Already I have a problem with that post title; let’s spend two paragraphs on that and then get to the main point. I’ve been unthinkingly using the term “co-ed” to mean…”girls and boys,” I guess, and I don’t even KNOW what would be a better and more inclusive and more accurate word. I’m not sure “mixed sleepovers” is clear enough. And maybe co-ed is fine! It’s just, I’m remembering how female students were sometimes referred to as “co-eds,” as if making something co-educational means “adding girls to a thing that is by default for boys,” and that is not a connotation I want to bring into the year 2021. But maybe there is no such connotation anymore, just as the word no longer has to refer to an educational context; and maybe “co-ed” easily and neatly includes people who are non-binary, and maybe there is no issue here—but if you know of a better adjective, I’d be grateful to hear it. Or maybe the solution is to remove the adjective, and just say “sleepovers,” but for this post I need a word that means “NOT ONLY GIRLS, AS THE SLEEPOVERS OF MY YOUTH WOULD HAVE BEEN WITHOUT QUESTION.”
(Just now I asked William, age 20 and a combined computer science / linguistics major, if he had any negative connotations with the adjective “co-ed,” and if he thought it excluded/included people who were non-binary, and he said he had no negative connotations and that he thought it could easily be inclusive, since it’s “co-,” which is together/with, and not “bi-” or “duo-” or anything else that means/implies two. So there is one single data point from The Youth.)
ANYWAY. Here is my issue: Elizabeth’s friend group includes boys and girls (and possibly also people who identify otherwise, but that has not yet been confided in me). They all turned 16 in the past year. Once they are all vaccinated, they would like to start having entire-group sleepovers. And it turns out, I have some Upbringing to work through on that!
Elizabeth has actually ALREADY BEEN to sleepovers that included boys, but it was A Particular Boy who has been in that other close neighborhood friend group (which occasionally invites others, as they did with Elizabeth a few times) since preschool. Leaving him out of things just because of his sex would have meant leaving out ONLY HIM, and no one wanted that. (Also, I suspect none of the parents wanted to try to draw the line between “He’s six years old so it’s fine to have him sleep over” and “He’s N years old so it is suddenly no longer fine, and Here’s Why.”) I didn’t know ahead of time that there would be A Boy at the sleepover, and Elizabeth was extremely shruggy/eye-rolly at my raised eyebrows when I picked her up afterward. (The attitude was “GAH, Mom, it’s not *huge sarcastic air quotes* ‘a BOY,’ it’s NOAH.”) Which left me thinking over what it was I thought was so inappropriate about having a boy there. Like, what EXACTLY. And finding I did not have a good, simple answer to that question, all I had was some mental flailing. Like: IT SEEMS LIKE IT’S NOT ALLOWED. …FOR SOME REASON.
Plus, thinking over the rules of my childhood all the way through to the rules at my Christian college, those were…extremely hetero-assumptive. No one even ASKED if we were heterosexual; we were all heterosexual by absolute default. Like, if I’d been interested in girls, I could have had girls in my room with the door locked EVERY DAY/NIGHT OF THE WEEK and there would have been no rule against that. (And in fact, looking back on it it’s PRETTY CLEAR to me that several pairs of roommates in my various college dorms were girlfriends living together.) So I’m looking for policies that make a SHARP TURN from that. And this is where I welcome chipping in, because…what policies DO make a sharp turn from that, other than not having policies?
Do you see what I mean? Any rules I make about WHO can sleep over, WHO can be in the room with the door closed, etc., have to take into account that my children have not yet confided in me what their own situations are, and I don’t wish to make assumptions. And furthermore, I’d like to have policies that don’t include the icky implication that any two people of theoretically-compatibly-attracted status will immediately start having sex if they’re allowed in a room with the door closed. I was pretty annoyed as a teenager that I was not allowed to have male friends in my room, as if there wasn’t any such thing as being “just friends” with a boy. (The explanation for that rule throughout the Christian community, including again my Christian college dorm experience, was that we should “avoid the appearance of evil.” Perhaps we should also avoid teaching children that sex = EVIL.)
But as soon as I try to customize something appropriate, I run into trouble. I start out so well: I think, “Well, what if we get to the TRUE GIST of it, and we say that the rule is that they are not allowed to have someone in their room if they’re…”—wait, how do I complete that sentence in a way that doesn’t feel stupid to say? “You can’t have a person in your room if you’re dating them, or if you might LIKE to date them”? Really, am I going to say those words? And is that actually a rule we want to make? Sometimes when I try to transfer the Christian parenting/school rules of my own upbringing to rules that stand on their own without God/Bible/religion, I find that there IS no transfer, and that the whole concept of the rule needs to be thrown out, and maybe that’s what’s happening in this case. Maybe my kids are allowed to have ANY peers in their rooms, and maybe it’s none of my business what the exact relationship is. Maybe sleepovers can be with WHATEVER friends they want to invite, and we don’t need to discuss what sex those friends are, because that doesn’t actually matter. (If as a teenager I’d had a co-ed sleepover that included even my actual boyfriend, I still wouldn’t have felt inclined to, like, make out with him IN FRONT OF THE GROUP, any more than I felt inclined to make out with him at the school lunch table, or when we went to the beach with a bunch of friends.) WHAT IS IT EXACTLY that I think is inappropriate about certain combinations of people (1) in bedrooms and/or (2) at night, and what part of that thinking needs to be tossed into the trash and which part is legitimate, I guess is a question here.
