To Sleep or Not to Sleep: The Sleepover Craze

February 20, 2017 | by Luz Helena | 3 Minute Read

Ah, sleepovers. It starts with it being a cute sign of independence. You can’t take enough pictures of the cuties in their PJs and floor beds with their besties. We all have those pictures somewhere in our extremely insane, large, untamable collection of digital family photos. (No, I am not bitter about those at all.)

Well, the cuties grow and the sleepovers intensify. They want to stay up later every year and pretty soon you are too old to keep up with this craze. I am there, right now, with my early teen. I’m entirely too old to tolerate kids being up until hours I don’t even remember staying up for. Whatever wisdom you have as a parent – research, experience, common sense – is out the window. They don’t get it: they are different, they don’t need sleep – why, they function perfectly well with 6 hours of sleep. Apparently, the mirror does not speak to them.

So you try to set some kind of decent limits, but you discover that you’re “the only parents who do this.” See, “other kids’ parents don’t care what they do.” Really? Is that really what is happening in other houses? Do parents not care? Do they close the door, leave early teens unsupervised with social media until 3 and 4 a.m., then wake up, have their coffee, and move on?

Well, yeah, kind of. In our struggle with this we have consulted several sources for feedback and different opinions. We read a lot. We talked to other parents – both of current teens and of current adult children. We even surveyed parents of friends who “don’t care what we do.” We found out that sleepover rules are as varied as there are families. Go figure. (On the bright side, we found out that some of “those parents” had limits, too – again, go figure.) And in the process, we found that we probably needed to relax our limits a bit. Here’s where we came out:

We seem to have landed at acceptance of the fact that it is indeed true that these early teens just want to be awake. And being awake until 4 isn’t as shocking as we thought it was. While we do not like it, we have learned to accept and accommodate. But still, some form of structure must be in place. Back to back sleepovers are a no, only in extreme situations and when there is an extra day of rest before school starts. Sleepovers are planned in advance, not on the fly. Kitchen closes at a certain time (meaning there is no brownie-making at 3 a.m., with mixers going and spoons and pans falling to a large echo that awakens the entire ‘hood). Two kids is plenty for a sleepover (for girls, if you add that third one, the screaming intensifies to resemble that of a sorority party; for boys, it’s Madden at an intolerable level of noise). We like the three rules that one parent used: don’t wake anyone up, don’t leave the house, and be good to each other.

In closing, I’ll share something I ran into this week. I’m really trying to love it :) :

May you be blessed with a child…

Who defies you
 So you may learn to release control

May you be blessed with a child...

Who teaches you
 That it’s never about them

And all about you.

-Shefali Tsabary