By third grade (circa early 1980s), I was spending a lot of nights at friends’ houses. Birthday slumber parties were common, and Friday nights were spent randomly watching VHS tapes in dark nooks until our eyes burned. At one friend’s house, we choreographed Wham! songs and another time, I absorbed MTV like a sponge because we didn’t have cable in our house.
I figured when my own kids were in second or third grade, we’d start deciding if they were ready for a sleepover. I didn’t think sleepovers would actually be a thing anymore. I also didn’t realize that I barely knew my kids’ friends or their parents. See, I grew up in the same town my parents grew up in. Everyone knew each other, and my earliest sleepovers were with neighbors or children of people my parents had known all their lives.
Now we call everyone a “friend,” even though they’re practically strangers, and the fear of the unknown makes sleepovers intolerable for many parents. In recent online and media debates about sleepovers, parents have expressed great concern about letting their children sleep over at their friends’ houses:
How much adult supervision will they have?
Are there guns in the house?
Is the family vaccinated for COVID?
Are alcohol and drugs safe enough?
Will other parents take my child’s allergies/health condition seriously?
Will the children have access to the Internet?
What other siblings, friends and adults are in the family and do I know them?
How do I know my child will not be abused?
Who exactly are these people?
Aside from those serious concerns, sleepovers can be just a pain. You may get a call in the middle of the night to pick up your child because she’s too anxious to sleep, or they may come home grumpy because they stayed up late. If you’re hosting a sleepover, you’ll need to plan a house full of activities. And then you can’t sleep because taking care of an extra minor overnight is no small feat.
But what about the benefits? In my childhood, it was exciting to come into an unfamiliar home and see how other families functioned. Watching MTV and Rambo before I was really mature enough. Kids do need exposure to other lifestyles and different social norms in order to contextualize their own social experiences. What are they missing out on if we don’t allow them to have sleepovers with their friends?
As a teenager in my 1990s, sleepovers were a time for making grand plans, extended post-curfew adventures and trying to be independent before we were truly unsupervised. Do teens still need those baby steps toward independence? Or are sleepovers a remnant of Generation X nostalgia, and our kids have turned to other (online) ways to build deeper friendships and independence?
There are alternatives to the traditional sleepover where young children can gain some freedom and novelty without much risk: the
Allow overnight stays with trusted family members or family friends.
“Sleepovers” (or half or late sleepovers): Let your child play late at a friend’s house, but come home to sleep.
Let them go out with friends and their families during the day so you can be present and get to know everyone better.
Camping with other families, which gives the kids the experience of spending the night, but with all parents present to supervise.
So far, my daughters have really enjoyed staying home and not asking for overnights. Or they are content to “spend the night” in each other’s rooms until they really get tired and go back to their beds. I wonder if their lack of interest is a sign of a cultural shift, a custom that seemed to be an essential part of my childhood. Is the debate moot because kids don’t even care about sleepovers as much as we do?
We’d love to hear your thoughts as parents on how you respond to sleepover decisions. Do you have your own rules about when sleepovers are allowed or clear reasons for banning them together? Are you as surprised as I am that it didn’t even come up? Let us know in the comments.