I was discussing this with Elizabeth, telling her that I was having trouble figuring out (1) if there needs to be rules and (2) if so, WHAT and also WHY, and she was very amused by the whole thing. At one point she said, “You do NOT need to worry about Caleb and Cameron!!” (the main two boys in her friend group) and I said, “No, I know, I’m NOT worried about Caleb and Cameron, I’m worried about…” and I absolutely trailed off, to the escalation of her amusement. I could not finish the sentence! What AM I worried about? Is it in fact NOTHING?
Please let us know what you decide because I have had these EXACT SAME THOUGHTS only less organized and more abstractly because my kids are younger. I think I am in fact worried about nothing but we are still pre-sleepover era here so I have not tested these thoughts yet.
exact same.
I am very interested in this conversation because it’s something I anticipate struggling with too. I think for YOU, you are very fortunate because Elizabeth is already well into her teen years and does in fact seem to have a good head on her shoulders and it’s not particularly likely that her fate depends now on you figuring out the right balance of rules in this instance. But if I go back to my high school years, I had one good male friend who my parents DID NOT need to worry about (and my parents kind of knew that, even though he was not out) who was not invited to sleepovers and that was understood as just how things were…but also might have been unfortunate for him, because it would have been nice if we had been a bit more inclusive. Sleepovers were also not a huge part of how we socialized at that point, so that helped. At least the single gender ones. There were also co-ed all night movie parties, and drama cast parties, which I was mostly not allowed to go to. I felt left out, and also maybe a little better protected and loved than my friends that did go, because those parties were not always wholesome and there were games of truth or dare that were actually sexual coersion with older boys exploiting younger girls’ insecurities. (Although the older boys also turned out to be, in some cases, gay? So I guess it was insecurity all around). And I absolutely would have been making out with my boyfriend, and maybe more. But because I wasn’t allowed to go to those parties I did it in broad daylight at the park and at school in ways I still cringe in retrospect sometimes. But I didn’t get pregnant! But I’m also grappling with how much I don’t want to give my daughter’s the same impression I had that they’re in a competition to stay as pure as possible as long as possible (my parents didn’t even try to do this, and in some cases gave guidance in the opposite direction, but it was just in the air), but also protect them from being the 14 year old at a party with older boys and wanting to be cool. My older one reminds me constantly of the girls I know who were that 14 year old, and she’s turning 9 this year so I’ve got to figure out my strategy fast.
I think for a sixteen year old with an established, fairly trustworthy group if friends I would say yes to co-ed sleepovers, but
1) Make it clear that this isn’t a yes to all co-ed sleepovers, or to all co-ed sleepovers that don’t include a romantic interest. With new friends, it would be a new discussion
2) Also make it clear that it isn’t only a yes because of the lack of romantic interests for her, and that if she had someone she wanted to date that would not make me feel like she was a less responsible kid. (Although I might not immediately be in favor of romantic sleepovers, however lovely the person might be).
And, because I’m a bit of a busybody,
3) That although girls only events might be too heteronormative for the modern age, we shouldn’t forget how important it is for people who are coupled up to carve out separate time for platonic friendships, and that I would be looking extremely sidewise at any romantic relationship that required doing everything together.
YES. The coercive/peer-pressure-y aspect to sexual exploration at “mixed” parties = not good, even if everyone is technically the same age (because we are not all the same inside age as outside age, in these matters as well as others), but even more so when you have Older, Cool People or otherwise people you want to impress or not disappoint.
And, with mixed slumber parties, you’d also want to talk about what you do if you wake up and someones’ groping you or if you’re changing into pajamas and someone takes a photo or whatever, because peoples’ automatic responses are different and fight, flight, or freeze are not going to serve you equally well in that situation (I was a “freeze” critter; this served me well in terms of staying alive in some situations and… poorly… in terms of not getting out of other situations).
(I have never been groped by a lesbian; experiences presumably vary, but there’s American Jerk Culture socialization towards things as well as attraction? I was occasionally wrong about which guys are safe, although *of course* there would have been all the eye rolling, from me, if my ability to identify safe guys had been questioned. And my experiences on a co-ed dorm floor – with a successfully locked women’s bathroom and a ton of guys intermittently discussing how they might possibly sneak themselves, a camera, or otherwise get a “view” inside – heavily informs my feelings in general about physical privacy while showering, and safety in situations where yelling would not bring help, from collective people with heavy testosterone and male “conquest” sexual socialization.)(I briefly considered being a model in my late teens; a guy I knew warned me against it on the basis of fake modeling gigs he’d seen videos of online, which were just tricks to get video of girls changing. I told him if he thought it was wrong for me to be videotaped without consent while changing, then it was wrong for him to watch those videos of *other* girls changing, and he was not a fan of this concept. )(I knew so many creeps; a couple attempted PUA guys, which is such toxic nonsense I’d suggest giving the boot to anyone who endorses it; and I’m frankly fairly surprised nothing worse happened to me than did happen.)
