The Importance of Sleepovers
Keeping kids safe doesn't come from closing ranks; it comes from empowering them
Lately, debates over childhood sleepovers have become a thing.
In a world where children are expected to remain strapped into booster seats until they’re old enough move out and get married, in a world where parents lose their minds over the thought of little Luna or Harper catching a cold, in a world where parents on both sides of the aisle are super concerned about the messages in Disney movies, sleepovers have become the hot new topic.
They are, apparently, factories for both sexual assault and brainwashing; an opportunity for the family at the end of the block to sell innocent children into human trafficking rings or turn them into neo-Nazi suicide bombers.
Forget about worrying that Emma might catch head lice; she could be sold into prostitution and forced to salute a photo of Hitler before Prince Andrew and Bill Gates run a train on her.
…
Now, first of all, this concern seems rather short-sighted: With current housing prices and the cost of college tuition, the eventual payout there is almost definitely going to be a better path to upward mobility than youth soccer. Does that mean our society is deeply broken?
Yes.
But also, most of my classmates would eventually give it up for a bottle of Boone’s Farm and a trip to Burger King. The Blue Hawaiian flavor is pretty good, but I checked. It’s pretty much impossible to buy anything with half a wine cooler and some leftover chicken fries.
The state of our economy and the limits of meritocracy notwithstanding, these also strike me as rather unreasonable concerns.
…
I mean, I went to lots of sleepovers as a kid. Most of my friends did. They were free babysitting.
We…made some pretty creative prank phone calls. We searched the garage and found my friend’s dad’s stack of Playboys. We once snuck out and walked across town to another friend’s house, which maybe wasn’t the best idea, but also, we were a group of eighth graders walking from one whitebread subdivision to another whitebread subdivision, so the odds were kind of in our favor. The city’s last known kidnapping had been never, and we had no trouble maintaining that fine tradition.
In other words, we acted like morons at sleepovers.
Regular, happy morons.
As far as I’m aware, nobody was irreparably damaged by any of this. I think a few of us decided that boobs can be hot, but that was definitely coming anyway. Finding the boobie magazines had nothing to do with it.
And of course, these were not Helicopter Mom, “Do you have any guns in the house? What about unattended bodies of water? You’ll make sure everybody wears a lifejacket before going to feed the ducks, right? You know that teenagers can drown in as little as a centimeter of water. Will tonight’s dinner be 100% organic? Here is my 37 page list of movies my sweet little Lakelynn isn’t allowed to watch”--sleepovers.
These were “last gasps of laissez-faire parenting”--sleepovers.
These were the kinds of sleepovers where adult supervision was minimal at best.
If my friends and I really wanted to, we could have hitchhiked to Miami. We could have stolen someone’s mom’s minivan and gone on a cross country crime spree from Missouri to Palm Springs. We were limited only by our imaginations and the fact that we had a combined $6.27 to our names.
That and common sense.
Something that unattended twelve year olds actually have a decent amount of.
I mean, these were not MENSA conferences. These were not assemblages of the most responsible seventh graders in America, handpicked by a panel of judges specializing in prudent pre-teen behavior. We were not the kinds of kids who any adult looked at and said “Now these, these are the youths who are going to lead our nation one day”.
We were a pretty average bunch of kids.
And yet, we all survived. Unscathed. By a wide margin.
Nothing in the world has changed since then. Not really. Not in the ways handwringing mothers worry about.
Crime rates today are no higher than they were in 2000. The number of people out there who want to do horrible things to middle schoolers has stayed relatively steady throughout history. The dangers of being an unsupervised 12 year old are pretty much exactly the same now as they were in 2000, or 1970, or 1950.
If anything, the thing keeping kids safer back then was the lack of supervision.
My friends and I weren’t “street smart”. We weren’t the kids in Manhattan getting on a subway alone every morning, or the kids in public housing navigating gauntlets of gangs on the way to school. We were dopey kids from the exurbs with L.L. Bean lunch boxes and moms who wore teacher sweaters; our “survival skills” in any sense of the word were non-existent.
But we were used to navigating our little whitebread world without much intervention.
We’d been to enough people’s houses, and enough sleepovers to have a pretty good spidey sense for what was and wasn’t normal. We all had enough experience navigating our friendships unsupervised to know when to go along with a buddy’s stupid plan, versus when to hit the brakes and say “Fuck no, you’re not getting in a Trans Am with some stranger who has a hesher mullet. Are you a damn retard?”.
We’d had enough opportunities to practice independence in relatively low-stakes scenarios to understand that we were responsible for ourselves; that this wasn’t Disney World. That there wasn’t some massive team of experts out there to make sure that we couldn’t possibly hurt ourselves.
We knew that we were in a pretty safe place, and that we had loving parents who we could turn to if needed, but we also knew that we were part of the “the real world”; that our actions had consequences.
We’d all accidentally touched curling irons enough times to know that our parents weren’t kidding around about some of the dangers out there.
And this is important stuff.
Because eventually, everybody has to grow up.
No matter how lax the oversight and supervision, there are still a lot more safeguards for 12 year olds than there are for adults.
At 35, there is nobody to run a full background check on the people I come into contact with; no group of neighborhood mothers watching to make sure I make it out to my car every morning. There is nobody to make sure that my friends all live in sufficiently safe houses before playdates, or to confirm that everybody in attendance at a dinner party is known for being “good people”.
At 35, the main person keeping me safe is…me.
I have to figure out which neighborhoods are safe enough to spend time in. I have to figure out which people I can and cannot trust. I have to figure out whether it’s safe to get in a car with an acquaintance, or whether it’s okay to walk two blocks after dark. And a lot of these judgment calls are guided by the opportunities I had as a kid—those chances I had to roam the subdivisions and see different types of families in action were great practice for the day when I’d finally leave our little enclave of tidy, cookie cutter houses. For the day when I’d have to encounter people who I hadn’t already known for years.
