Parents are skeptical about sleepovers
January 17, 2023 5:28 PM Subscribe

'What a once-simple rite of childhood reveals about the divisions among us'

"Among parents who are skeptical of this particular rite of childhood, one question — 'Can I spend the night?' — unleashes a slew of others: How well do we know the other parents? Are there guns in the house? What about alcohol or drugs? What is the risk of covid exposure? Are there older siblings around? Will the kids be watching YouTube or TikTok all night? Is it a girls-only or boys-only gathering? (And what about kids who don’t adhere to binary concepts of gender and sexuality?) What might happen if they stay the night, and what might they miss if they don’t?" (Washington Post)

posted by smorgasbord (104 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite

Most of the legitimate concerns here (who-all is going to be there, are there guns in the house, is the alcohol supervised?) apply as much to multiple-hour visits as to sleepovers. Some parents just have way too much time on their hands and way too much status anxiety to work off. Oh, no, my child might get a little extra screen time!
posted by praemunire at 5:44 PM on January 17, 2023 [25 favorites]

Yeah, the whole point of sleepovers is to stay up past bedtime doing stuff you don't have a chance to when you're at home by yourself.

Also, there were lots of homes with guns and drunks in them 50 years ago, and I don't remember anybody coming to a bad end because of a sleepover. Your kids probably are not eager to get themselves into a sketchy situation.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 5:51 PM on January 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

I've talked so much with my friends and sisters about this. I was sleeping over at friends' houses constantly from about the age of seven, and there were times in my life when I almost never spent a Friday night at home. I do think I learned a lot about other cultures and ways of living from those experiences. I went to church, to Hebrew school, to synagogue with my friends. I prayed with them over dinner, I saw them speak languages I didn't understand with their parents, heard them worry about getting spanked, knew their pets and their siblings, saw their favorite movies. I'm glad I had these experiences. I was generally a pretty sheltered kid and they broadened my world.

My husband isn't from a sleepover culture and when he spent the night away from his parents, it was with his cousins. He thinks none of these benefits are worth the risk of letting our kids spend the night with a stranger. And honestly, I'd fight him on it except that I spent many nights in high school at the home of a friend whose father was both an alcoholic and a gun nut. I absolutely found him terrifying and absolutely kept going over there anyway because I figured I was mature and I could handle it if anything happened (I was not, and could not have). Nothing unsavory ever did happen, but I hate thinking of my kids trying to navigate that scenario. I think a lot of parents are leery of sleepovers because they remember a parent or a family that gave them a bad feeling and picture their kids spending the night with that family, and don't like how it makes them feel.

We're talking about having my kid spend a week at a family friend's house for the summer. We've known them for many years and trust them implicitly. And that might be one of the only sleepovers she ever gets to experience, who knows. I'm honestly fine with that. I'm sad she won't get my life experiences, but there are many other ways for her to learn how other children live, and she's had many cool opportunities I haven't.

But yes, the gender questions are also way more complex to navigate! I definitely abused the trust of parents who didn't realize their daughter and I were getting up to Gay Shit behind closed doors as teens. It's no longer as simple as single-sex sleepovers and I've seen parent groups get in huge flamewars about when a nonbinary kid should and shouldn't be allowed to join a slumber party billed as "same-sex" and whether inviting them constitutes misgendering or inclusion. I can see why a lot of parents are like "let's just paint ceramics for your birthday, kiddo."
posted by potrzebie at 5:57 PM on January 17, 2023 [36 favorites]

Our kids go to sleepovers all the time, but Living in Canada it never occurred to me to even think about guns.
posted by fimbulvetr at 5:59 PM on January 17, 2023 [27 favorites]

My thing is I don't ever remember even hearing of a sleepover that wasn't with a well-known family.

I don't think there's anything that new-fangled or odd about wanting to know a fair amount about the people you are entrusting your kid with for that kind of time frame? Of course there's lots of variables with respect to age etc. but as a former child and current parent I don't really expect anyone to stay the night with casual acquaintances.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:03 PM on January 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

Then there are those of us for whom a sleepover was an escape from an alcoholic household, and the only "danger" was that we'd see what an even modestly functional family was like.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:03 PM on January 17, 2023 [120 favorites]

Let's not get too dismissive of the article. I wouldn't call those concerns status anxiety right off the bat. I think it's perfectly reasonable to exert some parental judgement on the types of environments your kids may walk into.

Pre-COVID, we were not too favorably inclined towards sleepovers for our kids at their friends' houses because we weren't too comfortable with some of the kids and hosts. And there's a big difference between staying up to watch the Letterman top ten list and some double entendres and getting exposed to hardcore pornography or being recorded on social media.
posted by fortitude25 at 6:04 PM on January 17, 2023 [14 favorites]

Growing up in full late Gen-X 80s, I slept over at friend's houses a good deal. They weren't sleepovers in the idea of a bunch of kids going to one kid's house, and looking back, it was pretty obvious that a good number of those sleepovers were so my (single with two kids) mom could just have a break, and many of the times a friend stayed with me, it was pretty much reciprocation.

The thing is, the people I stayed over with were members of a community (most sleepovers I had were with kids from my synagogue, and whose parents were close with my mom), or close neighbors (so, yeah, I only realized years later that my childhood/kindergarten best friend was the son of the neighborhood pot dealer). I didn't have sleepovers with a kid that my mom didn't know.

At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for some bullshit halcyon better days (that never really happened), there is something to be said for reaching out and making connections in the community, and getting to know who your kid is hanging out with. I realize it's a lot harder, especially since I'm sitting here typing to my internet community who I've mostly never met in person, and never will, but it seems like "I know your friend's parents, and I trust them" is a pretty handy metric for whether the sleepover is okay or not.

I mean, how else are kids going to find out that their friend's dads walk around naked in the morning? (the 80s were an interesting time)
posted by Ghidorah at 6:07 PM on January 17, 2023 [28 favorites]

I never ever had any sleepovers as a kid, so I've deliberately arranged a couple sleepovers for my son, an only child, and his best two buddies from school. They run around the house, blow up balloons and throw them at each other, play loudly on my drum kit, play Smash Bros on the Switch, and go to sleep at midnight.

At the same time, I completely understand the hesitation to send a kid to spend the night at the house of someone you hardly know. (But it's fun to be the cool hosting mom who makes pancakes in the morning.)
posted by daisystomper at 6:15 PM on January 17, 2023 [18 favorites]

I was not allowed to attend sleepovers as a child. Sometimes this was an annoyance as a kid, but looking back, I realize my parents didn't really know any of the families inviting me (we moved a lot). When we stayed in a single town for a couple years, I did stay over at that friend's house and it was fine.

My child is 8 and not-verbal and will likely never be invited to a (non-family) sleepover, and that's its own hard. I really don't know what my "policy" would be.

Ghidorah, did you sleep over at my ex's house? His dad was notorious for middle-of-the-night naked walks to the fridge. Pretty sure his dad was doing that to be creepy, which is another strike against other people in general if not sleepovers in particular.
posted by mmmbacon at 6:15 PM on January 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well, I for one definitely slept at the homes of people my parents didn't know all that well. And friends whose parents didn't know mine spent the night at my house too. I'd love to believe thorough vetting was generally happening in the 90s but that doesn't match my experience.
posted by potrzebie at 6:19 PM on January 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I wonder how all this relates to parental friendships and town layouts. Like, when I was a kid I went to sleepovers at two friends' houses, both within a mile of mine. My parents knew the other parents from car pooling and school stuff and before the sleepovers happened there had been lots of hangouts and birthday parties and so on. In junior high, I slept over at a couple of friends' houses that were slightly farther away and where my parents didn't know the other parents super well, but I'd known those kids for a while at least.

I'm not saying that nothing bad ever happens if you know the parents in question, but it's a lot easier to feel confident when you do know them - my parents knew that these parents weren't big drinkers and that their general style of life wasn't too different from ours.

At least around here, kids get bused long, long distances to school instead of going to neighborhood schools, so it's less likely for parents to know the other kids' parents socially and it's harder to have a sense of what their general way of life is like. And of course, if something goes wrong five blocks away, the kid can practically walk home from the sleepover, but if it's ten miles away on the other side of the metro it's a lot harder to just pop over and pick them up. Also, kids don't seem to play outside as much or as informally, so it's more difficult to get to know each other in low stakes settings.

There are upsides to these changes - my parents suffered a lot of loneliness in our town because while we lived a lot like the other families, our values around money, culture and politics were very different and those other parents were mostly pretty right-wing, Reaganite, money-oriented people, and frankly it would have been worth it to drive around a little bit if it meant that they had adult friends who were more congenial.

But I can definitely see why you'd hesitate to send your kids to a house where you really didn't know the family.

And of course, there's social media - when I was a kid, if the parents were at all in control of things the worst that could happen was you'd stay up all night and manage to see a movie that was a little too scary or had some disturbing eighties/nineties "erotic thriller" stuff going on. Again, I would in fact worry a little bit about the long long hours between say 10pm and 6am if they were going to involve totally unchecked access to the internet.

