James' World 2

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Sleepovers were mostly a nightmare for me as a child, and I mean that literally: I had nightmares every single time I slept over at a friend’s house. Too embarrassed to tote my babyish night-light from home, I’d lie awake roiled with terror. Come morning—my Rolodex of anxieties exhausted—I’d immediately begin lobbying my mother on the drive home for the exact same sleepover routine the next weekend. I loved sleepovers.

Sleepovers helped me escape my nerdy little comfort zone. They were an opportunity to be silly and a touch subversive, and to get a glimpse of how other families lived their lives. Old-school prank phone calls were usually on offer—an act of mild sociopathy I would have sooner died to avoid than try alone in my own home, or by daylight. I once got a concussion after an excitable girl hit me with a blunt object, and I had to be driven home in the middle of the night. Another time a friend and I got in trouble for deliberately pouring copious amounts of “blood” (red food coloring) on her sheets as a joke.

We occasionally snooped around family areas that were clearly off-limits, and I recall that some of the more louche parents had Playboy magazines in full view in their bathrooms. My own family home was particularly attractive as a sleepover venue because, apart from the distinction of having a “cool” mom who provided junk food, we also had access to my father’s medical journals, which featured black-and-white photos of naked adults with genital tumors and other afflictions.

My childhood spanned the era of what I’ll call, unscientifically, “Peak Sleepover,” a period from roughly the mid-1960s to the early ’80s that’s fondly remembered (by those of us with poor memories and limited insight) for its laissez-faire parenting norms. Today’s parents appear more skeptical of sleepovers. On TikTok, a father and psychiatrist got millions of views for a pair of videos in which he explains why he doesn’t let his children attend sleepovers. In 2023, The Washington Post published an article featuring parents worried about their kids being exposed to a range of concerns, including excess screen time and domestic violence.

I’m not unsympathetic to some of the no-sleepover arguments, but denying our children a chance to learn up close from other families shortchanges children’s autonomy. I think it’s fair to ask why adults can’t organize our lives better to give children reasonable and age-appropriate experiences that put them at non-zero but nonetheless, limited risk, and that benefit their maturation.

No one is suggesting—certainly I am not—that children should be entrusted to unsafe households for a night. I’m deeply aware of all that can go wrong when adults fail to protect a child. I’ve spent my professional life trying to persuade adults to take children’s needs seriously. But one badly neglected need is that of acquiring resilience and self-sufficiency.

Basic due diligence (asking about firearms in the home, or whether older siblings’ friends or a new boyfriend are visiting, for example) is essential for any interaction between kids and other families. But after the threshold for safety has been met, why does it matter if our kids eat junk food for a night, or hear unwelcome political views, or sit through the wrong kind of prayers (or no prayers) at dinnertime? Why would we want to deprive a child of the occasional strange or uncomfortable experience at another family’s house—even one that might directly conflict with our values or our preferred practices? Isn’t an understanding of human differences a bulwark against frailty and narcissism? We’re not talking about moving in with a new family, just spending the night!

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