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LAST UPDATE | 9 Feb
I HAD MY first sleepover at age eight in my best friend’s house. We had known each other, and each other’s families for about five years at this point, and spent hours going between both houses, so I’m sure her parents were more than a little bewildered at around 10 pm when I fell into a full emotional breakdown, complete with heaving sobs and uncontrollable tears.
Bless them, they tried everything to reassure me. They even gave us a glass of Coke each (which, in the early 90′s was a serious treat), but nothing worked. Then again, Coke before bed probably wasn’t the smartest idea.
I was beyond devastated that night, left to perish in a strange house, convinced I would never see home again. Eventually, they had to call my parents, and my poor mam had to drive the three minutes down the road to collect me. I can still remember everything in our house feeling different when I walked back in as if I had been gone for months, not hours. The hallway felt strange, its colours more vivid. The sitting room was different, was that rug always there? And weirdest of all, my family had somehow continued on as normal, as if their youngest child wasn’t going through a monumental crisis, and were actually all watching a movie together, without me?
Naturally, I had assumed that their lives would have become utterly meaningless without my presence, and honestly, I found it a little rude.
My best friend’s family were polite enough to never mention that night ever again (my own parents re-tell the story at every opportunity), but I would have been mortified to go through it again, and so sleepovers were knocked on the head for a few years.
They resurfaced again in my teens when I suddenly expressed a need to attend ‘study sleepovers’. You would think my parents would have been even a little suspicious, given that I hadn’t ever cracked a single schoolbook until that point or expressed any interest whatsoever in school or exams. Another red flag was that I didn’t even ask for a lift to ‘the sleepover’ itself (obviously due to it not existing). It just wasn’t like me.
Anyway, not a single eyelid was batted, and so I packed my school bag with ‘books’ (definitely weren’t books, but my own 15-year-old sometimes reads my articles) and clinked my way down the stairs and out the front door without as much as a suspicious glance from my parents. This began a pattern for the next few years, with a gang of us on the verge of death in a field near the house. My parents continued on with their lives, blissfully unaware, even as the ‘study sessions’ continued long after the exams had finished, and throughout the Summer holidays, without any discernible change to my exam results.
Naturally, now that I am the parent of a teenager, I can no longer find any humour in it and the thoughts of her doing the same fills me with a cold dread. A very deep cold dread that can wake me up from the deepest of sleep, because like all other parents I foolishly hope that if I can get everything right then maybe she won’t make these same stupid decisions. That we might be exempt from the sheer recklessness of the teen years. As if my actions have any bearing on her decisions. As if I gave my parents a second thought when there was fun or chaos to be had.
This is just one of the many reasons why we don’t allow sleepovers. They are always a bad idea. What kind of trouble can kids get into when no one is watching? Oh, all of it.
Terrible ideas occur to kids in the middle of the night, and without anyone to stop them they are free agents. And for today’s kids, they are proudly uploading the proof of these poor decisions, creating digital footprints to haunt them forever.
And it’s not just my own kid’s actions that I am worried about. Years of coordinating ‘study sleepovers’, keeping tabs on who was supposed to be in whose house, and where the electric fences were in the dark, all came together to prime my brain into constant vigilance.
I worry about everything, constantly.
So unless I can ask the other parents about smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, any possible vapes or alcohol that might be left lying around, and what their nightly house lock up checks look like, I just couldn’t send my child there overnight. Unfortunately for my kids, I know too much.
And I won’t apologise for it either, I stand firm in my belief that ‘nothing good happens after 10 pm’. This is actually a mantra in our house as my eldest falls apart any time she is up late, and we have to remind her that there is joy and hope left in the world, that she just needs to go to sleep. Now that I write this, it sheds a new light on my own first sleepover attempt.
I have no issue with friends sleeping over in our house, and actually welcome it as a middle ground on the sleepover battle. I have no issue with reassuring parents about who will be in the house, what alarms are set (all of them, obviously), but I am still going to bed and leaving them unattended for multiple hours. And they won’t sleep. Not a single wink. And my kids will be a terrible influence. A terribly persuasive terrible influence, to be precise.
My younger daughter had a friend sleep over on one of the nights over Christmas, and the poor thing ended up with an awfully sore and upset stomach. As she was heading out to her mam’s car the next day, she weakly said that she wouldn’t normally eat the amount of sweets that she had the night before, which was equal parts mortifying and unsurprising. My younger daughter is absolutely feral for sugar and likely had her mainlining Nutella.
Despite all of the ‘no’s’, all of the explaining and all of the reasons why, the kids still ask regularly if they can sleep over at their friend’s houses and to be fair, there have been a small handful of times where I have given in, in cases where we know the parents reasonably well. But to be honest, we have only ever ended up regretting it.
We end up collecting exhausted kids the next day, who have binged on sweets, horror movies and questionable choices for the previous 12 hours, and it takes a few days to integrate them back into normal life. My eldest is well versed in the Statute of Limitations and now waits around six months to traumatise me with stories of what happened, and her poor decisions.
If there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that teens will be sneaky. They don’t care how much love has been poured into them at this point, how long you spent on ‘tummy time’ or how many vegetables you blended into their pasta sauces. Whether you religiously attended Musical Tots classes or sat them in front of hours of ‘Toddles & Tiaras’. None of it matters. They are homing devices for trouble, and you can guarantee that as soon as the supervision stops, they are going to find it. Sleepovers are always an absolutely dreadful idea and the sooner we banish them as a thing of the past, the better!
Margaret Lynch is a parent of two and is TheJournal.ie’s parenting columnist.
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