A lot of stuff can happen at sleepovers because supervision at night is more complicated - during even a long daytime visit, the kids expect some parental check-ins every hour or so even if it's just an adult passing by in the hallway. Overnight means many hours when the parents are absolutely dead tired and sleeping but the kids are bouncing around.

Frankly, a parent who hesitated to send a kid to the kind of sleepovers I attended would indeed be a paranoid parent, but I'm not sure that those are the majority kind of sleepovers anymore.
posted by Frowner at 6:20 PM on January 17, 2023 [15 favorites]

Before high school I wasn't allowed to go to other kids' houses at all, except for that one time a classmate's mother called mine and kind of shamed her into letting me attend a birthday party. Went to one sleepover in Grade 9 with my entire friend group and it was pretty uncomfortable. One bathroom was not enough for all of us plus the host's large family.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:44 PM on January 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I remember very clearly when I was 10-11 making plans with a friend on Friday to have a sleepover the next day. Or I thought it was a sleepover. That's what I told my mom before she dropped me off on Saturday. As it began to get later and later I sensed something was off and realized my friend's parents were not of the same idea. They thought it was just us hanging out for the day and I'd be gone in the evening. It worked out. I did end up sleeping over. But that awkwardness at realizing your idea for the visit and their parents' idea were not the same is something I still think about three decades later.
posted by downtohisturtles at 6:47 PM on January 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

I had tons of sleepovers as a kid but always with family friends (ie other Pakistani families). I remember in grade 5 or 6 one of my classmates was having a sleepover party for his birthday and my parents wouldn't let me go and I was pretty mad about it. My parents didn't know his parents so weren't comfortable with it, but they didn't know any of my classmates' parents and never made any effort to. In junior high and later I went to sleepovers and had friends over but it wasn't like our parents knew each other any better by that point.

Now that I'm a parent my kids have done sleepovers with some family friends but not with any classmates. My older kid went out for Halloween with her friends this year and on their birthday they go to the local burger shop after school and hang out for an hour or so so maybe they'll work their way up to sleepovers at some point. Our younger kid isn't going anywhere by himself and it would be hard to think of a situation where both him and his older sister would be going to the same sleepover that wasn't with family friends. We've gone on camping trips with his classmates and their families though.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 6:49 PM on January 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

In 2012, a person I went to highschool with (we still both live in the area, which is a small rural community) lost his son at a sleepover. The boys had located a handgun -- in a "Hey, my dad has a (gun type), let's check it out..." -- sort of way. They assumed it was unloaded and decided to fake like they were "playing russian roulette." It was not unloaded. He was fifteen.

So, yeah, maybe some parents are "overly worried" about the guns thing but... it's not a bad question to ask.
posted by which_chick at 7:01 PM on January 17, 2023 [47 favorites]

Oof, the cognitive dissonance on display with that mother who was wondering if her kid would stay up all night on TikTok, only to consult TikTok herself about what to do.

If I hadn’t started going to sleepovers, I wouldn’t have found my first bandmates. And I also wouldn’t have been able to form an opinion about powdered milk or Tang or grits.
posted by emelenjr at 7:05 PM on January 17, 2023 [10 favorites]

I read this article earlier this evening, the story about Emory from the FPP still has me bummed.

Anyway, things I encountered for the first time during my dozens of sleepovers during the 80’s and early 90’s between the ages of around 10 and 13: soft core pornography, trying hard liquor, buying marijuana (watching my friend do it anyway), witnessing domestic violence between a mother and father, verbal abuse between a different mother and father, being a passenger in a car with a visibly drunk driver (domestic abuse dad), pentacostal Sunday services (the verbal abuse family), Shabbat services (different family altogether). Except for the domestic violence and the Sunday services, it was a pretty good time. Still, can’t see me greenlighting many sleepovers for my kids.
posted by skewed at 7:07 PM on January 17, 2023 [13 favorites]

I slept over at friends’ houses occasionally growing up, and that was a good experience in life to have. I’m Gen X and for most of us, we grew up in our friends’ houses. Most of the time, either I was at a friend’s house or a friend was at mine. As a white person who grew up in an overwhelmingly Mexican neighborhood, I got a lot of good perspective on life (oh and I ate so gooooooood) that has been valued to me with the political climate these days. A few parents never let their kids do sleepovers, especially at church, but those were the exception to the rule. Sometimes there wasn’t even really any planning, we’d be playing video games or watching TV and it was getting late and “hey, you can sleep over if you want” was it.

As much as I valued the experiences, I can understand why parents are hesitant nowadays. You can go on and on about “the good old days” but things didn’t change overnight. Families moved. Incomes changed. Cities grew. Technology changed communication. Schools changed. The political arena changed. Everything evolved into a world where people are less connected in-person. I think about this a lot and wonder if we wouldn’t be making the world a better place by hanging out more often. But then you get to the issue of finding friends and maintaining friendships which seems to be getting tougher over the years.

On a little aside, you know what this makes me nostalgic for? The days where you could leave the house and just be gone and no one knew where you were. Occasionally I think it would be nice to have a simple flip phone as a second phone to keep in the car for the simple purpose of calling help if you had a breakdown, and leaving the smartphone at home. When I go camping it’s time for a digital detox, and I highly recommend it whenever possible. Even if for a few days my friends can’t get a hold of me. Even better if I have a couple along for the trip. It’s still a sleepover if we’re all in separate tents at the same campsite, right?
posted by azpenguin at 7:11 PM on January 17, 2023 [19 favorites]

Again, I would in fact worry a little bit about the long long hours between say 10pm and 6am if they were going to involve totally unchecked access to the internet.

Surely most of the trouble one can get into on the Internet doesn’t require sharing a room, by the nature of the Internet, so what you’re getting at here is - that your kid’s friend’s parents might have a more lax policy about device access than you do?
posted by atoxyl at 7:23 PM on January 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

When I think about ways the online environment might be more hazardous to kids today than it was for my generation, it’s 95 percent about issues of constant access anywhere, not the worst case for a single night’s access.
posted by atoxyl at 7:26 PM on January 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

This article was interesting because I’m thinking about these things and loved sleepovers as a kid. My kid is younger than I was when I started going to sleepovers and so far, the closest thing to a sleepover she’s had is sleeping in the same room as her cousin. It’s funny to think of the innocent fun we had at sleepovers like prank phone calls and talking to people in chat rooms. A scandalous thing we did was watch a R- rated movie (Jerry Maguire) with a friend who was not allowed to watch them.

I think a difference between me going to sleepovers growing up and my kids potentially going is that a lot of moms didn’t work in my community so I think they knew each other better. Right now, the parents with whom I feel the most comfortable are those who are as hands-on as I am. If they wanted to talk about doing a sleepover, I’d be open to it.
posted by kat518 at 7:28 PM on January 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

The thing is, your kid is going to be exposed to hardcore pornography anyway (Pornhub! phones! teens!), your kid is going to do gay shit and/or straight shit anyway, your kid is going to run into authority figures who don't have their best interests in mind anyway, your kid is going to be filmed doing goofy shit by bullies anyway. Not letting children interact during night hours isn't going to eliminate these rites of passage and these dangers.

The one thing I can think of that is markedly different from olden times is that certain configurations of sleepover might lead to fooling around that could cause pregnancy in ways that aren't as obvious as the "no boys and girls together until MARRIAGE or at LEAST 16 AND CONDOMS" rules of the past.
posted by kingdead at 7:32 PM on January 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

Surely most of the trouble one can get into on the Internet doesn’t require sharing a room, by the nature of the Internet, so what you’re getting at here is - that your kid’s friend’s parents might have a more lax policy about device access than you do?

Kids do things together that they would not do apart - they want to impress each other, they are afraid to look scared or weird, they just get into a being-goofy-taking-risks-double-dare-you headspace. If things were the same in the room and online, it wouldn't have mattered that we've all had three years of zoom meetings and zoom playdates, etc etc etc, but of course being literally in the room with someone changes the dynamic considerably.

Also, it's a lot easier to stay up all night goofing around when the other person is right there, also during a sleepover the regular household rules are intrinsically relaxed - you aren't going to bed early like on a school night, you probably get extra snacks, you may get to play or watch something unusual. This changes the dynamic.

Changes to the dynamic have a lot more potential when the internet is right there than when the most unsettling thing to hand is a videotape of Nightmare on Elm Street.
posted by Frowner at 7:36 PM on January 17, 2023 [17 favorites]

The covid exposure and the gender stuff definitely seem like good reasons to have pause on sleepovers these days. Not that I have kids to have a dog in this fight, but I'm not sure what the hell I'd say. It might really depend on situation and the kids involved.

" I've seen parent groups get in huge flamewars about when a nonbinary kid should and shouldn't be allowed to join a slumber party billed as "same-sex" and whether inviting them constitutes misgendering or inclusion. I can see why a lot of parents are like "let's just paint ceramics for your birthday, kiddo."

...yeah, me too. If that's going on, that's probably a lot more drama and hurt than seems worth it to have a sleepover.