(and now with social media auuuugh can you even imagine…)
Basically. Yeah. If a co-ed sleepover stays together, and doesn’t pressure, and everyone knows they should bail if they feel pressure, and everyone knows they should not grope and if groped, should yelp, then sure? Provided there are no known creeps but sometimes one does not know about the creeps and auuuugh I want all the people to be safe whatever sex/gender/attraction combo they are but then also literally all the creeps I met were guys. (I did know one girl who was clinically insane and was a Problem in different ways in terms of always wanting to make drama and wanting to be fought over by guys, but that’s… different?… from pressure and from psychological tricks and non-consensual or dicey-consensuality contact and masturbating across the bus aisle while staring intently at you and propositions and bragging about things that did not happen and bragging about things that did happen but didn’t mean what they were implying they meant and whatnot?)
Anyway. I have wariness, collectively, about teenage boys who have been socialized in this culture [testosterone! peer pressure! brain development isn’t quite there for impulse control all the time! and the US is really, really screwed up about what it has told them it means to be Men!], and that is unfair to many of them, and I do not know what to do with the fact of that unfairness while also running the statistical logic on the vast majority of people who rape.
(although there’s also sending out photos of girls in a state of undress, which conditioning and sexual attraction would have differential effects on, but would definitely not exclude, say, a heterosexual female from taking a different kind of advantage of the situation, either to be a bully or to please a guy she knows or to be “edgy” or whatever. And I am so, so glad I have no teenage children.)
What’s PUA, please?
Pick-up Artist
Pick Up Artist. It’s a horrid culture of trying to “get” the girl through manipulation.
Yep, “Pick Up Artist” – sorry for using the acronym without expansion! Basically, there are all sorts of psychological social hacking tricks where you 1. take *incredible* advantage of peoples’ ingrained don’t-make-a-fuss socialization, 2. attempt to subtly destroy self-esteem so you can make the person dependent on you, 3. gaslight all the time, 4. talk out of both sides of your mouth to get both plausible deniability (“I was joking!” or “but surely you knew I wasn’t serious!”) and also victim-blaming (“I mean, come on, you knew this because I *told* you before, you can’t complain now”), and 5. isolation.
And then you brag about it all online or at gatherings and pretend you’re enlightened. From what I gather, some of them focus exclusively on short-term – sex tonight with someone I hadn’t met before tonight, the end, someone new tomorrow – and others do both that and long-term things.
It’s basically con artist + abuse/cult tactics, and they’re fine with torching anyone’s psyche and norms generally on the off-chance of getting some action with any given person, so they end up doing hefty damage to more people than they “succeed” with – and then that damage often ends up making things easier for the next abusive/manipulative guy who comes around.
Obvs. some are in deeper than others, but I haven’t met a legitimately competent-moral-compass guy yet who thought this stuff was a good idea once he really took a look at it and what it was doing. (some guys go “oh, wow, it works! and you can get ‘consent’ so all the sex is ethical!” but no, it is not ethical when the ‘consent’ is acquired via lies and manipulation – consent based on a lie or fear is not actually consent. Often there’s some excuse nonsense about this stuff “leveling the playing field” because interactions preceding sex are a “game” which they feel is currently unfairly skewed towards the sexual object’s preference to not have sex, and the PUA stuff “evens things up” between the sexual object’s preference and the sexual predator’s preference)
In my experience, some of PUA stuff being “fine” is often found more plausible by people in computer science, for a variety of reasons, some trained-in [find the edge cases; use things in weird ways if it works], some based on population collective socialization and norms and how people have or haven’t learned to socialize. (…. also there is often a surprisingly-pervasive “we’re better than the jocks but aren’t getting as much action” resentment which is sometimes eager to learn the “secrets”)
It was also very hard to *explain* some of the worse aspects of the “advanced PUA” problem to computer science people, because in many cases they wanted to evaluate each plain text statement for its most obvious meaning outside of any context or power dynamics, and that is simply not how it works; if someone shows you their weapon, puts it away, then says in a mob-boss-threat tone of voice and intonation “I don’t think you want to get me angry” – it adds up to *mean something* different from someone just saying those words in a normal, sane-human, non-power-dynamics context, and this is frustrating to try to explain to some people. (see also: Trump asking people to ‘find’ a certain number of votes. We know what this means; Trump knew what this meant; the person on the receiving end knew what this meant; but people who want everything to be exclusively what it is on the surface and some people who are grasping at straws and some people who are just not familiar at all with this sort of manipulative power dynamic say “he only asked him to find votes, not make them up; what’s the problem?”)
None of the PUAs succeeded in having sex with me. They did succeed in bestowing trauma with some long-term side effects on me, but no sex for them. But I hate-hate-hate this stuff so much, as you may have been able to gather…
Sheesh – not easy. My kids have not been in this kind of situation as none of them have friends groups that include strong friendships with the opposite gender. I do get your point that often a dating couple is not likely going to make out in front of a group of friends at the beach or the lunch table, so then they won’t likely do anything similar during a sleepover with their group.
Coach’s parents are wound so tight that we weren’t ‘allowed’ to be alone while dating or see movies that were suggestive. We just kept telling them that we’d found another theater that was showing The Lion King. Yes, this was over 25 years ago. They told us that putting ourselves in a position to make bad choices was called ‘an occasion of sin’. In 25 years of marriage I still can’t warm to them. Totally over the top and overstepping types.
You bring up such a good point. I was a good kid, but my parents were so overprotective that I found ways to lie and sneak–in order to hang out with my equally good kid friends. All we wanted to do was drive around and eat fast food, but I had to lie about seeing a PG movie. I’d rather know what my kids were up to and who they were with, not a cheerful lie to make me feel better.
