Sleepovers are a rite of passage for kids. And a battleground for parents.

Boston Globe

06-02-2025

Like so many other aspects of parenting, sleepovers have become a cultural flash point. Videos cautioning against sleepovers get millions of views on TikTok, and parent groups on Facebook are rife with warnings about guns, social media, vaping, and substance abuse.
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Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy
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There should be, he argued, 'more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons.' So are sleepovers proof that American parents have gotten something very wrong? Are we tied to a symbol of late-20th century mediocrity?
Condon and Nicolazzo represent, in some ways, our increasingly polarized approach to parenting. On one side is the free-range view: let kids bike around town, walk to the store, spend unstructured time with their classmates down the street.
On the other side is a deep concern about — and increasing awareness of — the world's dangers. Nicolazzo says that as an adult she discovered that some friends had been sexually abused, making her aware of how much could go wrong.
Nicolazzo's children, who are now older, frequently did
Psychiatrist
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'Increasingly, what I've seen is more and more concerns that parents have about their kids' safety,' Beresin says.
Beresin, who's also a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, emphasizes that while some of those dangers existed 40 years ago, internet-related dangers did not. He believes the world has indeed grown more dangerous. But he also notes that our perception of that danger has been amplified, in large part by both the news media and social media.
On October 14, 1987, an 18-month-old girl fell into a well in Midland, Texas. Her name was Jessica McClure, and, almost immediately, throngs of media descended on Midland to chronicle the massive effort to pull her to safety.
The story of Baby Jessica was
In the moments when McClure emerged from the well on October 16, more than 3 million people were glued to CNN. Rescuers had heard the toddler singing Winnie-the-Pooh songs 22 feet below them, and the race to hoist her to the surface was filled with tension. 'Everybody in America became godmothers and godfathers of Jessica while this was going on,' then-President Ronald Reagan said.
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The Baby Jessica story ushered us into a new era of cable news, an era in which round-the-clock live television trained the nation's attention on the distress of a single child, an era of amplified focus on tragic accidents, kidnappings, and disappearances. We saw that in the unrelenting coverage of Elizabeth Smart's kidnapping in 2002, and in the media frenzy that surrounded Madeleine McCann's disappearance from her bed in Portugal in 2007.
Beresin says that as media coverage of far-flung events has escalated, so has our sense of danger. Both parents and children now have access to deeply concerning stories from across the world.
Nicolazzo agrees that our access to information has changed dramatically. 'You're hearing what happens all around the country,' she says. 'You hear what happens to a kid in a park somewhere.'
During COVID, particularly, ' All of us were inundated with with a ton of digital media that was basically saying: 'The world is not a safe place. My kids are not really safe,'' Beresin says. 'Do I want them to be in a place where I don't know the parents?'
Anne Mostue, a teacher from Lincoln, told me that, in her view, 'COVID killed spontaneity.' In the late '80s and '90s, she says, when she was growing up, there was an 'ease of kids getting together,' but that was 'stunted' by the pandemic.
As a kid, Mostue mostly slept over at a couple of good friends' houses. They listened to Tori Amos and Nirvana, and talked about plans for the future. She remembers once 'logging onto AOL, and there were all these chat rooms. I remember that my friends' parents were angry because it tied up the phone line, and they almost immediately kicked us off.'
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Allie Sullberg for The Boston Globe
She loves the idea of her two children, who are still too young for sleepovers, getting to spend unstructured time with their friends. 'But I also think that our culture has opened up in a good way about the things that can happen at sleepovers,' Mostue says. She plans to ask parents a few questions before she lets her children sleep at their house:
Do you have guns and how do you store them?
What older siblings and adults will be in the house?
How do you monitor screen time and internet use?
'I plan to ask the questions in a very friendly way,' she says. 'And if people think I'm crazy and they don't like my questions, that's fine.'
'COVID changed how people operate, and I think it was definitely for the worse,' says Courtney Yakavonis, a Newton mom of three who has mostly embraced sleepovers. She notes that play dates now tend to be pre-planned and that people rarely 'pop over' to see each other, as they might have a generation or two ago.
Packed schedules have also changed how parents operate. Lots of children are on traveling soccer teams, or enrolled in nighttime or weekend math classes (to Ramaswamy's delight, no doubt). If sleepovers were once born of boredom, such boredom has now, largely, been banished.
Children are 'working 24/7,' Beresin says. 'They're taking honors courses. They're doing community service. They have to do three sports. They have to play the Suzuki violin.' He says that when he was a child, he sometimes had so little to do that he went looking for people to play basketball or ride bikes with him. 'I think kids are overbooked, and they don't have a chance, an opportunity — as much as they did in the past — to experiment.'
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Brain science bolsters both those who are cautious about sleepovers, and those who are not. On the one hand, research has long shown that our brains aren't fully developed until our early or mid-20s, which is, in part, why teens make lots of questionable decisions. But psychological studies also support the idea of embracing risk. As the journal
Nature
noted in January, 'Research has emerged showing that opportunities for risky play are crucial for healthy physical, mental and emotional development.' Though, the article quickly added, 'In many nations, risky play is now more restricted than ever.'
When parents ask Beresin what to do about children who are invited to attend sleepovers, he says, 'Look, you've got to give them a certain amount of freedom, autonomy, separation, independence, ability to take control. And at the same time, you've got to have a safety net. And it's your job as parents to decide with your kid, collaboratively, what will keep you safe and what won't.'
For some parents, that will mean having a code word that a child can text if they're feeling uncomfortable at a sleepover. Then the parent can call and say they have to pick the child up, and the child can pretend to blame their crazy, overprotective parents for hustling them home at midnight.
For other parents, that might be always having sleepunders, during which children can eat junk food and talk frankly with their friends, even if they duck out before everyone goes to sleep. ' It's not one-size-fits-all,' says Beresin. 'One kid may be able to go to a sleepover and another kid might not.'
Nicolazzo thinks that, while it's critical to protect your children, you don't want to make them overly anxious.
'I think my husband and I did a good job of playing the fine line. Both of our kids are extremely independent, very social.'
Condon believes there are more parents like Nicolazzo than like her, but she's not afraid to defend her approach. ' I do think we've over-rotated on safety a little bit,' she says. Take COVID, for example. 'You could stay home in your house and never get sick, or you can figure out how to wash your hands and do the mask and do all the things, and live life.'
The polarization on this issue — as on so many others — reflects increasingly large social divisions, says Beresin. And those divisions go beyond Fox News vs. MSNBC — they reach into all aspects of our lives. Are there ways, he wonders, that 'we as parents, caregivers, teachers, coaches, mentors, journalists, can have more balanced viewpoints? And actually see both sides of the issue?'
Perhaps, but it's not a muscle we're used to flexing.
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