I dunno on the rest, since we didn't get up to THAT much trouble, other than fake humping (don't ask), "light as a feather, stiff as a board" weirdness, and the time when everyone but me wanted to freeze their wet underwear. I still don't understand why that was A Thing. But other than the underwear thing, which was discovered for obvious reasons, no parents knew what weirdness we were up to, and it didn't hurt anyone, and things were fine.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:40 PM on January 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

My brother racked up like $100 phone billfrom 1-900 phone sex numbers at a sleepover age 14. My friend showed me his dad’s playboys. (But I had already seen my grandfathers.

Both learning experiences. My parents also didn’t drink or watch r-rated movies when kids were around, so that was a new experience.

In middle school, a friends dad who was a retired cop/current private investigator showed a picture of a dead body. That one definitely stands cos in my mind

HS sleepovers were a whole different ballgame.
posted by CostcoCultist at 7:45 PM on January 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think parents are right to be skeptical about sleepovers. I was a free range latchkey child from the age of 9, but even staying for dinner at someone's house was a big ask. A sleepover was maybe a birthday party, or something you did with a very close friend. They always involved staying up too late and watching the TV you shouldn't watch.

By the time I was in high school, sleepovers had morphed into church lock-ins, which were weird in so many ways. There was ONE house that had parents that let us hang out in Friday and Saturday nights until midnight or 1 or whatever, hanging out and being loud and watching MTV incessantly, and that was safe, even for my Presbyterian parents. But like sleepovers at houses wasn't a thing. Not for me, anyway.
posted by hippybear at 7:51 PM on January 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also, there were lots of homes with guns and drunks in them 50 years ago, and I don't remember anybody coming to a bad end because of a sleepover. Your kids probably are not eager to get themselves into a sketchy situation.

I don't have any opinions about sleepovers one way or another but I do have an uncle who died this way when he was a kid. The way I heard the story, him and his friend were playing Spiderman in the attic with a gun they didn't think was loaded. Kids don't always know what a sketchy situation looks like.
posted by aniola at 7:52 PM on January 17, 2023 [14 favorites]

Yeah, "We did [potentially dangerous thing X] when we were kids and nothing bad ever happened!" is often deeply tinged with survivor bias.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:59 PM on January 17, 2023 [28 favorites]

I usually tell it "We did Dangerous Thing when we were kids, and I'm amazed we're still alive".
posted by hippybear at 8:01 PM on January 17, 2023 [9 favorites]

Sure, kids are going to do what they’re going to do. That doesn’t mean I have to facilitate.
posted by kat518 at 8:03 PM on January 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, playboys and scary movies aren’t life altering. A gunshot certianly is and lax gun attitude is absolutely a red line for any kids sleepovers.

In HS we did get into some parents liquor cabinets, but hey we weren’t driving anywhere. Senior year of HS there was one family that didn’t care if we drank as long as no one was driving. That got reigned on a bit when they ended up with dozens of teenagers passed out all over the house.

Car crashes are the biggest killer of kids and my kids will not be driving themselves anywhere late at night.

I will also echo above that I got to experience some different Christian denominations after Saturday night sleep overs. My wife’s only experience going to church came from sleepovers
posted by CostcoCultist at 8:08 PM on January 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm glad we didn't deprive our kids of sleepovers. Pretty important socialization/experience, IMO.

The kids get to see how other parents set rules, make dinner, allow/don't allow stuff...for the most part, it involves trust and letting go...but that doesn't mean you have to skip the whole vetting process. My sleepovers were always with kids and families that my parents knew pretty well. If the parents don't know each other that well, it's typically a group of kids spending the night, which I guess counts more as a slumber party.

The whole point is to stay up late and do shit you're not supposed to do. One of my kids wound up going to sleep early while her friends all stayed up late, LOL. It was disappointing to hear that more than "Oh noes, the Internets and R-rated movies!"
posted by Chuffy at 8:10 PM on January 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

In elementary school my brother almost shot his penis off with a firecracker on an unsupervised sleepover. I found out years later helping my brother clean out his closet. I found a wadded up pair of tiny umbros with a crotch area burn melt crammed into the hole of a puppet toy buried under layers of old stuff and I was like wtf is this??? And my brother panicked and said please don't tell mom and dad I almost shot my penis off.

My sleepover horror story was also my very first sleepover. I don't remember it at all but I came home and told my mom about the stuffed cat and the bedtime medicine. When my mom recounts the story years later, it's hard to say whether it's the stuffed cat (they taxidermied their deceased pet and put it in their child's room) or the fact that the other kid's mom GAVE ME BENADRYL TO PUT ME TO SLEEP that disturbs her more. The Benadryl was definitely why I never went to that girl's house again, but it's the stuffed cat that gets my mom to retell the story every year.
posted by phunniemee at 8:11 PM on January 17, 2023 [33 favorites]

I did tons of sleepovers, but getting invited to one was always about "you have now reached Friend Status Level 1", a big deal, not a thing you did randomly. So your parents would know the kid's parents because you played together pretty frequently. Of course, my best friend, whose house I slept at dozens of times, had a dad who was an alcoholic, but he was functional and I had no clue what alcoholism looked like, so I was completely oblivious.

My worst sleepover experience was when a friend convinced her mom to get a hotel room (w parents next door) for her birthday and a bunch of us preteen girls watched a sex comedy where most of the jokes were right over our heads. But that was bad because I didn't get along with her other friends and they put toothpaste on my pillow, the bitches.

We did a lot of "stiff as a board, light as a feather" and ghost stories and daring each other to say Bloody Mary in the mirror 10 times and so on.

I think jr. high was where it petered out, we tended to not be as excited about Staying Up Late or just had other social stuff that was more fun to do.
posted by emjaybee at 8:12 PM on January 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

To elaborate: I know my mother was overprotective for a Boomer raising a Gen Xer, but I can't really say I blame her if I put myself in her shoes. Sure, my older brother dying at the babysitter's was a freak thing nobody could have predicted, but her childhood was punctuated with classmates and cousins dropping like the Gashlycrumb Tinies, sometimes right in front of her. Unsafe playground equipment and public infrastructure, rickety carnival rides, kids doing tasks only adults should be doing, unregulated chemicals, and yeah, sometimes just kids who didn't know any better than to do that crazy thing spending too long without somebody checking in on them. When I hear people her age moaning "We all survived!" I have to bite my tongue pretty hard.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:13 PM on January 17, 2023 [11 favorites]

This thread excavated a memory of us being the Bad Family for a bit. I had a bunch of my classmates over for my birthday and I left them alone for a minute and they got ahold of the one thing we couldn’t watch which was the “Justify My Love” video and they wouldn’t quit watching it and somebody told and other people’s parents got mad and mine were Disappointed and I didn’t live it down for weeks

Man I don’t miss fifth grade

Anyway I saw plenty of weird shit at sleepovers, but also there were mostly nice times and introduction to other people’s family lives, so I hope it doesn’t die out, but I cannot judge worried parents in 2023
posted by Countess Elena at 8:14 PM on January 17, 2023 [10 favorites]

which was the “Justify My Love” video

Man I don’t miss fifth grade

I am so horribly old.
posted by hippybear at 8:17 PM on January 17, 2023 [13 favorites]

Is there a nonpaywalled link to the article? I have Opinions but I think I want to RTFA first…
posted by Mchelly at 8:19 PM on January 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

sometimes other parents have bizarre rules

Weirdly, I see that as a kind of benefit of sleepovers, a form of socialization and learning to read the room/adapt to different situations. There've been way, way too many comments and articles (not here, per se, but around, on the net) about "kids these days" and younger workers in general not understanding boundaries in the workplace or how to carry oneself in a professional setting, and (desperately trying not to re-litigate that conversation), I feel like sleepovers, and the exposure to how different families do things, even the weird ones, are a pretty useful way to introduce kids to the concept of reading the room, of learning that not every space is conducive to every kind of behavior.

You go over to the family with the weird rules, you learn that some people are downright weird, and you have a chance to learn how to deal with that encounter. Obviously, some of the examples (witnessing domestic violence, being in a car with a drunk dad) are pretty fucking awful (but still exposure to a part of the world not yet experienced), but it can even be things like going to stay with a friend whose parents say grace before a meal, and maybe you've never experienced it. Missing out on that kind of expansion of awareness, the learning that comes from these experiences, I feel it has a limiting effect, to an extent.

/spoken as a teacher of junior high schools students who are utterly unable to read the room
posted by Ghidorah at 8:21 PM on January 17, 2023 [47 favorites]

My 13 year old daughter wanted to go to a sleepover at her friend Josh's house a few weeks ago, to which I said no, and she called me out for heteronormativity because I let her go to sleepovers at her female friends' houses all the time.
posted by Rumple at 8:22 PM on January 17, 2023 [23 favorites]

gift link
posted by kat518 at 8:22 PM on January 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

One thing about sleepovers is sometimes other parents have bizarre rules. I slept over at a friend's house one time, and over breakfast the next morning, I was VERY strongly scolded/chewed out by the father, who was VERY angry because I had gotten up in the middle of the night to use the toilet. (I went straight from bed to the toilet and back to bed, and didn't touch anything else or look at anything else along the way.)