Also, I did have the family friend who it was fine to do sleepovers with when we were 6, and 8, and 9, and then suddenly when we were 14 or something the adults decided we needed separate rooms, so he had to go sleep with our older brothers and I had to sleep by myself, listening to them have fun in the other room, and I was SO MAD. It happened a couple of times over the years, and it always ended up as boys get to stay up and have fun, girls have to be protected.
You’re worried about Teens and Sexual Activity and Peer Pressure and Consent and making sure everyone is safe and making good choices around those issues, especially behind closed doors. And those worries aren’t confined to gender spectrum or even the number of people behind the closed doors. And I have no idea what The Rules should be but I’m leaning toward No Closed Doors.
I would agree with that. Maybe a sleepover in an open area or something. I had sleepovers and we always “slept” in the living room. Kept it simple that way.
This is hilarious and timely because I have a 16-year-old who has just had two mixed sleepovers in the past two weeks, one of them here and one of them elsewhere. To complicate things, the 16-year-old’s significant other, who is same-sex but not same gender, was also attending both of them. My first instinct was to say no because I never would have been allowed to have a sleepover with anyone I was dating, and I had pretty permissive parents! But my kid asked what I was afraid of, and we ended up having a funny and open conversation about teen movies, the kinds of shenanigans I got up to in high school, etc. I checked in with my husband and we decided that what we didn’t want was for anyone to have sex or do drugs/alcohol, and as long as our kid was on the same page, we needed to trust them and let go of our outdated ideas about sleepovers. Kid: “You’re overestimating us. All we want to do is play video games together.”
Ha! This reminds me of a phase where my mom was SO WORRIED I was doing drugs—and I had never even SEEN a drug. I wouldn’t have known how to acquire a drug even if it had occurred to me to WANT to do drugs! But parents at that time were SURE that at every social event, someone would be furtively bringing out the heroin or pill-bowl or something!
Ha, same here. And last year, when my daughter was thinking about a male friend That Way:
Her: “What’s the difference between a friend and a boyfriend?”
Me: “Well… there’s usually some kissing involved…”
Her: “Oh ew, I don’t want that. Thank goodness it’s the pandemic.”
My parents were always VERY CONCERNED about me drinking. They failed to notice that my friend group was pretty limited and I hardly every went out on weekends. I’m not sure when they thought this drinking was going to occur.
My kids are in marching band, which is an intense activity here and there’s lots (LOTS) of activities where the whole section is involved, many of them official marching band activities but then it bleeds over to social life activities. My girls have had co-Ed sleepovers with their sections for the past few years with no issues. We allowed it for the same reasons you say here- there’s no way to really determine who should and shouldn’t be allowed so the default is everyone is allowed. Also if teens are going to have sex, they are going to do it even if there’s no sleepovers in their life and in fact would be LESS likely to do it AT a sleepover wirh all the friends possibly snooping/giggling/gossiping.
This! My daughter, too, was in marching band. Usually the parents all know each other, too, and there’s a lot of comfort knowing all the kids, and the kids’ parents, and everybody knows that if anything untoward were to happen, all of the parents would find out. As long as there is a parent present, I think it’s fine.
I think in general, rules are overrated. It sounds like you could have fairly open conversations with Elizabeth about the kinds of things that happen at parties that you are concerned about (if nothing else, recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings give some clear examples). Caleb and Cameron are great, but what if someone invites in a new person and the dynamic starts to change? Would Elizabeth feel comfortable changing her mind about staying at the party? What if some of her friends surprise her and it’s not all as platonic as she thought? Overall though, 16 is close enough to 18 that it seems important to practice making her own choices and figuring out her own comfort zone while surrounded by friends she knows really well and her parents are still close enough to pick her up at 3 AM if need be.
ALL OF THIS!
AGREED. Conversations, thinking ahead, being aware of what can happen and how things can shift past your “nope” line without a clear place to say “hold up” without awkwardness, and generous bailing-out. (I would have benefited enormously if anyone had ever offered to just… pick me up… anywhere, anytime, anyplace, if I needed it.)
This would be complicated for me by the fact that my youngest identifies as non-binary and bi and has a lot of friends who are gender non-conforming in all sorts of ways and who change how they identify frequently. It’s actually hard for me to get anyone’s pronouns and names right because they are always changing.
If I’m being honest, I think the hardest combination for me would be two kids who are biologically male and female (conditioning from my youth? concern about pregnancy?) and this isn’t much of a problem because my kid is biologically female and so are almost all of their friends, though their gender identities are all over the spectrum. They did ask if a cis boy could sleep over four years ago when they were both eleven and we said no. I don’t remember how we justified it, but there was at the least a two-way crush and possibly something more between them, and that seemed to be the line I didn’t want to cross, even with sixth graders.
BTW, my wife often says being able to have her (secret) girlfriend spend the night in high school was one of the one perks of being a teenage lesbian in the early 80s. I wouldn’t know as I didn’t have a girlfriend until college.
With kids around the same age, we’ve had the same conversations. The biggest thing I want for my kiddos is to be safe and smart about their choices. I WANT them to enjoy the fullness of young hormones—just in a smart, reasonable way. I’ve always been inclined to openly discuss my concerns and my goals, and my children have both seemed to respond well—suggesting their own parameters. Of course, one of my kids is openly Bi, so there’s that stickiness. One thing they decided was that sleepovers would happen in the basement ‘man cave’—which doesn’t have a door. With that being said, I have insanely ‘good’ kids, but I’m not sure that putting in rules will deter a child whose more prone to making poor choices. Yeesh. Teenagers are complicated.
