I think that if I had put some silicone lube on it from time to time, that could have been avoided. Fortunately, Marmot repaired it for free, which is obviously awesome, but we did have to go without a tent for a month or so (I sent it back in the middle of winter, so it didn’t hamper our trips). They have updated the design slightly from our version; presumably with improvements.
Our 2-person tent is an REI brand Half Dome 2 Plus. This tent offers astonishing value—it is well made, bombproof for heavy weather, and is dirt cheap. Not sure how they get away with it, to be honest. Keep in mind, this is a car-camping tent. Which is to say that it is not lightweight for backpacking. When you’re looking for a 2-person backpacking tent, you spend a whole lot more money to trim down the weight, and you end up with considerably less space. The Half Dome is quite roomy for two people. I have camped in it with both of my older boys, and I can fit our three camp pads side-by-side (just barely). I would not try it with two adults and one child, that would be too tight. I use it when I take just one boy, or when I go off by myself to meet up with friends for more demanding adventures.
Whichever tent you get, do yourself a favor and buy a set of proper stakes. I’ve never bought a tent that came with adequate stakes—they are inevitably the round cross-section style, and they bend when you hammer them in with a rock (which is the only proper way to install stakes, ask my boys, they know to find a rock for me when it’s staking time). I use the red MSR groundhog stakes (full size, not 
Now here is a bit of hard-won parenting experience. There are two phenomena you can count on if you camp with really little kids:
1) They will fall forwards in the camp chairs. Yours and theirs, doesn’t matter if it’s small or large, they will fall forward whenever they get out of it, and it will continue until they are about 3 years-old, when it finally clicks for them. Just sayin’. If you’re already out there doing it, you’ll chuckle because you know I’m right; if you haven’t been out with toddlers yet, you’ll remember I said so and you’ll chuckle. Some things are universal.
2) They will trip on the tent cords and stakes. Inevitable. Especially when you are solo-dad’ing, setting up the tent, and your one-year-old is following you around the tent for twenty straight minutes saying “daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy” over and over and over again, as Bodie did one memorably chilly evening—tripping at EVERY corner, over and over again.
There are two things I do to minimize the tent line/stake tripping hazard for the little kids.
First, I use retro-reflective paracord for staking out the sides of the tent–there are tracer fibers woven in that glow like road-signs do when you hit them with the slightest bit of light. In the dark, if the kids are wearing headlamps, that stuff really glows. It works well for adults as well. Aside: I also bring enough extra paracord to 
Second, I take the extra time to place a melon-sized rock next to each stake. If the boys trip and fall in the dirt, no big deal. However I REALLY don’t want them to trip and fall on top of the stake, or to kick a stake with bare feet–the tops of those stakes get sharp and could definitely mess them up. I would rather them fall on the rock (they do that all over the place anyway). Perhaps that is an overly obsessive thing to do, but that’s me. If I have extra action packers, which I usually do, I’ll put them on each side of the vestibule, (as in the top image above) which pretty much ensures that the boys don’t trip getting in or out of the tent.
Here is another tent tip, particularly when camping with rowdy boys: when I first set up the tent, I throw all the soft stuff in there ready to go: pads, sleeping bags, pillows, blankets. But I avoid putting anything hard inside until later on. Because the boys LOVE to get in the tent and jump and fall and bounce off the side walls and wrestle. And if there is only soft stuff in there, the odds are reasonably good that my fireside conversation and reverie is uninterrupted by injury.
One more thing. I use a picnic blanket (see Karen’s blanket post) as a front porch. And the boys know that they aren’t allowed in the tent with shoes on. They have to stand on the porch and take them off. They can go in and out of the tent as much as they want, but they have to follow the shoe rule. Even our two year-old, he knows. He can’t even get his shoes on and off by himself, but he will follow the rules.
Finally, do yourself a favor and bring one glow-stick per night. I get the yellow Cyalume ones because they have a nice hook which hangs perfectly in the center of our tent, and a nice warm 
Picture Gallery of USING our tents:
The two videos below are fond memories, probably more precious to me because they’re my kids and these videos remind me of really good times out in the woods. The first video is the first time I took Jasper camping just he and I, up in our local national forest. The second video is when we went to climb Uncompaghre, a 14er up in CO, again just he and I but a considerably more ambitious solo-dad outing (we did summit, but with difficulty).