So a totally different situation, but that story reminded me of when I was in my 20s traveling overseas and in a small town we got invited to spend the night at the police chief's house. It was great, they were really welcoming and it was very kind of them to host a couple of foreigners in a place that was actually fairly dangerous. But, I woke up in the middle of the night needing to go to the bathroom, only to discover that the metal grates on the doors and windows were locked and there was no way to get to the outdoor bathroom without waking everyone up. I can remember trying to decide between peeing out a window or just waiting. (I waited, it was a long night.)

When I was a kid I went on sleepovers all the time. I'm not sure if my parents weren't worried about it or not, but there weren't any restrictions that I can remember. But nothing was all that sketchy until I was in high school, and at that point it was us being sketchy, not the fault of whatever family was doing the hosting.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:24 PM on January 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I grew up in a tiny town and my parents might not have let me attend sleepovers with other families they didn't know well, but there weren't any other families they didn't know well.

But the only times I can recall seeing hardcore porn at my friends' homes was in the daytime, sleepovers weren't involved, and the parents had nothing to do with making it available to us. 80s satellite television, however, was shockingly poorly encrypted.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:25 PM on January 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

You can watch a movie with one single, solitary swear word in it, and that is guaranteed to be the moment your parents walk into the room.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:28 PM on January 17, 2023 [23 favorites]

Oof this brought up a memory.

I stayed in a boarding school for a while when I was in high school. It was small. Most of us went home for the weekends.

One weekend, one of the younger girls couldn't go home for some reason and she was very upset at the prospect of spending the weekend alone.

I invited her to go home with me for the weekend. Initially she was excited at the idea, but then she phoned her parents.

(On the payphone in the lobby. No cell phones existed yet)

Her parents asked her where my family went to church. She asked me, and I still remember her look of confusion when I said we didn't go to church at all.

That was that. Suddenly she was no longer keen to spend the weekend with me. All the other kids were also pretty chilly with me.

Ugh. That felt so crap.

To wash the memory away, I will remember all the many sleepovers I had. Many midnight feasts, that always featured Smash for some reason (instant mashed potatoes). Many sleepovers on top of a friend's garage roof that you could only reach by climbing up a extremely thorny Bougainvillea tree. Once we went rafting down the Eerste Revier in a home made raft just before sunrise and got shouted at by a guy for trespassing. Many games with a home made ouija board which was one of the only things my mother had forbidden me.

And of course TALKING ALL NIGHT LONG. That's what I associate with sleepovers.
posted by Zumbador at 8:28 PM on January 17, 2023 [17 favorites]

Yeah, the group intimacy of staying up late, in a pack. Even better during high school, after we could drive ourselves home at three in the morning.

As an adult, I miss staying up talking in a group the most
posted by eustatic at 8:32 PM on January 17, 2023 [20 favorites]

You can watch a movie with one single, solitary swear word in it, and that is guaranteed to be the moment your parents walk into the room.

We call that the 100% rule. Because, yeah, one hundred percent. In our household, it's the reverse...the kid will be in her room all day long, but the time she wanders into the room for a glass of water, is the 20 seconds of nudity/sex scene/bloody violence, etc...
posted by Chuffy at 8:37 PM on January 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

My southern cousins...lighting farts, fiery tightie whities. But in high school, it was more like ad hoc not sleepovers, where we climbed out our windows, and walked around all night, then got up and got ready for school. My kids had plenty of sleepovers, I had very old friends with same age kids, and for the youngest, I had newer friends with same age kids. Now we are all very old friends, and the kids are in their thirties, one just turned forty, still good friends with the sleepover friends.
posted by Oyéah at 8:41 PM on January 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

When I changed schools as a kid, a bossy girl sat next to me on the first day and changed my life by announcing she would be my friend. Within a few months, she invited me to a sleepover and for the next two years I pretty much lived at her house during the week, going home for weekends. Her divorced mom was super glamorous to me but also intensely kind, welcoming this awkward white kid into her family, and it was her brother who let us grudgingly read his comics and mess around on his computer.

Looking back, this happened after she had a sleepover at my house and clearly went back horrified at the abuse she saw, told her mother never again, so it went entirely one sided. My parents were not friends with her at all and mildly hostile but those two years of a regular family gave me a foundation later to parent and make a better life. Thank you always, Mrs Ng.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:42 PM on January 17, 2023 [130 favorites]

The first sleepover my kid went to, the girl got a knife out of the kitchen and threatened to kill herself. I was one of a line of cars in front of her house to pick up our kids at 10:00 at night. That was in elementary school. Thankfully, every sleepover after that went pretty well. One of her friends still spends the night when she comes over, because they live on the other side of town, and my kid's about to graduate from college.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:50 PM on January 17, 2023

This strikes me as a rather dysfunctional way for parents to manage their anxiety about threats that are not actually controllable. Parents don't want their kids seeing porn. Okay, well, most of their friends have access to tiny devices that can easily be used to show porn, even in spaces that appear supervised, including classrooms. If a peer is going to show your kid porn, it will happen at any time of day. Or: parents don't want their kids around guns. Okay, well, guns are everywhere in America, and it's possible your child may encounter an unsecured gun. Again, there is nothing magical about nighttime that makes this preventable. Or: parents don't want their kids sexually assaulted. Okay, well, sexual assault is unfortunately a common experience, and your child may frequently be in the unsupervised company of adults or peers who could harm them. In some ways, a sleepover allows for easier access, but what of the hours a kid might spend alone with their piano teacher or grandfather, or on daytime playdates? No one is saying that these things should also no longer happen, and children should simply never be outside the view of their parents. Or at least, not yet.

In general, it's interesting to me that people get very concerned about things like unsecured guns that a fellow parent is failing to disclose, but are casual about letting their kids go to houses with pools or trampolines or large dogs or driveways/vehicles with poor sightlines, which statistically speaking are much more common and do carry a degree of risk.

I had many sleepovers as a child. Nothing bad happened, other than me seeing some R-rated movies. Instead, I experienced sexual assaults or inappropriate behavior due to mistakes such as: riding a train while surrounded by other people, going to a bookstore with a friend, entering a medical office, attending a family reunion.

Like. The only actual thing you can do to inoculate your kids from danger is to teach them about the threat before it occurs. If you don't own a gun, your child still needs to understand gun safety and have it hammered in their head that YOU DO NOT TOUCH GUNS, YOU DO NOT STAY IN ROOMS WHERE A GUN IS BEING TOUCHED. Or if I'd been prepared as a kid RE: bodily autonomy, the possibility/frequency of sexual assault, and the likelihood of freeze or fawn responses, maybe I would've been able to get out of some of the situations I wound up in.

American childhoods have become so relatively restricted and structured, and that to me represents a real threat to kids' autonomy, creativity, and social functioning. Sleepovers are only one symptom. But maybe I'm biased because I grew up with a controlling parent, and know what that does to people, even when the control comes from a place of love.
posted by desert outpost at 8:54 PM on January 17, 2023 [51 favorites]

I think sleepovers are something you should let a kid do if they want. It's a healthy part of them learning independence. You prepare them as best you can, you make sure they know they can call you and they have an out if anything happens.

The only actual thing you can do to inoculate your kids from danger is to teach them about the threat before it occurs.

So much this. When they are in school or with friends, and you're not there to protect them, they've got their own instincts and the tools you've given them. Give them the tools, have a relationship with their friends' parents, and let them live.

I have fond memories of sleepovers with friends when I was young. I had formative experiences during those times! They were good! Anyway, I don't have kids and I grew up before the internet had streaming porn and cultish amoral influencers so take all this with a grain of salt.
posted by signsofrain at 9:12 PM on January 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

I left them alone for a minute and they got ahold of the one thing we couldn’t watch which was the “Justify My Love” video and they wouldn’t quit watching it

Ooooh, I forgot to mention watching Dirty Dancing, that was my equivalent of that at a Tahoe cabin weekend sleepover!
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:14 PM on January 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

My child has a neurological disability which would be hard to accommodate in a sleepover.

Disability apparently is such a non-concern to people that nobody has bothered to even consider it in all these comments, while talking about "status anxiety" and so on.
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:20 PM on January 17, 2023 [16 favorites]

same thoughts, splitpeasoup. I did mention my daughter above.
posted by mmmbacon at 9:22 PM on January 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

I recently found out that two kids I grew up with - from very "nice" families - were sexually abused by two different teenage boys. One boy, abused by his own brother, and the other a girl abused by a friend's older brother. In both cases the younger child was about 8 and in one case it continued through to high school. I knew the families - caring and conscientious and attentive - and would never in a million years have guessed their beloved children could be preyed on in this way.

It makes me very nervous to send my child to someone's home as the only guest. Slumber parties - when there's a group of kids, maybe about 4-5 of them - seem safer to me; less likely a bad actor could separate one child from the group for long enough to do something bad, or sneak into a room while that many kids stayed asleep.

I think when it's sleepover time for my kids, I'll suggest that we occasionally rent a double hotel room and 1 or 2 moms stay in the other side while the kids party in their own room. More contained, nobody to abuse them, no worries about guns.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 10:15 PM on January 17, 2023 [10 favorites]

My child has a neurological disability which would be hard to accommodate in a sleepover.