I’m on a similar page with my kids (ages 17 and 15, one of whom identifies as bi). I consider our household to be sex-positive. We openly discuss consent and birth control. And the fact that sex is good and fun. I probably pound the consent thing more with my son, which I know is not really fair, but seems like an unfortunate reality. We also talk about sexting photos and the laws around that. (Like, California does NOT have a Romeo and Juliet law.) I frequently remind them that I am too young to be a grandmother. Much of these discussions lead to them rolling their eyes but I think most of it has sunk in. Oh, it’s also important to me that the other involved parents are more-or-less on the same page with the parameters. My son and his GF are allowed to be in bedrooms with the door closed in all houses, for instance. If her parents were not okay with this, I wouldn’t allow it at my house either out of respect for her parents. It’s a complicated thing to navigate, that’s for sure!
My 14 year old daughter is a lesbian and in the past few months starting dating her best friend of many years. They were friends prior to their sexual orientation identification), and they’ve had tons of sleepovers already, both with just the two of them and with larger groups (and most frequently with the two of them and my daughter’s other best friend, who is a boy). So I had to figure out my rule set on that really quickly. Where I ended up with all of it was that we needed to be on the same page with respect to what was cool and what wasn’t, so, after some googling on my part, we had a long discussion about boundaries (physical, verbal, and social media/internet communication) and they still have sleepovers, but in common area parts of my house, like my basement or den. I don’t kid myself that this is a fail safe, but my basic position is that everything in the world is way too accessible at this point to rely on lack of access as a prevention method. So instead we rely heavily on open communication and trust and just hope for the best. At least for the time being.
My wife and I are both women, and we realized that it would be absurd to have gender-based limitations on sleepovers for our own kids (oldest is about to turn 12). So our rule is that there are no closed doors for sleepovers, regardless of the genders of the people involved. They can be in their room with the door open, or they can be in a common room, but they will know that a parent or sibling could walk by at any moment. We have yet to see how this will work in practice in the teen years, but it seems like a solid plan.
In my teenage years I attended some mixed gender group sleepovers (which were SO FUN), and I had sleepovers with a particular female friend that I had a crush on, and you can guess which one of those should have made my parents more concerned. (We didn’t get up to nearly as much as I would have liked to, but STILL.)
I love the no closed doors ideas. That is what my conservative concerned parents did, and my BF, now husband and I had no problem with it! They also trusted me and I definitely didn’t want to break that trust.
I am decidedly not The Youth, but I’m with William on co-ed.
Sexual activity does not only happen between males and females. Based on my memories, that is true even when they are (primarily?) heterosexual. Sexual activity does not only happen at night. Sexual activity is not the only behavior that concerns me. It barely makes the top 5.
My kids are still very young, but my current and planned strategy is to: 1- teach them about sexual responsibility and responsibility generally 2 – try to arm them to stand up to peer pressure and to know I will always be the scapegoat if they need it 3 – maintain rules that allow me to supervise at an age appropriate level all activities.
Part of the last one is that I don’t knock before entering their bedrooms when they are hanging out with friends. This is an established policy that my kids take for granted. So far, the only friends who have slept over are very close family friends, but they are both male and female. Given that we put mattresses on the living room floor in the middle of the house when we have a group sleepover, it definitely hasn’t been an issue.
YES. Scapegoats are gold. I only used scapegoats in absentia, and never my parents since my parents personally were not convincing, but I have heard from friends that having a mutual “cue” as to when their scapegoats should respond on the permission phone call with “no, I need you to come over/come home right now” was useful. A lot of us are conditioned to not say no/be awkward/”ruin the fun, and *also* some people really take a “no” better from a larger person who is not present than the not-very-muscular, unarmed person who is present. (I do think we also need to break that conditioning, though!)
Oof this is such a tricky question! For what it’s worth my kids are 5 and nearly 2 so we’re very much in the hypothetical zone here.
I’d like to think I’m going to raise my kids in a sex-positive way. But what worries me about sleepovers as kids get older in general isn’t the sex aspect exactly, it’s the peer pressure. Having sex with consent on a one on one level with a partner, however they identify, is one thing. Doing something in front of others to feel like a grown up or one of the gang is totally another though, isn’t it?
Overall, I think the ladies above have got it sussed as much as is possible – trust, communication, doors open? And one step at a time. I think it’s ok to agree to something and then change your mind as evidence presents itself – or vice versa.
I want to preface this by saying I’m not being critical (and I’m truly not) but I am curious: did this issue come up previously with your older sons or just now with your only daughter? And if it is just now with your daughter, why is that? Is that a knot to also untie?
I might be projecting, so backstory: I don’t have children, but I am a daughter, and was raised completely differently than my brother in regards to issues like this one.
Me: mega introverted, didn’t date in high school, went to co-ed sleepovers (at YOUTH GROUP) throughout high school that were ridiculously wholesome and like hanging out with cousins/extended family.
My brother: super extraverted, dated everyone in high school, had his first sexual experience AT A YOUTH GROUP SLEEPOVER, went to HS parties 30+ years ago where everyone got hammered and had sex in the woods (because that’s what “party” meant back then).
