Losing Sleep Over Slumber Parties

What's a parenting topic that's even more controversial than sleep training? It’s whether to let your child spend the night at a friend’s house. In the '90s, most of us had sleepovers — sometimes all weekend.

From Friday's school dismissal bell onwards, M.A.S.H. games, the TGIF lineup and Bagel Bites were our parents. I swear, unless we spilled nail polish on the Berber again, my BFF's mom didn't even want to hear from us.

Then came Polly Klaas, who was murdered at age 12 after being kidnapped from a slumber party.

The sleepover Polly Klass disappeared from was, ironically, at her parent's home. But a wider consciousness of safety issues at sleepovers grew up out of true crime shows — not just ones about Polly, but from several high-profile murder-kidnappings in the '90s.

One of those poor girls was Cassidy Senter, the first friend I'd ever had a sleep over with.

Even though these things are every parent's worst nightmare, assaults and kidnappings (and worse) do happen and it’s up to parents to spot the red flags.

On the day of my first-ever sleepover, for instance, Cassie's family member dropped us off for several unsupervised hours at the roller rink across town. We were only eight years old.

Despite all that, memories from ’90s sleepovers still hold a special place in my tweenaged soul. In the fifth grade, my girl posse loved to do makeovers. We cracked open our Caboodles and went too hard with Maybelline Great Lash. Drugstore makeup wasn’t our only guilty pleasure. We prank-called strangers and left long, wildly inappropriate voicemails. These antics reached a fever pitch when my cousins and I toilet papered our house. Even though our parents made us clean it up, we got to feel like rebels.

Three of my kids are in college now. Seeing our oldest kids (ages 21, 20 and 19) reach young adulthood means my husband, Joe, and I are damn-near into what I call our “grandparent era” — nevermind that we have three more children (ages 12, 10 and 7) still at home and precisely zero grandkids.

For me and Joe, the grandparent era means permissiveness well beyond what our big kids enjoyed at the same stage. You want to hang out in a public place, within a few miles of our house, with peers who don't seem like total miscreants? OK, but bring your phone.

You want to sleep over at some random kid's house — one I don’t know and whose parents I have never once crossed paths with? Even grandma-vibes mom says “not yet.”

The world feels less safe now than it used to, since parents of our kids’ new friends aren’t reachable with a phone book anymore. It can be hard to suss out other families’ safety rules, like how much unsupervised internet access kids get. On the other hand, if parents are easy to communicate with by text and responsive within an hour of my reaching out, I’m usually comfortable sending my kid to sleep at their house.

Still, nothing beats a face-to-face meeting first.

Growing up isn't all movies and marathon screentime. Honestly, it would be sad if we all gave our kids the Finding Nemo treatment, infantilizing and locking them down until they leave the anemone. Ultimately, kids must learn to move through the world safely without us. And if nothing ever happens to our children, well, nothing will ever happen to them.