This would require a higher level of trust and knowledge of the parents. I would take on the responsibility, knowing full well that it could include a late night drive home, or possibly an unexpected/uncomfortable situation for the disabled child that has to be caringly navigated...it's a different set of circumstances completely, though, in this context.
posted by Chuffy at 10:54 PM on January 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

A gunshot certianly is and lax gun attitude is absolutely a red line for any kids sleepovers.

To me, that's a red line for any visit, though. My point is not "Risks, eh, we didn't die of them, who cares?", rather it's "most of the big risks are things you should've addressed before letting them go over at all."

These parents do not seem to be considering that their children are going to be hanging out with these or similar kids totally unsupervised in just a few years. There's got to be some kind of transition, accompanied of course by the appropriate preparation. The risks are going to come regardless. Sometimes I see some young people on the Internet who seem to have spent pre-college life in a hermetic bubble and are just totally staggered by being expected to navigate the adult world on their own. I don't think their parents necessarily did them--or, frankly, the adults who have the misfortune to be around them--any favors.

A hotel sleepover sounds like it would be super fun, though!

Disability apparently is such a non-concern to people that nobody has bothered to even consider it in all these comments

What is it you think should be said?
posted by praemunire at 11:02 PM on January 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

The only actual thing you can do to inoculate your kids from danger is to teach them about the threat before it occurs.

That's all well and good but I do think a lot of children encounter situations at other people's houses that it would never have occurred to their parents to prep them for, and they often encounter them while the adults in the house are asleep and the peer pressure not to wake them is intense (i.e. it's SO not done in a sleepover context to say "couldn't we just ask your mom if it's okay to do that?"). Sure, a lot of these things are also things that could happen while parents are awake, but in my experience as a child who went on a LOT of sleepovers, most of the interesting (i.e., dangerous/transgressive/etc) stuff waits till mom and dad have turned off the lights and are less likely to walk in and interrupt the proceedings.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to say "why let your kids go over their friends' houses at all then, they're just as likely to be looking at porn/playing Russian roulette with a real gun/getting into the prescription drugs and mixing them with tequila/etc in broad daylight in the family room." That just isn't true? Kids aren't stupid, they know what'll get them in trouble and they wait till they hear snoring to get started with that stuff.

To be fair they also wait till they hear snoring to put on Aladdin, the movie they have watched every Friday night for all of third grade, and then maybe they wake up before you in the morning and make you scrambled eggs. In conclusion, sleepovers are a land of contrasts
posted by potrzebie at 11:10 PM on January 17, 2023 [9 favorites]

I got my first cell phone because of a sleepover. An "unauthorized" sleepover. After I got my license and a car I went pretty much anywhere whenever I wanted. Divorced parents. I grew up spending half the week with each and then I got my license and it was pretty much sleep at the house you're closest to. No curfews. Just come home when you're done. So I was out with friends and it got late and we decided to crash there. I didn't think anything of it. I got home the next morning and all hell broke lose. My mom had been up all night calling every parent of every friend I had looking for me. She was scared to death I might have been in an accident or dead or who knows what. I was in the wrong. I should have called her to let her know. But I was 16 and hanging out with friends. It didn't occur to me. I knew I was safe. So the next day she took me to the mall and got me a cheap Nokia phone like everyone had back then. And that's how I got good at Snake.
posted by downtohisturtles at 11:12 PM on January 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

What is it you think should be said?

About how the children with disabilities in our community aren't included in normal events of childhood and how they might be better accommodated or how to mitigate the risks of their participation in things like sleepovers?
posted by mmmbacon at 11:15 PM on January 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

And in addition to the disability perspective, also I think it's very telling that the article frames this as a "once-simple rite of childhood" as if all kids were going on sleepovers in previous generations and nobody had a complicated relationship with them back in the day. I can count the number of times a kid whose parents immigrated from East Asia slept over my house on one hand, and it's not because our parents weren't close. Navigating sleepover culture was hellish for kids whose parents didn't buy into it. I had a friend come up to me at school and hand me a note with a drawing of her own crying face on the front, telling me she wouldn't be at my birthday slumber party because "my mom says it's not what we do in our culture. I hate being Korean! I wish I were anything else!" People in minority religions also get excluded for similar reasons, either because their parents don't trust anyone outside the church with their kids (e.g. because they're concerned that dietary restrictions won't be accommodated or rituals that need to happen at bedtime won't be observed), or because their religious observances are timed in a way that makes a slumber party impossible to attend. It's a very culturally specific perspective that this is something that was ever simple and inclusive. There were always a lot of people being excluded from sleepover socializing.
posted by potrzebie at 11:21 PM on January 17, 2023 [19 favorites]

That's all well and good but I do think a lot of children encounter situations at other people's houses that it would never have occurred to their parents to prep them for, and they often encounter them while the adults in the house are asleep and the peer pressure not to wake them is intense

See, I think navigating situations like this is just part of growing up, as young people learn how to handle peer influence or manage unexpected/alarming scenarios. Most of the time, the random unexpected situation is not going to be an assault or mortal threat. Rather, it will be something relatively harmless, in the broad spectrum of harm. I mean, was it a smart idea to let Kenny cut my hand with a knife and mash it together with his to become blood siblings, like he saw in a book? No. But the cut healed okay, some cross-parental conversation happened, apologies were issued, and my family taught me strategies to help me stand up to the next Kenny who had a dumb idea.

...I will note this incident took place on a small supervised playground. It went unnoticed by adults until I showed off my wound. Children are sly.

Basically, no one can prepare for every bad or weird thing that might happen in life. But some bad and weird things are going to happen anyway. And chances are, they won't happen in the places you might expect.

Rather than restrict a child's social settings, I think it's much more important to bolster their assertiveness, give them safety skills, and make sure they feel confident about coming to you with anything. Or about calling you for help/advice/a ride at any hour.
posted by desert outpost at 12:04 AM on January 18, 2023 [16 favorites]

I think it's a bit disingenuous to say "why let your kids go over their friends' houses at all then, they're just as likely to be looking at porn/playing Russian roulette with a real gun/getting into the prescription drugs and mixing them with tequila/etc in broad daylight in the family room." That just isn't true? Kids aren't stupid, they know what'll get them in trouble and they wait till they hear snoring to get started with that stuff.

When I was a kid, we finished school at quarter to three. No parent finished work that early. All our proper mischief was in the early afternoon, when parents were still at work. A parent sleeping elsewhere in the house is much more likely to catch you than one halfway across town in a meeting.
posted by Dysk at 1:51 AM on January 18, 2023 [9 favorites]

I mean, was it a smart idea to let Kenny cut my hand with a knife and mash it together with his to become blood siblings, like he saw in a book? No. But the cut healed okay, some cross-parental conversation happened, apologies were issued

These days that could lead to a life threatening illness like HIV or Hepatitis C...
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:05 AM on January 18, 2023

There’s one simple way to make sure your kid is safe at a sleepover, and that’s to host it. I mean, will the other kid’s parents feel safe? One would hope so.

In middle and high school, we had a friend who practically lived at our house. Only boy in a family of girls, he really enjoyed hanging out with my brothers and I, so my mom made sure he was always welcome. Here I am nearly 50 and this friend lives across the alley from my dad, still hanging with our family.

Our son has had sleepovers with a lot of friends from school. Always with kids who we have met before, and always with parents we have met before. It would be a bit weird for our son to be friends with someone enough to do a sleepover but not have had us ever meet the parents at a school or sports function I guess. More often than not, he has invited kids to our house. Which is fine, but really, as a parent one critical important aspect of the sleepover is that you have an evening where your kid is not at home! Kinda miss that, but it is fun seeing the kids act like kids. (Which reminds me, he is due for another night away, with a friend he has known since he was 2 months old… but as teenagers finding a date that works for all families keeps getting harder!)
posted by caution live frogs at 5:13 AM on January 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

These days that could lead to a life threatening illness like HIV or Hepatitis C...

Oh yes. HIV famously was a complete non issue in the 90s and in fact did not exist at all.
posted by phunniemee at 5:44 AM on January 18, 2023 [25 favorites]

Growing up in whitebread Minnesota in the 1980s, I learned about Kwanzaa at my friend's house on a sleepover. Tried lots of new food on sleepovers and went to my first nightclub (during the day, anyway).

I have four kids and they went on overnights to friends' houses -- and we hosted, too. But nooooo, never with strangers or even very new friends.

For a lot of kids it's their first time staying overnight away from home, and it's honestly hard for them...and good to finally get past that milestone.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:07 AM on January 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ooh, another sleepover memory, not involving eventual bandmates: Got tossed off a three-wheeler while riding around on a friend's farm and hitting a rut on the long dirt road leading to their house. Ended up on my back with the ATV on top of me. That was my last visit to that friend's house.