I’m a year older. Neither of us had a curfew: I didn’t need one because I was either at home, school, work or YOUTH GROUP; they didn’t even try with him.
Then: I started sorta dating one of my friends the summer after I graduated HS. My parents LOST THEIR DAMN MINDS. All of a sudden I had a curfew and if I wasn’t home on time my mom would drive around town looking for me LIKE SHE WAS THE COPS. It made no logical sense to me since I worked 2nd shift and didn’t get home from WORK sometimes until 1am, but throw A BOY into the mix and I was automatically a slut after midnight, like the worst interpretation of Cinderella ever. [/backstory]
It did not come up with my older two: they didn’t attend or host sleepovers. But if you look back in the archives, there are several posts of me fretting that it MIGHT come up!
Gotcha. Thanks Swistle!
I’ve been thinking on this a lot, especially as a parent of b/g twins whose friend group includes kids of varying gender identities and sexualities.
When I was a teenager, I had a friend group that lived somewhat scattered, and we had co-ed sleepovers with some frequency because of logistics. I think the general rule was that we were together, and without the expectation of privacy. (That said, I distinctly remember a committed couple within the friend group that found a private space to have sex. But it wasn’t their first/only alone-time — they were having sex with or without the sleepover experience.)
As a parent, I am leaning toward feeling group sleepovers with a mixed group are ok if parents are around and at least loosely supervising (because large groups of teenagers can combine into worse-than-usual decision-making on all sorts of fronts) but at the moment, I feel like a one-person sleepover (in the bedroom, with more privacy) is limited to someone who is not a current romantic partner, because at this age (15) I don’t think I’m comfortable with my kids spending a WHOLE NIGHT sharing a room with a romantic partner. And I am open to re-evaluating down the line. I don’t think I’m opposed to a friend of any gender or romantic-partner-status visiting in a bedroom, though we haven’t encountered this yet to have to make decisions about open/closed door or anything else like that.
This reminds me that the alternative to co-ed sleepovers is often driving home late at night…in which case I think I’d take the hypothetical dangers of a sleepover, especially if I knew/trusted the parents and most of the kids.
Yes! I would rather have my kid spend the night elsewhere every night if the alternative is driving home alone at midnight or later. My husband had a terrible accident as a teenager coming home from a girlfriend’s house, and it’s a miracle he lived; it would have been so much better if he’d been allowed to sleep on their couch instead.
I have been thinking about this all evening. I have a 14 year old son, so, this is something I can relate to. When I was in high school, in the late 80’s, I had a large group of co-Ed friends- maybe 20 of us. We were all in honors classes; basically really good kids. We had frequent parties, dated each other loosely, went to dances…But. We did date each other and we were really, really trustworthy. We never drank, got into trouble or anything. We had an overnight after prom senior year with no issues. But, would I, right now as a parent want to be responsible for a co-Ed sleepover at my house? NO. Because we did date and I can’t promise that none of us would have taken advantage of that kind of sleepover. Now, at 18, in college, we had all the coed friend sleepovers we wanted. So, for me it is a matter of not wanting to be the host of something that could go bad, even though I had innocent experiences myself.
I can tell you what my concern is: sexual assault. Which is why we are a no-sleepovers family. (I do not yet have teenagers, but this comes up surprisingly early with some kids.)
Yes, this. Also a “no sleepovers” family.
My parents were very lenient. I went to tons of sleepovers. In my experience, nothing good or necessary happens at sleepovers. Anything “necessary” can occur in a normal house visit with a friend that ends at 10PM.
My husband’s family was also a “no sleepovers” family. He hated it at the time, but 100% agrees with it in retrospect. He says the only reason he wanted to sleepover anywhere was to do something he wasn’t supposed to do.
For context, we were both kids that would’ve been classified as “super good !!! kids”.
I have to say my childhood experiences of sleepovers (although not co-ed and with female frequents who identified as straight, for what that’s worth) was incredibly bonding and positive and… just generally wholesome? We lived in a very rural area where there wasn’t that much to do so from the age of about 10-11, sleepovers were our social life really. We would practice cooking, host dinner parties for each other, practice hair and makeup and then watch movies and giggle and go to sleep a bit late. I can completely see why no sleepovers feels like a simple no risk response but sometimes a bit of independence and time with friends is a *good* thing, right? Especially at a home with a degree of parental supervision.
Seconding this. I get the fears and each family can make it’s own decision, but I hope my girls get to have sleepovers the way I got to. (Our house is actually pretty well set up to be THE SLEEPOVER HOUSE, which might be our strategy.)
I have a good friend who has worked as a school social worker, and she is also in the no sleepovers camps for this reason. She says she has heard too many stories, and that her concern is mostly not the other kids, but the possibility of an older brother, an uncle, a neighbor, using the time to exploit a vulnerable person. But her kids are young still (6 and 8) and I am curious if she’ll change her mind when they’re older.
My husband is a social worker who works exclusively with children and is 100% against sleepovers for our kids, for similar reasons.
I am not quite “The Youth” but on the younger end and also I teach middle schoolers…
In my experience nobody calls female students “Co-Eds” anymore except older men and it’s nearly always creepy in that context. I don’t think my students would even know what it meant if someone referred to a person as a co-ed. Maybe I’ll ask them if I think of it in August.
BUT I think “mixed group sleepovers” is a great alternative if Co-Ed feels weird.
