Why Kids (And Parents) Still Need Sleepovers

There’s a joke About being a Gen X child versus a Gen Z child. The Gen Z kid is about to leave the home. His parents are telling him this. “Take your phone. Text me when you get there. Text me the names of who you’re with. Text me before you head home.” But what did his parents say when the Gen X-kid left the home? “Bye.”

It’s an accurate observation, but it leaves out a crucial detail. For it’s the Gen Xers, the generation that mostly just said “bye,” They are asking their children to give so much information and worry so much every time they go out of the house. As such, it’s not a totally shocking thing that Gen Z is largely missing out on one of the pleasures that Gen Xers — and millennials such as Michael Brendan Dougherty, writing about the phenomenon at National Review — experienced when they said “bye”: the sleepover. 

Granted, there’s probably some institutional knowledge at work here. Gen Xers have more information about what we were doing once we moved out of our home. We know whether we stayed overnight somewhere else or if we stayed for the majority. The times when we sneaked into the country clubs to use the pool for the winter to skateboard were many. We started small bonfires just because we could. There were willful acts of property destruction.

We managed to survive despite our efforts to make an Olympic sport out of Boy Scouts and to be unattended Boy Scouts in order to earn a merit medal. That should make us very relaxed parents. Except we’re not. The “meh, whatever” Generation is the most neurotic generation ever.

Perhaps it’s that we remember all the moments we survived even though we probably shouldn’t have. Perhaps it’s that we’re having fewer kids — except our parents, the boomers, didn’t exactly breed at the replacement rate, and they weren’t on edge all the time. Whatever the reason, though, we’re really disrespecting our biggest claim to fame with our obsessive focus on excessive safety. We need to be better than this.

The arguments against sleepovers make sense. In a fragmented age with weakened communities, it’s harder to know where we’re sending our kids. There are so many variables to consider in an age where broken homes are more common than they were when we were children, that it’s hard to know where our kids are going.

I’m a big proponent of having children, but not just in the literal sense. But, think back to what your life was like before you had kids. You can have the freedom, tranquility, and relative lack of uninexplicable destruction of the kitchen again for just a night. All that’s required is that you bring in a gaggle of other children on some night in the future and let them inflict a multiplicative level of damage upon your kitchen while your friends enjoy getting out the pressure washer and not running the dishwasher for an evening.

It’s not