The best adult sleepover I remember was in college, when our astronomy club went to stay at the Green Bank observatory in West Virginia. Most of us wandered out of the dormitory in the pitch black night and found our way to the giant radio telescope, climbing up some stairs and sneaking a peek in the control room there, then running away when we were spotted. (This was after getting to run a smaller radio telescope ourselves for a few hours that night.) The next morning, we got to go on a guided tour of the main telescope, and the tour guide said "Nice to see you again."
posted by emelenjr at 6:10 AM on January 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

I only ever had one sleepover growing up. It was a kid I was friends with and my mom worked with his mom and she needed emergency overnight babysitting.

Later in high school when I was trying to make friends I had a few people over to do an all-night scifi movie marathon. It kind of sucked and we mostly just sat around in various stages of drowsiness, though my parents were greatly amused when one of my friend's father called in the middle of the night to ask "how many girls" were in the house.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:11 AM on January 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh yes. HIV famously was a complete non issue in the 90s and in fact did not exist at all.

phunniemee, I was a bisexual teenager in the 90s reading my city's LGBT newspaper, I remember all too well.

I thought desert outpost was talking about the 1970s,

and by "these days" I meant "when I was a teenager in the 1990s, and also now"
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:21 AM on January 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

... a note with a drawing of her own crying face on the front, telling me she wouldn't be at my birthday slumber party because "my mom says it's not what we do in our culture. I hate being Korean! I wish I were anything else!"

Oh no, that poor girl. I hope she had happier experiences and changed her mind before she grew up.

desert outpost: I remember planning to become "blood sisters" with at least one other girl. I don't remember if we didn't go through with it, or if we did and I felt let down because it was basically a thumb prick, because I was terrible at drawing blood on purpose. It looks easy in the movies.

(Late last night, it occurred to me that I had never actually watched the "Justify My Love" video, so I looked it up. I got bored and didn't watch more than halfway. It was basically an extended perfume ad.)
posted by Countess Elena at 6:23 AM on January 18, 2023

I spent the past four years working at a boarding school. I was around a bunch of teens basically all day every day. My main observation other than love and respect for the kids of today:

They are anxious, dependent, terrified of messing up the most minor if things, and have none of the minor conflict resolution skills you'd expect by 15-16. Please let your kids out of your house. They need to be away from you sometimes.
posted by wellifyouinsist at 6:36 AM on January 18, 2023 [27 favorites]

I think it's easy to have a lot of mystification about "now" versus various "thens"; often "now" can also mean "the way this group of people do things" and "then" means "the way this other group of people do things.

For instance, I think that with the exception of some cultures where people just literally don't do sleepovers, most people would think, "hm, a sleepover where I know the parents pretty well and have visited their house and where my kid has been over there a lot, plus it's fairly close by and I can come and get them if something goes wrong, probably fine!" and most people would think "I don't know these parents, it's far away, my kid doesn't actually know their kid well...not such a good idea". I think that was true when I was a kid, especially for kids/tweens, and I think it's mostly true now.

Back then and now, some parents are/were not in a place to make those judgements - either they're overwhelmed and glad to get a night's break or there's something going on in the home that makes "vet my kid's friends" a low priority or possibly there's a culture of recklessness with guns, sex and alcohol at home already. Most of the time this is going to work out okay, but occasionally it will go really wrong.