My sleepover experiences were primarily all-female but my friend group was pretty balanced and also kind of large so often we would have a joint party and then split at 10/11pm for boys to sleep at one house and girls to sleep at another and sometimes text back and forth all night. Sleepovers were almost exclusively in basements/other common areas, not bedrooms.
Hi, fellow Christian-college graduate here, wife of a pastor, and mom of two daughters. I have some experience in this area. :) My older daughter had plenty of all-girl sleepovers throughout high school, and although we did not know it until she was in college she identifies as bi. Turns out she had been feeling that way since high school but wasn’t ready to share it. So we may have hosted some problematic sleepover situations without even knowing it, and *SPOILER* no one died. So far, so good.
Younger Daughter started dating a young man when she was 16, and he occasionally spent the night at our house when we weren’t home (with our knowledge and his parents’ permission). We felt REALLY WEIRD about it at first, so here is what we did: we told her we didn’t want her having sex in high school because we did not think she was prepared to handle those types of strong feelings, but also said if she ever needed birth control she should ask sooner than later. We also told her that we trusted her to always tell us the truth, and that our trust in her would last as long as she held up her end of the bargain. The Boyfriend relationship did not last but since then she’s had friends of all genders sleep over and I never feel like I have to worry.
NOW: my experience may be limited a bit because Older Daughter never asked to have a boy sleep over and Younger Daughter is very responsible and mature for her age, and is also very open with us. Had we had a child who specialized in Sneaking Around, things would have been handled differently. But for us, offering trust was repaid in trustworthy behavior (and that applied to underage drinking as well). Also, note that the concepts of sin/modesty/”being a stumbling block” never came into it.
I think asking yourself what you’re worried about is the place to start. Are you worried your child will be coerced into doing something they don’t want? Then talk to them honestly about that, and if a friend gives you that vibe then don’t let that particular friend stay over, and tell your child the reason why (which might prompt them to view the relationship through a more careful lens). Are you worried about teenage pregnancy? Talk about birth control and condoms and the efficacy rates thereof. Are you worried about their maturity levels? Talk about sex and being ready for sex and how it’s not just about “pantsfeelings,” as Captain Awkward would say. I think “talking” is my main point here, and I’ll admit that’s easier when your husband is a youth pastor and has been doing this for 25 years but take your kid on a drive, bring up the sleepover issue, and see what they have to say.
It came up in my daughter’s friend group but not really while they were in school. They wanted to take a senior trip for a week at the lake and share a house. One boy was gay, and the other just liked being around girls. The arrangement was that the boys would get their own room in the lake house. On the trip two kids caught feelings and it set off weirdness in the group. But back to the question of teen sleepovers. I think there’s a big issue of What Will Other Parents Think. Even if you know the kids and their parents, there is a thought about the optics and will there be anything said.
This is exactly the sort of thing that would normally be a really good guess for me: normally I DO care What Other People Think—even when I know I SHOULDN’T, and wish I DIDN’T! But in this case, I find I don’t care at all—not about Optics, and not about What Might Be Said. The other parents have full power to make their own choices for their own teenagers, for their own reasons, and if they don’t think co-ed sleepovers are a good idea, they can tell their own teenager that they may not attend, and why, and that doesn’t affect me at all. (If only, IF ONLY, I could apply this so easily to other areas of my life! Well, we are who we are.) (Plus, it helps that I am not hosting the first co-ed sleepover!)
Instead of “co-ed” you could say “all gender”… What’s nice about using the more modern term is it’s clearly meant to be inclusive as opposed to possibly just an old habit of speech. :)
I think that if you decide to allow mixed-gender sleepover parties, you need to make certain that the other parents know in advance so that they can decide if they’re allowing their kids to attend. Because equality and judgment and good kids and all the rest… but also: the teenaged brain is still developing and their choices can reflect that.
In my ideal universe, my kid– who is still too young to attend any sleepover parties at all– wouldn’t attend any ever, regardless of gender mix. This is mostly because I have memories of all-girl younger-kid parties that got mean–a group of 9-year-old girls without supervision playing Truth or Dare is not necessarily a great place to be. I would worry about my own kid being in a situation where the other kids are free to push the envelope a little further than they would in daylight, with adults around. The envelopes that can be pushed with younger kids are different from the ones for older ones… but the setup is the same. Some of the stops are off at sleepovers, and I think those stops are good ones.
(A wrap-around sort of party would work better in my mind. Let them come over for a later evening, have them all go home to sleep, but have the expectation be that they come back for breakfast and hanging out the next day once they’re up.)
This post resonated with me because Oldest is 18 and has his first serious girlfriend (since December) and when she comes over they are often in his room with the door closed. I was raised Catholic by parents who did not allow me to have boys in my room with the door open OR closed because I guess they were worried I was going to have sex or ??? Of course the result was that I spent virtually no time at my house with any boyfriends. We’d go to his house, his car, the beach, the woods, the movie theater, literally anywhere but my house. So I was alone with boys in places where if things went wrong it would have been too bad for me (note: nothing ever went wrong, they were all “nice” boys, and I didn’t have sex until college). I’m trying mightily to avoid this reverse incentive with my kids because let’s face it: if they want to make out/fool around/have sex etc they will find a way and a place that could be significantly less safe than my house. This is so far away from how I was brought up that I actually feel a little tense posting it for fear that I’ll be considered a bad parent, but in my heart this is the best approach for me.