In terms of “staying safe” one of the best tools a person can have is a clear sense of what is and isn’t normal. And that’s not a static, black and white thing.
Normal means different things in different scenarios. Normal covers a pretty broad spectrum of behavior. It doesn’t always mean best practices, or that a person is acting in accordance with what mainstream society would prefer.
Having a solid feel for normal behavior is understanding the difference between a person wearing gloves and a ski mask in January versus July. It’s being able to differentiate between “This lady is a nosy gossip who’s checking out my purse to decide whether I belong in her country club” vs. “This lady wants to steal my purse”.
It’s being able to pick up on the difference between annoying pushy and dangerous pushy; the difference between the guy who set Hyundai’s sales record last year, and the guy who’s wanted in thirteen states.
Nobody is perfect at this. Detectives are imperfect at this. FBI profilers are imperfect at this. There are always false positives and false negatives—there’s a guy around town who wears a gaiter covering his entire face, large sunglasses, a hat, long sleeves, and gloves everywhere he goes, no matter the weather. He does not look normal in the least, but as far as I can tell, he’s not going on any crime sprees. I think he’s just really odd. Or maybe a burn victim.
But, the first time I saw him, I did have enough of an idea of what’s normal to perk up and pay a little more attention than I would have if he’d been in shorts and a t-shirt like everybody else.
I also had enough of an idea of what’s normal not to immediately call 911; enough of an idea of what’s normal to realize that as unusual as his appearance was, his actions weren’t out of line for the situation. To realize that there, in that moment, he wasn’t posing a threat to anybody.
None of this is to discount the fact that very bad things do happen to children.
When I was growing up, Kanakuk Kamps were a huge cultural force. I never attended, but many of my classmates did. Many of my friends did. My own step siblings did. It and YoungLife were omnipresent; the shirts and stories and window stickers all as ubiquitous as North Face jackets and Honda Accords.
When I read about the legacy of sexual abuse at the camps, I was sickened and horrified.
I also wasn’t nearly as shocked as I wanted to be.
Even at the time, I’d had the vague sense that something was off.
I hadn’t been there, but I’d grown up in fundamentalist churches. I’d been to Girl Scout camp. I’d been to tennis camp. I’d been to vacation bible school. I knew that my grandparents wrote not-insignificant checks every summer to help make sure that the poor kids at church could still go to church camp; that poverty wouldn’t keep anybody from getting to roast s’mores and learn about Jesus.
And I could pick up that Kanakuk was different from all of those things.
Different in a way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but that unsettled me.
I picked up on the idea that the dynamics were different; like the boundaries between kids and adults, the boundaries between proselytizing and play, the boundaries between Christianity and secular commercial forces were all fuzzier.
It seemed like someone was hiding a ball, if only in the sense that I knew tennis was the primary focus at tennis camp, and “Jesus for all” was the primary focus at regular church camp, but I couldn’t quite tell what the primary focus at Kanakuk was supposed to be.
It was clearly supposed to be about Jesus, but it was also clearly supposed to be about having fun, and also about being popular and having the right clothes, and also about growing into a certain type of hyper-patriotic, hyper-conservative leader, and I couldn’t really tell which of those things was supposed to be the top priority. It wasn’t that the materialism and jockeying for status were the natural byproducts of human nature like they were in other church settings; it seemed like those were things being encouraged by the leadership. Like they were baked into the whole thing from day one.
Even though it never crossed my mind that kids were being molested, I could pick up on the idea that something wasn’t quite right.
The very reason that I could pick up on that was because I had a pretty good understanding of what was normal.
I had a pretty good idea of how different types of adults interact with different types of kids in different settings.
I had a pretty good idea of what a normal church camp looked like, and what normal secular camps looked like. I had a pretty good feel for the broader evangelical culture surrounding everything.
And I could sense that what I was seeing and hearing wasn’t that.
…
That’s not to in any way discredit the parents who trusted their kids to the camp. That’s not to say that I’m some expert on human nature; that I’m never blind to the things going on around me.
I know why parents trusted Kanakuk. If I would have been a parent, I probably would have given into the pressure—misgivings aside, all of the families in town raved about it. Throngs of kids insisted that it was a magical experience.
And crucially, the world actually is a pretty safe place.
Just as how 99.9999999999% of sleepovers will result in nothing more serious than a few prank phone calls or a stomach ache from too much candy, most summer camps are staffed by normal, caring adults who want to see children thrive.
But, the best way to keep kids safe isn’t a garrison mentality of closing ranks and making sure that nobody can come in or out. The best way to keep kids safe is often quite the opposite: By spending lots of time around lots of different people. By socializing kids in such a way that they get a pretty good feel for what’s “normal” in a variety of situations and contexts. By giving them the freedom to explore, and the autonomy to say “this seems a little odd” without worrying that they’ll either be dismissed entirely, or locked away in a special cage so that nothing odd can ever happen again.
Safety doesn’t come from avoiding the world.
It comes from engaging with the world enough to know what’s normal and what’s not; it comes from being an active, autonomous participant in the world. It comes from having the confidence and skills to recognize when something is off, and knowing how to best remove oneself from uncomfortable situations.
That’s the thing that needs to be emphasized.
Not making sure that the world is completely free of any possible dangers ever.
"Safety doesn’t come from avoiding the world.
It comes from engaging with the world enough to know what’s normal and what’s not; it comes from being an active, autonomous participant in the world. It comes from having the confidence and skills to recognize when something is off, and knowing how to best remove oneself from uncomfortable situations."
THIS!! I love this so much. You are wise beyond words.