We're mostly in agreement that within some parameters it's good for kids to experience different rules - even a little bit of weird/negative stuff is okay because kids need to know how to navigate that. Later meals? Different but basically non-traumatic religious observances? New and possibly strange rules? Getting to watch something that is not, eg, Human Centipede but that is a little scarier or more adult than mom and dad would let you watch? All basically okay for most people! And again, most of the time when people more or less know the parents, that's what is going to happen.

~~~
HiLARiously, my one really bad sleepover experience was when my friend's mother, a psychiatrist, gave me a children's book about this girl who was being abused by her mentally ill mother and then fished around after I'd read it to see if I would fess up to being abused too. I am still baffled as to why - my parents were excellent parents, not remotely abusive, a little stricter than my friend's parents but not much. I didn't understand what was happening with the book until years later - because I was not being abused!!!

This woman was, allegedly, my mother's friend. Her daughter, the perfectly raised child of a well-balanced psychiatrist, invited me over when we were eleven and friend-dumped me by explaining that I was too weird and fat to be seen with at school and she wanted a new start in junior high.

But anyway - that was a bad experience that still makes me angry but it wasn't dangerous and didn't really have anything to do with guns, drinking, conservatism, inappropriate nakedness, inappropriate movies (they watched even less TV than my family), etc. It did teach me that people can be extremely proper, etc, and still be extremely unkind and off the wall.
posted by Frowner at 6:39 AM on January 18, 2023 [15 favorites]

I do think it's truly past time to look at this with a disability justice mindset. If slumber parties and the cultural touchstones therein are worth preserving, what are some ways we can make them accessible to kids with disabilities? I think it's a world of topics, because it depends so much on the needs of each child and also what is developmentally appropriate for them. Can the hosting family provide some supports and care? Can the physical space be managed to allow disabled kiddos the freedom to enjoy the night? How can the host kid(s) get involved in the planning and communication around it? And, maybe the big question - if it won't work to have the party without the ableist gatekeeping, perhaps we need to inquire with ourselves why we (and I am including myself) are mourning the waning popularity of slumber parties at all.

If it is worth holding onto them with these modifications, one thing mostly missing from the conversation so far is building trust with your kids. See desert-outpost above. Of course trusting the other kid or their caregivers is important. But what about trusting your own kid? And saying, hey, sometimes things happen that are beyond your control (guns, abuse, etc). I trust you to make decisions. And I'm available in this way to help. And following up after the party having the mirror conversation about how it went.

My one year old hasn't had any invites yet, but I'm cautiously optimistic for sleepover time when and if it arrives.

I think the Parenting Internet needs to be critiqued here, too. Because "all the answers" are supposedly available, everyone has Opinions about every tiny decision around bringing up your kid. The moral panic is real. I think at least some of the hesitancy here comes from feeling the burden of all that info, and the idea that someone else hasn't read or seen the things I that have consumed me for hours online, things that kept me up, things I agonized over. What if another parent doesn't do this. Or worse, what if they don't even value what I have invested in being the best parent I can. I think these are very human reactions to parenting with the consultation of the world wide web, but also, not a reason to eschew a sleepover. Maybe the opposite.
posted by kaelynski at 6:43 AM on January 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

of course there is a reasonable-ish article about this

of course there will be 100+ comments

look, terrible things happen but mostly, in my experience, sleep-overs for kids are crucial parts of life experience. more and more, life experience (from what I can see) is about people staring at a screen. alone. all ages. fuck this to the fucking moon.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:18 AM on January 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

My daughter gets a sleepover every month or so, and we usually know the families we arrange these with pretty well. One time we didn't, there wasn't breakfast at the other house -- it seemed that the (single-parent) dad and the daughter just ate whenever, without a fixed schedule. My daughter wanted to be polite and didn't ask for breakfast, but came home upset. We had a good talk afterwards, about how to be assertive about one's basic needs. Overall I thought it was a good learning experience for a 10 year old only child.
posted by of strange foe at 7:40 AM on January 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think one reason for parents to be skeptical about sleepovers is that kids now lack the social experience to be ready to navigate them safely. I think kids in the past that had unsupervised play had much better social skills for spotting when they were being bullied, or talking down another kid that wants to do something dumb, or spotting when they themself were bullying someone who wasn't having any fun, or backing out of a situation when they were getting scared.

I think when kids test boundaries they have worse judgement about how far it would be smart or safe to go, simply because the boundaries they live within are much more pervasive. Some kids don't see a difference between swiping a packet of Jell-o from their friend's parents kitchen to eat dry in the bedroom, versus experimenting with oral sex because they haven't had enough experience at things like pilfering from kitchen cabinets.

Kids usually know a lot more about somethings, like how dangerous guns are, and the possibility of sexual abuse, but that doesn't translate into self protection. It's like when they first started teaching boys about sexist behaviour being unfair to girls, and that caused them to double down on the sexism because it was laid out to them in clear terms what being sexist was. A kid that knows about sexual abuse maybe simply end up being a compliant victim and regard it as a rite of passage. Which is not to say that a kid who doesn't understand what is going on was more likely to resist, but that knowing what is going on very frequently doesn't lead to standing up to an adult, or resisting peer pressure.

The other thing I've noticed is that kids don't seem to enjoy their in person activities as much as in the past. There seems to be a lot less companionable comfort. Of course my observation about kids being too socially awkward with each other to have fun may not be shared with other parents, but if it is I can see parents of ten year olds deciding that their kid is not ready for more than say, a four hour play date, and refusing overtures of a sleepover from other parents on those ground.
posted by Jane the Brown at 8:07 AM on January 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

As already iterated, I felt like sleepovers were a largely positive experience. I learned many valuable experiences, notably provided an opportunity at a young age that families were different (not everyone goes to church every Sunday or has pictures of Jesus or Mary in every room (some do); some families were less well off, others, more so; others were single parents; had different levels of parental supervision.) One friend was materially spoiled (had every video game system and the latest fashions) but when visiting his home, I learned his widowed mother was extremely risk-averse: she always took side roads instead of the freeway and was strict on curfews and where we could go outside of the house. You learned to manage situations on your own without any parental guidance outside of school and got to know your friends and friends' lives in a way that you wouldn't otherwise know.

My sleepovers as a kid were from the mid 90s until the early 2000s: we did have computers and the internet (mostly 56k internet ). There were definitely some situations that that were hairy at the time and caused anxiety: ordering pizzas to teachers' houses (really thought I'd get caught then); setting gasoline-coated tennis balls on fire; or that friends set the family computer background to display a massive cock while said computer was in a common area (they'd eventually fix it, hours later).

I am a little bewildered that a few parents here won't have sleepovers for their children but I suppose that could be my cultural perspective as an American.
posted by fizzix at 8:13 AM on January 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

The only actual thing you can do to inoculate your kids from danger is to teach them about the threat before it occurs.

Sure, the threats you can imagine. But the other thing you have to do is make sure they trust you enough to tell you if something bad happened to them, and follow through with as much punishment for the other party you and reasonably dish out.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:22 AM on January 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

I also had many sleepovers as an American kid growing up in the 80s/90s. So I have a lot of complicated thoughts and feelings about them.

I will say that I always assumed Kid Objects would eventually be going on sleepovers, just like I did. Not until she's 7-8 at the earliest, with families we know well. In my experience, this was still pretty much the norm in my school/area 30 years ago for Elementary and Middle school. High School was pretty much the Wild West of sleepovers. The article and conversation has given me a lot to think about though and 3 years to prepare her for this milestone of American childhood.

First, holy heck there were at least two instances of kids dying in this thread alone because "they thought the gun was unloaded". I understand lots of people don't own guns, are scared of guns, don't want their kids around guns. But like, replace the word guns with cars. Even if I never owned a car, you can be damned sure I'd teach my kid all I could about car safety. I'll be doing the same for guns, even if I never own another one. America is a car and gun culture, as much as I wish it wasn't. I have to do my best to prepare Kid Objects her inevitable encounters with both. It might not be enough, I could still lose her, but at least I tried.

Also, I think a lot of your kid's sleepover experience is really going to depend on what kind of person they are vs who you let them have a sleepover with. Stubborn, bossy, take charge? Quiet, go-with-the-flow, not willing to contradict authority figures? Are they a Mom/Dad Friend? Do they easily succumb to peer pressure? Lots of common sense or head in the clouds/daydreamer? Yes, even disabled or not. Gender binary or not. As a parent you can at least attempt to take these things into account and head off the worst experiences based on what you know of the other kid and their family.

But as much as I hate to admit it, to be a fully formed adult human with adulting skills, Kid Objects is going to have to experience a higher level of awkwardness and embarrassment and semi-taboo situations than I'm comfortable with (which would be zero, btw).
posted by sharp pointy objects at 8:47 AM on January 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thanks for the gift link, kat518.

It's funny seeing this thread on the heels of the Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret thread, since sleepovers and Judy Blume books go hand in hand in my mind (where else besides sleepovers or sleepaway camp were you going to get your hands on Forever or (not JB) Flowers in the Attic?) I don't have a lot of memories of going to sleepovers when I was young, but I seem to remember it was mostly for birthday parties. We made a lot of prank phone calls, mostly to people we knew that we found in the phone book (teachers? boys we "liked"?) definitely tried "light as a feather, stiff as a board," maybe Truth or Dare - even that I can't remember, so it probably didn't involve any dangerous or problematic dares - but I don't think we ever got any crazier than that.

My son loves sleepovers. From the time he turned 6 we threw him a sleepover birthday party every year for about 8 of his friends - pizza and cake at 10, sleeping bags in the living room, put on a movie, pancakes for breakfast. They were all out by midnight, but they always claimed that they weren't. A couple of parents would pick their son up after the movie (usually because of some family or sports activity the next day); it wasn't a big deal. The parents were always more amazed that we would put up with that many boys in our apartment than worried about safety. But we all knew each other. I wouldn't have hesitated to send my kid to any of their homes for the same kind of party, but no one else ever had one. Maybe because we all have small apartments. We finally stopped after he turned 12 and couldn't fit everyone.

Still, when I first read the article and saw the comments, I was reading it through the lens of sleepover parties, with lots of kids. But it seems like a lot of the focus is just sleeping over at another kid's house, period. Which really surprises me. Maybe it's just that my son went to a school with a relatively small class size so most of the parents knew each other, but we have my son's friends over a lot for various reasons, and we've sent him to other kids' homes as well, all the time. When there were a bunch of bar mitzvahs in a row in his class, and one of his friends who lived in Brooklyn was going to miss them, we had him for 3 weekends running - he'd come home with my son after school, and his mom would get him on Saturday nights. Another of his friends stayed with us for a week when his dad got remarried and went on his honeymoon (and his two siblings went to other friends' homes). One of his friends is often at a rotating bunch of friends' homes because after his parents' divorce and move, it's the best way for him to hang out with his friends on the weekend. In light of what I'm seeing here there must be parents who have valid concerns about one-kid, one-night sleepovers that never occurred to me, but I found this really eye-opening.

I think now that our son's in high school it's going to be different for us. But at the same time, when we went to his school orientation, they took us through their official policy / initiative that they had in place, to make parents feel comfortable about overnight invitations - facilitating conversations with other parents and normalizing the idea of asking questions so it isn't intrusive or weird to know what you're saying yes (or no) to when your kid is invited to the home of people you don't know. It was really thoughtful. So maybe that's one answer.

I think it's okay to both acknowledge that terrible things can happen to your kids no matter where they are, and also parent them in the situations where there are things you can do to look out for them. And I think that the middle of the night is different from daytime, especially for kids who are looking to push boundaries. That's why trusting the other parents is the most important factor for me. Weird happens and can be enriching. Unsafe is another matter.
posted by Mchelly at 8:53 AM on January 18, 2023 [8 favorites]