I didn’t speak to the issue of coed sleepovers because that has not come up with Oldest but reading other’s comments raised some very good points I hadn’t considered because it hasn’t come up. Am mentally saving these thoughtful issues for when/if Youngest encounters this situation.
You don’t sound like a bad parent at all! You bring up a very good point, that the rules your parents had for you set up the situation where you ended up in places that weren’t super safe. I had my first (and very intense) romantic relationship when I was 16, way back in the 70’s-and I know we would end up in some strange places to make out. He was a very sweet boy, and the only thing that kept me from having sex is that my mother seemed to get pregnant at the drop of the hat-and I DID NOT want that to happen to me. My parents got married at 18, and my mother was pregnant at the time (cracks me up how long it took us kids to figure that out, they didn’t hide the date of their wedding anniversary!), so I know that informed their views on being strict with allowing us to even have boys in the house. We would NEVER have been allowed to have an all gender sleepover, but honestly between the number of younger siblings I had and the size of our house? It would have been much safer than us parking on a side street in his car.
So that is a very wordy way to say I think you bring up a very good point about being safe, in case things start to go wrong.
This is just how it was for me, as a teenager: I was not allowed to have my boyfriend in my room at home…and so we spent time together anywhere that was not my home. This isn’t what I want for my kids, either!
This is timely: my 15 year old daughter has a boyfriend (they’ve been together about 9 months) and her two best friends are boys. She does have female friends and attended multiple all-female sleepovers prior to the pandemic, but the kids she managed to remain closest to during the last year-and-a-half of almost no socializing face-to-face are almost all boys. So yeah, I think this may come up.
Hosting: I think I’d allow her to have a sleepover that included her male friends, but in our basement which is space open to all family members to access.
Attending: I think I’d allow her to go to “mixed” sleepovers IF it was going to be relatively small and I pretty much knew the other kids who would be there AND knew and trusted the parents of the hosting kid. I would have equal concerns about kids I didn’t know, and fathers/uncles/siblings of the hosting family that I didn’t know.
I would NOT go for having just her boyfriend sleeping over, or her sleeping over at her boyfriend’s, even in a family-accessible room (safety in numbers), and if they do go into each other’s rooms while visiting I’d expect the doors to remain open. This rule would be in place until at least the end of high school. If she went off to university and ended up living with someone in a romantic relationship and wanted to bring them home it would be a different situation.
Once when I was a teenager, my sister and I let a couple of male friends spend the night at our place on a night my mom happened to be away because there was a full-blown snowstorm raging when it was time for them to leave, and when my father dropped by the next morning he absolutely lost it to find them at our house after having obviously spent the night. My sister and I were SO insulted – neither of us was remotely attracted to the two friends in question, they’d slept in the spare room on the other side of the house from our room, we had thought we were doing the responsible thing in terms of safety, and my dad didn’t even live there! But that didn’t stop my dad from calling my mother and blasting her, calling her an unfit mother! I’m still pissed about it now that I’m thinking about it more than 30 years later.
Sleepover factor aside, after reading a couple of comments about the substance issues at teen parties, I’m going to share my thoughts on that too: I don’t really care that much if if my kids experiment with alcohol at parties with a good group of trusted friends (to be clear, this can be at a larger party where they don’t know everyone, as long as they are there with at least a small group of good friends). I think it’s unrealistic to try to forbid such things, and I’d rather emphasize not having too much when there’s no one trustworthy around to look out for you, and not leaving your friends if you’re the more sober one and they’ve had too much, and not getting into cars with anyone who’s consumed alcohol, and feeling like it’s okay to speak up for themselves and to call me to come pull them out of any situation that makes them uncomfortable.
My child, who is now 15 and assigned female at birth, came out as gay before then transitioning, so I have actually handled this situation myself.
We have had sleepovers inviting kids of all genders, though ultimately the cis-boys’ parents chose to pick them up (I gave them the option of a group sleepover in the living room but that’s what those parents preferred). A close friend, who was on full sleepover status, then eventually became a romantic partner.
When their parents and I became aware of the relationship, we all agreed on a no-closed-door policy. The pandemic happened like a month later and then they broke up, so we barely had a chance to put it into practice. However, we talked to both children and explained that it was to help them behave in age-appropriate ways, since neither of them was old enough to consent or have things like good judgment or strong boundaries.
I told my kid that the no-closed-doors policy is based on romantic feelings rather than gender, and that it relies on him being honest with me about whether it’s a friend or a Friend. If I can’t trust him, it’ll become a no-closed-doors policy for everyone, period.
And I’m not intending to be, like, super mean about it — I expect that there will probably be some making out while watching a movie in the basement at some point, which is fine. I just don’t want either party to get the idea that there’s a long and guaranteed stretch of alone time, and I want to keep the potential for plausible deniability of “no! my mom will catch us!” if it’s needed.
I think you’re totally right to conclude that basing the policy on gender identity or sex is not the way to go. Right now my kids are much younger, but I have my playdate dealbreakers, which are unsecured firearms in the home and unsupervised internet. I think making age appropriate rules for older kids could go along the same route – maybe it’s the open/unlocked door or maybe it’s smartphones on the kitchen table, but then the policies apply across the board.
A year after this post….I came back to it to read the comments. I gotta say this is helping me process my thoughts on a request from my kid for sleepovers with friends of mixed gender/sexes. I appreciate the posts and comments!