I never did sleepovers but my family's primary childhood babysitter took off to the Netherlands to marry his second cousin and my brothers and I were savagely bullied by a particular cousin during his visits to our place...so bad things & skeevy encounters can happen anywhere and at anytime and often inside the family home.
posted by srboisvert at 9:17 AM on January 18, 2023

I had sleepovers at probably a dozen different friend's houses in the 80s and 90s, and a few church "LockIns" before I finally left the church forever. It definitely helped me understand the differences in socioeconomic backgrounds of my friend group. Of course several of these friends had found dad's porn stash and several of these friends stole their parent's cigarettes or raided the liquor cabinet, but we didn't do those things at sleepovers. We did most of the crazy stuff right after school as mentioned above by Dysk.

I'm mostly sad for kids these days. I don't have any children, but the kids I do know are very sheltered from things like this and that makes me sad.
posted by schyler523 at 9:29 AM on January 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

I was sleepover age a long time ago. But one memory that quickly comes to mind is of the few kids whose parents wouldn't allow them to partake. From my kid's perspective, they tended not to be what I'd call "normal" -- too under their families' control, lacking autonomy. No fun.

I read some stuff a while back about how until age ten, it's natural for families to have maximum influence on kids in terms of values, interests etc. But past that, it's peers who naturally become more important. Which makes sense. Past age ten, we're starting to get serious about engaging with the world on its terms (as opposed to our families), because that's where we're going to spend the bulk of our lives. Not at home but out there.

So yeah, I worry about kids whose parents are unwilling (incapable?) of relinquishing control. Easy for me to say. I'm not a parent. But if we really want what's best for our kids ....
posted by philip-random at 9:33 AM on January 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

I love how this is the newest thing Parents Are Doing Wrong.

As for growing up in the golden era of independence and American-style sleepovers (born in '71), we were the house with the terribly crazy rules, and that was indeed a social experience if you mean sleepovers meaning awkward interactions after with some friends not wanting to come over and eventually getting ostracized (for other reasons as well, but still.)

I also had good and bad sleepovers... mostly bad, because as a child who was experiencing abuse, nighttimes at strangers were actually really anxiety provoking. I learned how to throw up quietly because the combination of large quantities of snacks and that anxiety used to mean I would throw up before tucking into whatever couch or bed we were in.

I can't draw a straight line between being dry-humped by a friend's brothers, the dad that liked to watch his daughter's friends watch inappropriate movies, or watching a friend get strapped with a belt and later #MeToo movements, but I do suspect that learning that most of my friends' dads' moods ruled their households and learning to make it through breakfast contributed to my success at "not overreacting" when one of my bosses a) masturbated in his office with the door open and b) put his hands on my breasts at a Xmas party.

I have sometimes been envious of kids who liked sleepovers. In high school I took regular babysitting jobs on Fridays and Saturdays in part to have a socially acceptable reason to say no.

"Socialization" is all the kinds and I don't honestly think any ONE thing is required. If parents aren't ok with sleepovers, that's okay. There's all kinds of ways to be friends and learn independence. That said, I do think kids benefit from experiences away from their parents. For me, sleep away camp was a fucking godsend and I owe at least 50% of my mental health to it because it was professional (more or less) and had clear rules and was designed for purpose. University dorm life was a bit more mixed, got raped one time, but also made lifelong friends.

But what I learned from sleepovers is a) I hate them, I don't do them as an adult unless forced by something like a funeral and b) I'm very grateful I can send a cellphone with my kids when they have them. I waited longer than most parents to greenlight sleepovers because I was nervous about them and I don't think my kids have suffered much.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:35 AM on January 18, 2023 [14 favorites]

The only actual thing you can do to inoculate your kids from danger is to teach them about the threat before it occurs.

Thank you, desert outpost.

Parents, TALK to your kids!
Let them talk back to you and HEAR them.

Fantastic comment. Hopefully I hit the right button on that, mods, please hope me!
posted by BlueHorse at 9:39 AM on January 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

A bunch of play dates and then a sleepover, same as in town.

I’m gen-x with all the free range glory that came with and I long to recreate this with my kids and yet I have 2023 anxiety the best I can do is let them play in the street unsupervised / in a neighborhood group (we have a quiet street) and sleep overs for the older one with well vetted friends. I feel even better if the other mom is more anxious than me actually then I know he’s probably better off than with me lol. And once I sent my kid in to Walgreens to buy some Gatorade for his dad while I waited in the car with his sister to 1) build his confidence 2) recreate that Japanese show Old Enough 3) build MY confidence.

But yet the anxiety is SO strong. How to bridge?
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:41 AM on January 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

The only actual thing you can do to inoculate your kids from danger is to teach them about the threat before it occurs.

again, something I read a while back is that the more sex education a kid has, the less likely they are to be sexually assaulted. Because for lack of better wording, they're wise to it.
posted by philip-random at 10:02 AM on January 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

Man, I loved sleepovers, both hosting and going to other people's houses. I stayed with friends (all kinds of friends, from all different backgrounds/cultures/etc) all the time starting from about age 5-6. I have lots of great and hilarious memories of those nights. I think I even kept an informal list of pros and cons (who's parents had hot tubs/ pools/craw thru laundry shoots/ excellent snacks and little oversight etc vs. "Will expect you to pray for whatever"). That's also how I attended a wide variety of religious services (my own parents were Christmas/Easter Whiskypalians), most of which I found fascinating ( I spent several weeks on THEY HAVE POOLS IN EVANGELICAL CHURCHES HOLY SHIT!)

I had experiences that were weird/uncomfortable but most were benign or benign-ish. And I had so much fun. Did we drink/smoke/look at porn? Sure. But we were teenagers by then and found plenty of excuses to do it anyway. One of my childhood best friends , whose wealthy parents lived in this actual 12-bedroom castle-like joint on the top of a mountain, and I spent a lot of 8th grade-ish sleepovers at her house trying to smoke rose petals/incense/ potpourri because we didn't know anyone cool enough to hook us up with pot (it does not get you high, but it will make you smell good). We definitely had slumber parties and snuck in boys. By high school, we had slumber parties that were tacitly coed among parents that tacitly accepted the fact that we were going to sneak in booze and better we do it in a place where no one would be driving. Writing this, I realize this sounds terrible to some of you, but those were honestly fantastic times an I'm Gen X, and as a then day student at a boarding school, this was more parental/adult oversight that most of my friends got most of the time.

And to that point, I started going to weeks long sleepaway camp when I was ten, and continued for longer periods of time until high school. I also vacationed with friends and traveled with friends, schoolmates, neighbors etc, just as they did with me. I loved it. I had, in general, a great relationship with my parents, but being out of their house in a different context was so critical to me. It pushed me to try new things and be new things and . . . I dunno, get out into the world. I can't imagine a childhood without those experiences. They were, in many ways, some of the best parts of my young life.

The days where you could leave the house and just be gone and no one knew where you were.

I miss them all the time.
posted by thivaia at 10:06 AM on January 18, 2023 [10 favorites]

I was just remembering the other day a time when my (very, very poor) friend's mom made a whole steak dinner for us on the night I came over and I could only eat a few bites. I was so ashamed.

After my stepfather's death my house was neglectful-abusive. I spent almost every weekend with a friend for those two years. I know it must've put her parents out, but they never once made me feel unwelcome. I sometimes think it's the only reason I survived until my mom snapped out of it. They hosted me a lot during his illness, too, so my mom could drive across the state to visit him at Shands, where he was being treated.

I was also bullied a lot at sleepovers (with different friends). But I spent so much time at them that it's difficult for me to imagine what my memories of my childhood would look like if my mom had declined to participate in sleepover culture.
posted by the liquid oxygen at 10:07 AM on January 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm a late stage boomer and we did sleepovers at friends houses both for parties and spontaneous spend-the-night times. My family had the alcoholic dad, so I didn't have friends stay over, but I was welcome at everyone else's house. Looking back some of the parents might have cared about gender stuff, but my close friends' parents sure didn't. But guns were way less present in those days, particularly in the Los Angeles suburban neighborhood I lived in. When considering if my co-parented niece should spend the night elsewhere, my sister and I erred on the side of her having the sleepovers at our house unless we were very close with the other parents. Around age 10, she started having her birthdays at a cabin in the snow and invited a small number of friends, with one or two of their parents to join. The other parents really seemed to appreciate that.

When she slept away, we worried about guns more than anything else because we live in the PNW with lots of military and hunting families, so we talked to her at a young age about what to do if she saw or found one. We also very early introduced that she could call us for any reason whatsoever at any time, and we would come get her no questions asked.
posted by drossdragon at 10:31 AM on January 18, 2023

I think it's very telling that the article frames this as a "once-simple rite of childhood" as if all kids were going on sleepovers in previous generations and nobody had a complicated relationship with them back in the day.

This is a common theme with this sort of article. They tend to be written from a very obviously dominant culture perspective, which assumes the author's own experience was the norm (which I suppose it was, when said author is a member of the dominant culture). Maybe that's OK, but there is almost always something left out of articles about how much simpler things were in the author's own version of the good ol' days, and that's the perspective of anyone even slightly outside the dominant culture.

Having said all that, this particular FPP seems to mostly avoid falling into that trap, despite what the teaser text suggests.
posted by asnider at 10:41 AM on January 18, 2023 [8 favorites]

Since starting high school my son has started doing sleepovers with middle school friends who didn't continue on at the magnet school. They just play video games and D&D, eat junk food and occasionally break into an abandoned building to smoke pot. I'm okay with that.
posted by slogger at 11:31 AM on January 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

You can watch a movie with one single, solitary swear word in it, and that is guaranteed to be the moment your parents walk into the room.

It wasn't technically a sleepover but my friend's 100% Goody Two Shoes schoolteacher mom came home early from a weekend away and walked into the split level home just as Scarface on VHS was reaching its climax. She had about a 50 foot walk down to the TV with full view of Al Pacino shooting every single thing in his entire mansion.

"Dyo wanna plah rough? OK! PEW PEW PEW"

Her eyes were as big as saucers. It was hilarious. Weirdly I think she liked me more after that. Almost like she decided her son needed some wildling influence.
posted by srboisvert at 11:44 AM on January 18, 2023 [9 favorites]

I miss the simple days of sleeping over at a friends house, showing up sometime in the afternoon and tromping through the woods in search of a (often mythical BUT FREQUENTLY REAL) trash bag full of moldy, damp porno magazines and trying to decipher scrambled softcore movies on cinemax. By the time I was in high school, internet (AOL really) was pervasive enough that we were trading jpgs in chatrooms and ... taking turns using the computer privately ...
posted by youthenrage at 12:13 PM on January 18, 2023

"Because for lack of better wording, they're wise to it."

I know what this person is trying to say but omg this is triggering and reads like victim blaming in the original comment, however unintentionally. Yes, education is important but we can be "wise" and "aware" as humanly possible and become victimized regardless. And it's not our fault nor is it the fault of the child's parents for not having made them more wary of predators. The one at fault is the perpetrator alone. Let's please be extra careful!
posted by smorgasbord at 12:35 PM on January 18, 2023 [7 favorites]

My kids are way too young for sleepovers, but I will be happy to do them, even with not too close classmates after some vetting, if my kids enjoy them. I loved single-friend sleepovers, small groups and big sleepover parties. And then, as a Jewish youth group-kid, all the shabbatons, etc.
But I also was 10 years old when THAT episode of 90210 (original) aired. The one where David watches Scott Scanlon accidentally shoot himself with Scott's dad's gun. And, of course, a million news stories in the years after. But Scott Scanlon, man.
However awkward, I will ask every parent at every new playdate about guns.
posted by atomicstone at 12:39 PM on January 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

When we became blood siblings, we scratched our mosquito bite scabs until they bled, then mashed them together. In retrospect, this is mildly horrifying, but that was the 70s.
posted by mygothlaundry at 1:04 PM on January 18, 2023 [10 favorites]

Long in the rearview but at the house where my daughter had several sleepovers years later a gun incident resulted in a child’s death. Loaded guns in the hall closet.

Now I would not consider without deep vetting and then not likely.
posted by aiq at 2:36 PM on January 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

mygothlaundry, you make me want to start a new book so I can use that line as an epigraph.
posted by thivaia at 2:45 PM on January 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

One deleted, let's avoid rude comments please.
posted by loup (staff) at 9:31 AM on January 19, 2023

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